Case study: How storytelling creates meaningful connections that lead to action

by Ryan McDermott

Creating personal connections drive people to take action. Whether through community engagement, emotional appeals or shared values, the way people feel about something often moves them more than statistics or academic analyses. And the way to make those feelings stick, regardless of strategy, is to use storytelling and narrative as a conduit for fortifying those connections.  

When then-Smithsonian Secretary Dillon Ripley created the Anacostia Community Museum in 1967, he sought for it to be both a rich resource created by the community itself and a bridge between the black community in Southeast D.C. and the rest of the Smithsonian’s 11 museums and galleries frequented in throngs by tourists and suburban visitors.  

To do that, he knew that it was vitally important to invest in Anacostia and its residents—many of whom had lived in the city for generations and created a deep culture in what is often seen as a transient city. Secretary Ripley and the Smithsonian at large invited a council of local Anacostia residents to advise and help plan exhibitions and other programming.  

The Smithsonian hired John Kinard as museum director—a pastor and activist who was already a trusted member of the Anacostia neighborhood. Under Kinard’s direction, museum staff and community members worked side-by-side for decades. And while Kinard died in 1989, his legacy lives on in the ACM nearly 60 years after its creation. 

Marshall Ganz, the legendary grassroots organizer who worked with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, provides another use case in his methods for engaging with the public. Like Secretary Ripley, Ganz was interested in understanding how personal connections can create pathways to action. But instead of creating local boards or advisory committees, Ganz used storytelling to make people invested enough to inspire action.  

To that end, Ganz saw that social movements rely more on subjective intentions and narratives than political motivations and created a three-step method that engages those narratives. Ganz cribbed the three questions of Hillel the Elder and rephrased them for his purposes to create the story of self, the story of us and the story of now. 

The “story of now” addresses the urgent challenge

The “story of self” talks about why this challenge moves you. And the “story of us asks” what shared values or experiences you will appeal to when calling on others to act. 

Ganz not only used these storytelling questions to help farm workers and the civil rights movement, but he also redeployed this technique in 2008 to train then-candidate Barack Obama’s campaign workers. 

There is also empirical data to support the theory that people are more willing to engage when they relate to a story. Recently, my colleague Duyen Truong, who serves as senior vice president at Sage Communications, shared with me a Carnegie Mellon study that underscores how stories connect with us and often determine our courses of action. 

In 2007, three researchers—Deborah Small, George Lowenstein and Paul Slovic—from Carnegie Mellon, conducted an experiment where they asked college students to take a short survey about tech for $5 in cash. But in the same envelope as the money, the students received a letter from Save the Children asking them to donate to help fight hunger.  

Those envelopes contained one of three stories

One solicitation contained statistics about food shortages in Malawi, lack of rain in Zambia and the dislocation of millions in Angola. ​Another had that same information but also the story of Rokia, a farm girl from Mali who faced the threat of starvation. The third envelope relayed only Rokia’s story without any of the fact-based content in the first two envelopes.  

Researchers found that the average donation for the first fact-based appeal came in at $1.14. The envelope containing both the fact-based appeal and Rokia’s story yielded an average donation of about $1.43. And the envelope with only Rokia’s story netted a donation average of $2.38—more than double that of the fact-based appeal. 

“It’s easy to override people’s feelings by giving them statistical information,” Small, one of the study’s co-authors explained on a podcast with University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “But it’s not so easy to add feelings where feelings aren’t naturally there to begin with. It’s hard for humans to generate feelings toward statistics.” 

As a lifelong writer myself, I have always believed storytelling creates bonds between people and communities. My 15 years in journalism and now seven years working in public relations, have fortified my faith in the craft. The clients I’ve worked with were most successful when they understood how storytelling can compel people to act. Whether that’s something as revolutionary as rising against oppression or something as simple as staying loyal to a brand or product because you feel a connection, storytelling matters.

This article originally appeared on Agility PR Solutions’ Bulldog Reporter.