Empathy: Impact Through Storytelling Vol. 4
Storytelling is a powerful way to create empathy and foster strong emotional bonds with an audience. One of the most important elements in achieving this is making a story human. The way to do this is by finding subjects with two key qualities:
1) They are vulnerable.
2) They have a clear goal with big stakes.
I delved into the role vulnerability plays in my previous blog post of this series. Here I share how and why it’s important for subjects to have a clear goal with big stakes, and a sense that they are going to learn and grow a lot through trying to reach their goal.
The harder it is for people to reach their goal…the bigger the obstacles they have to overcome…the harder they struggle, the more an audience will root for them, feel great empathy and be emotionally transported by them.
In real life and in stories, we love to root for the underdog, and conversely, if someone is arrogant, we’re turned off by them.
I knew that all six of the characters in my film GENERATION STARTUP (see Empathy: Impact Through Storytelling Vol.3) would struggle a lot since they were embarking on such a daunting and difficult path: launching companies in Detroit, and at a young age when they had little to no experience. I also knew our characters would learn and grow a lot during the almost two years we followed them. And, in fact, I was far more interested in their emotional and personal transformation under these extreme circumstances than whether their companies would succeed or not.
While the goals of our characters in GENERATION STARTUP were ambitious, the goals of the subjects in my next film, and the challenges they face to reach them, are herculean given where they start out. I am going to follow young women who come from limited economic and educational background in Latin America, and yet become highly skilled front end developers at a life-changing coding bootcamp, Laboratoria, with locations in Peru, Mexico, Chile and Brazil.
These women have grown up with such limited resources, education, opportunities, and support, and yet their ambitions, resilience and determination know no limits. Instead of being defeated by their circumstances, they are all the more determined to tackle hard challenges, prove their worth and make a better life for themselves and their families, like Carito, a past trainee in Peru.
Carito grew up here (see picture on the left) in El Agustino, one of the many dusty, sprawling slums surrounding Lima, in a shack with no electricity. Here is a window into Carito’s childhood from a video we shot to give potential funders a sense of whom we would feature in the film.
While Carito suffered from a lack of confidence her entire life, by the time she applied to Laboratoria, her self-esteem was at a real low. During the intensive six month boot camp, she struggled to keep up with the challenging coding assignments while commuting 2 hours each way and taking care of her son as a single mom. She also struggled to work through emotional issues with staff psychologists and other trainees. There were days when she thought she wouldn’t make it, but Carito has now achieved goals she never imagined were possible, thanks to her determination and hard work, and to Laboratoria for unleashing her potential.
Carito earns almost 3 times more working as a front-end developer at a web agency than she did prior to Laboratoria, and this is just the start of her career in the tech world. She loves her job and feels better about herself all the time. She is helping her family dig out of poverty, and she has finally earned their respect.
Carito’s story, while full of hardships many people will never experience, is relatable on a fundamental human level to anyone of any gender, age, nationality, and economic status. At its most basic, it is about the strength of our human spirit and our ability to achieve anything if we have resilience, determination and support. I am sure that viewers around the world will become emotionally invested in, root for and be inspired by the Laboratoria trainees to reach for their north star too, regardless of their circumstances.
Some of the most successful, emotionally engaging branded content employs this same technique of featuring people with big goals and clear stakes that are hard to achieve, even when it doesn’t seem obvious on the surface.
In their Dove Beauty Sketches spot, which has over 180 million views worldwide, Dove had a clear goal: to demonstrate through a brilliant social experiment that women view themselves as much less attractive than other people view them. In doing so, they hoped to inspire women to reconsider their view of their own beauty and realize they are more beautiful than they think. By the end of the spot, it becomes clear that feeling attractive is an important goal for the featured women too, and one that is super hard to achieve when we are bombarded by unattainable standards of beauty. It is also a goal with huge stakes, and one that is universally relatable, since feeling attractive is an important step to being confident and happy. When we feel good about ourselves — that we are “attractive” — we project that to others. Radiating self-confidence and a sense of being comfortable in our own skin makes us attractive to others, so it becomes a virtuous cycle. When we feel unattractive, we set in motion the reverse.
So, to form emotional bonds with your audience, feature people who are striving for something important that is hard for them to achieve, whether those goals are clear like in the case of Carito or implied like the women in the Dove Beauty Sketches. Ideally something that will force them to change and grow in positive ways in their emotional journey to get there. Your audience will root for them, gladly take the emotional journey with them, and find them relatable and inspiring.
In my final blog post of this series I will explore the third element to making a story human: how to get an audience to take action once you have moved them deeply. Available 5/15.
Let’s Get Emotional: The Empathy Manifesto by Creative Breed.
Learn more about Creative Breed.
