Story is the best tool we have for transforming culture and changing systems. This has become a fundamental belief in the social change sector. Many organizations are telling stories about their work and the issues they work on to capture attention, increase emotional engagement and ultimately drive behavior change.
But what do we know about building stories? How can we build stories that illustrate the importance of our work? What makes one story more compelling than another? How can we use story to get people to care about the issues?
“In contrast to our vast knowledge of how science and logical reasoning proceed, we know precious little in any formal sense about how to make good stories.”
Jerome bruner – psycologist
For the last few years, the Center team has been curating insights from behavioral, cognitive and social science to try to formalize the science of story.
We’ve curated seven principles that can help story builders activate as they create the stories they use to accomplish their goals.
How we tell stories
- Intentional structure of story
- Using emotion with intention
- Activating the power of deceptive cadences
- Activating narrative transportation
- Purposeful empty and full space in stories
How we choose stories:
- Examining dominant and counter narratives
- Verisimilitude
