Empathy: Impact Through Storytelling Vol. 2
In my first blog post in this series I introduced my three guiding principles of how to tell stories that generate empathy, form deep bonds with your audience and move them to positive action.
My three guiding principles, distilled to their essence:
1. Find Your Story
2. Make It Human
3. Provide a Call to Action.
In this second blog post of the series I provide examples of ways I and others have found compelling stories to bring to life through film, tech and branded content.
At Creative Breed we do work-for-hire projects for clients and we also develop our own projects. We find stories by listening to what the world needs, and then listening to what speaks to us. Whether you’re a person, a brand, a startup, a nonprofit or another type of entity, this process of figuring out what you stand for and then following your gut in how to articulate that to others is key. And, the more emotionally connected you are to what you stand for and how to articulate that in a way that will resonate with others, the more you will be able to forge an emotional connection with your audience.
That is exactly how I found our next documentary, LABORATORIA, which we’re raising funding for now. I was in Chile for a week with our most recent film, GENERATION STARTUP, at a screening at a co-working space inside an old renovated factory. Curious to learn about what else was going on in the factory, I asked for a tour.
That’s when I learned about Laboratoria, a coding bootcamp that helps young women who come from poverty, with limited educational background and sometimes abuse at home, to become highly skilled coders in just six months. They have an 80% success rate helping their trainees get high paying tech jobs throughout Latin America. Laboratoria is having such profound impact in Latin America that here is one of its founders, Mariana Costa Checa, being honored by President Obama and Mark Zuckerberg.
I was amazed at how Laboratoria and these women achieved so much so fast. I wondered if by sharing their stories, we might create positive social change around issues that we care about deeply: diversity in tech, female empowerment, equality of opportunity and breaking the cycle of poverty.
So I dug deeper. As I got to know the founders, staff and trainees at Laboratoria, they stirred in me, in such an intense way, that feeling I get when I know I’ve found a story I must tell. I’m deeply moved by their strength, determination and resilience, which in turn fuels the same in me. If I can channel those universal human feelings in film through the emotional journey of a few trainees from the moment they enter the six month bootcamp until they start their new jobs, it will inspire girls and women globally to learn to code, one of the most sought-after and best paid skills today. Studies have shown that one of the major reasons females don’t pursue education and jobs in tech is lack of role models. If you can’t see it, you can’t be it.
We also want to achieve systemic change with this film by spurring support for and establishment of more programs around the world like Laboratoria, and hope to inspire companies globally to broaden how they recruit, train and support their employees.
Research is another great way into a story. When I am seized by a problem I want to help solve but don’t yet know my story, I find my way in through research. My husband’s office was on the 104th floor of the second tower of the World Trade Center. On 9/11, 66 of his colleagues from work were killed. I was devastated by the senseless loss of almost 3,000 lives that day, and also by the backlash of anti-Muslim sentiment that followed. I wanted to use my storytelling expertise to help foster greater understanding and solidarity between people of different religions, but didn’t know how.
I went on the hunt to find someone compelling who had been moved to action by 9/11 and found an article in the Wall Street Journal about Reverend Pete. Reverend Pete ran a Methodist summer camp in the rural hills of North Carolina, and had invited Jewish kids from Charlotte and Muslim kids from Greensboro to join his local Christian boys for a week the summer after 9/11. I convinced him to let me film them, and then convinced Showtime to fund the documentary, “TRUST ME.”
The boys started camp wary of each other. The Christian boys had never before met someone who was Jewish or Muslim. One of them actually said he thought the Jews would have horns. The Muslim boys, most of whom had recently emigrated from North Africa, told heartbreaking stories about how their classmates blamed them for the 9/11 attacks. But during the week, they began to form bonds of trust. And by the end of the week they were all praying together.
This approach of knowing your mission and then doing research is how brands find stories too in their quest to harness empathy to form emotional bonds with their consumers. Since people increasingly want to buy from companies which stand for something that resonates with them on a human level, brands which are most effective at storytelling figure out what they stand for and then how to communicate that through storytelling.
For decades the brand Always had stood for confidence in girls, but they articulated that through their products: the confidence a girl could have not to leak during her period thanks to her Always pads. In 2013 the brand wanted to appeal to a new generation of teen girls in way that would resonate with them. When they discovered through research that 50% of females lose their confidence in puberty, they then figured out how to redefine confidence around what they stood for rather than through their products in this famous spot.
This spot is brilliant because it fosters empathy with not just teen girls, but with everyone around them who socializes them, often unwittingly, to lose their confidence. It takes a problem that teen girls suffer from and makes it a problem that we all share, that we are all complicit in, and that we all have the power to solve together.
Another way to find a story is through a problem you experience personally that you then feel compelled to help solve. In telling a personal story, people tap into empathy from others. When my daughter Sophie was 16, she wanted to make a video game that would foster female empowerment as her final project at a Girls Who Code summer camp. But female empowerment is a huge, abstract topic and she and Andy (Andrea), her collaborator, struggled to find their way into it, their “story.” They kept circling around ideas they hadn’t experienced first-hand so couldn’t relate to, until suddenly Sophie burst out laughing and declared “We should make a game where a girl throws tampons at her enemies.” She had meant it as a joke, and she and Andy could have had a good laugh and moved on. Instead they stopped and listened to themselves…to the deep discomfort and shame they felt about their periods. That’s when they realized how absurd it is that blood is commonplace in video games, while they had been socialized to feel shame over something as normal and natural as their period.
When Sophie told me that night she was going to make a game, Tampon Run, in which a girl throws tampons at her enemies with the goal of breaking down the menstrual taboo, I didn’t really get it. But she was definitely on a mission as she threw herself into making this game.
To her astonishment and certainly mine, Tampon Run went viral. Why was that? Empathy. Her game resonated so strongly with people around the world that that it spurred them to talk about menstruation and share their own personal stories of shame. Tampon Run is also an example of the power of humor and satire. If Sophie and Andy had only channeled their shame and anger, I’m sure the game wouldn’t have resonated as much.
All of these examples share a few qualities: in each case the storytellers listened closely to what was going on in the wider world and from that identified a specific issue(s) they wanted to address. And in each case the storytellers listened to their gut to figure out what story to tell that would foster empathy and resonate deeply with others. This is how to find stories that will form deep bonds with your audience too and move them to action.
In my next blog post I will explore the second key element in creating stories that harness empathy and forge deep emotional bonds with your audience: how to humanize your stories and what qualities to look for in the people you feature. Available 5/1.
Let’s Get Emotional: The Empathy Manifesto by Creative Breed.
Learn more about Creative Breed.
