Telling Stories Online Makes That Vital Connection

As nonprofits become increasingly sophisticated with communication tools and audience outreach, the frequency of contact between organizations and their constituents also increases. You've got your email newsletter neatly scheduled, your Web site shined, perhaps even a Web 2.0 tool ready to go. The conversation has clearly started.

But for many, the conversation people have been so eager to initiate feels a little flat. There's often a sense of discontinuity between one communiqué and the next. The conversation tends to circulate within a distinct and often small "choir," or set of die-hards. And the emotional drive that brought you to work for something other than the promise of riches, and brought your members into the fold, has taken a back seat to something that feels, well, more mechanical.

How do you get out of this high volume, low value communications rut? You don't need the latest Web 3.0 blog package. You need the oldest communication method known to human begins. You need stories.

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If stories, just like the kind you read to your kids at night, are not an integral part of how you communicate, you've got to consider the following:

People tend to support nonprofits and the causes they champion because of an emotional connection. When you're not trading in cold hard cash, your trading in hope, compassion and, yeah, maybe sometimes guilt or fear. Emotion drives people to try to tackle the world's problems. But emotions are a human-scale response and the world's problems are anything but human scale. How do you bridge this gap? How do you keep the emotional inspiration alive when your issue drowns you in a sea of statistics, policy proposals and case studies?

Stories were invented specifically to bridge this gap, to translate the complex, gray area experience of the faceless many into the simple, graspable experience of the single individual (or small group).

Here's what happens when you create an effective story around your organization or issue:

• The inherent justice of your efforts become apparent in a way that appeals to people's sense of right and wrong. Emotional connection increases.
• Serial communications become welcomed as the story continues to unfold. A key quality of stories is that they engage the listener (or viewer) to seek its end or next episode.
• The story begins to self-replicate as it's passed from one listener (or viewer) to the next. Self-replication is a basic attribute of stories, an attribute which has been super-charged by the internet. In this way the message expands beyond that choir.

So, how do you create a story around your organization or issue? The good news is that there are established can't miss formulas out there. In fact, the fantastic work of Karl Jung and Joseph Campbell suggests that the ability to understand and absorb certain specific story elements are shared by every human being on the planet throughout history. Just watch a movie like Star Wars (written under the tutelage of Campbell) to see how even the most out-there subjects (like fantasy sci-fi) can reach mythical proportions if they use the right storytelling forms.

To begin the process of telling effective stories, imagine a simplified world that your issue or organization inhabits. In this world, identify the following:

• The Heroes: Who are they? What are they trying to achieve? What person, historical figure, even animal or mythical creature might represent these heroes? Think beyond your organization's employees when searching. The hero need not be you! Oftentimes it is our constituents or those we are trying to help who emerge as the most compelling heroes in our stories.
• The Villains: Every story needs a bad guy. People just won't accept a struggle without a villain and with no struggle there is no story. Who stands in our hero's way? Are they identifiable individuals or a set of problems that can be personified in a character or person? Villains should feel evil in your story but that doesn't mean you have to vilify your opposition. We don't have to personally attack other people to show the problem as evil (although at times, it has undeniably worked).
• The Catalyst: Stories begin with a struggle between hero and villain that does not begin to resolve until a catalyst appears. Something or someone shifts the balance and the hero begins to prevail. Who, or what, is the catalyst in your story? What people or actions will come along to break the deadlock and allow the desired outcome? How can the listener (or viewer) of the story be the catalyst or cause the catalyst to come about?

Using these basic elements, begin to craft a myth in your simplified world. Try telling it to a 6-year old as a fairy tale. Try it out as in a Greek myth style. See which ways of telling it creates an emotional response in you and then test it on others. An effective story should immediately make you proud, again, of the work you are doing.

Elements of your new myth can be used effectively to inform your language in newsletters or in features on your site. Though you may never overtly tell your story as myth, comparing the way you speak to the myth you have created and trying to draw from its emotional resonance will vastly increase your audience's participation and sense of inspiration.

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Jonah Sachs is principal and creative director of Free Range Studios in Washington, D.C. His email is jonah@freerangestudios.com

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