This Beautiful Moment: Our Latest Report on Impact Storytelling

By Erin Potts, Dom Lowell and Liz Manne

The fields of practice that utilize narrative and cultural strategies to advance social change have grown considerably in the past five to seven years. With that immense growth, and the multiple urgencies of the times we are living in, we believe now is an opportune time to take stock and offer suggestions for how all of us working together can do more and do better going forward.

We do so with our new report — Spotlight on Impact Storytelling: Mapping and Recommendations for the Narrative and Cultural Strategies Ecosystem — which is meant to help those of us who do this work to better see and understand ourselves: our roles, our relationships to one another, our strengths, and the opportunities we have to make improvements that will result in greater impact.

As inputs to our research, we reviewed nearly 50 reports (most of which have been written in the last five years) and interviewed and consulted with 24 field leaders. In light of what we learned, we offer five key recommendations that we urge the field — practitioners and funders alike — to adopt so that we can see greater impact and accelerated progress towards the creation of a more liberating, just, welcoming, and beautiful world. Or, as Anat Shenker-Osorio put it during our interview, “To help make people’s lives better … or at least slightly less shit, as fast as we can, as much as we can.” To do this, we need to invest in all of the following:

1. MORE COORDINATION, PRODUCTION, AND DISTRIBUTION OF IMPACT STORYTELLING!

We’ve invested a lot in theory and research, but not nearly enough on coordinating, developing, testing, and optimizing “impact storytelling” — defined as intentional, strategic storytelling designed to advance social impact goals. It is crucial that we produce and distribute these stories at scale, which means thousands and thousands (maybe millions) of connected stories. This includes better leveraging of the media and entertainment industries, so it’s about both what we produce and how (and what) we influence commercial entities to produce.

2. MORE TRAINING, MORE TALENT!

To help solve looming leadership and practitioner pipeline challenges and to grow the work, we need to create standards in curricula and uplift best practices … and maybe even start a certificate program.

3. MORE PRACTICAL, USEFUL, AND AFFORDABLE RESEARCH AND MEASUREMENT!

We already know a lot about audiences and measurement and “what works” — but too often that knowledge is isolated, highly academic, and technical. We urgently need to reorient our research and measurement so that what we produce is practical, affordable, accessible, and equitable. We need less research on theory and top-down narrative design and more performance and measurement tools and analytics.

4. MORE SPACES FOR COORDINATION AND COLLECTIVE LEARNING!

There is a constant and clear call that we need more coordination infrastructure to help build relationships and trust; to co-create shared strategy, standards, and practices; to build better coordination and collaborations; and to ensure that we aren’t missing opportunities because the right people and organizations aren’t appropriately resourced to do critical components of the work.

5. MORE ABUNDANT, MORE EFFICIENT, MORE STRATEGIC FUNDING!

We need funding geared towards the particular needs of narrative and culture, such as the ability to fund collaborative efforts and to fund more types of change agents with longer timelines, different deliverables, etc. And instead of the $50K project-based grants that are common today, we need much, much bigger, multi-year general operating grants.

Details on these recommendations — and our mapping and analysis of the current narrative and cultural strategy ecosystem, key terms and practices that we heard alignment and divergence around, and more — can be found in the full report.

The bottom line of what we learned is that the ecosystem is ready for deeper conversations around “the how”: How might we generate more impact stories? How might we train more people and institutions to do this work? How can we make research and measurement more affordable, accessible and usable? How and where can we create more spaces for collective learning? How can we transform funding of this ecosystem?

There is always a fear that this beautiful moment of momentum and interest might not last. That funding will dry up. That we might not be able to rise to meet the challenges. But when we look out over the existing ecosystem, we see a community that is ready for the hard work that lies ahead. A community that is ready to make sure that our collective work results in the levels of impact we know we need in order to achieve, as our friends at the Butterfly Lab say, a future for all of us.