Storytelling for Health Equity
Supercharging narrative change work for Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and its partners
“A new system to replace our current, racially biased healthcare system: one that is accessible and affordable to all, delivers excellent health outcomes across all populations, recognizes and rectifies past and current injustices, and honors everyone who participates in it.”
Over the last year, we’ve been developing an audience-narrative architecture that can help the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and its partners find “narrative strategies” and actual storytelling that would activate people in the U.S. to dismantle structural racism in America’s healthcare and public health systems. We developed the target narrative above for the third and final phase of this project, where, together with our project collaborators, we built and tested real media content to see if it engaged and transported, or moved, audiences toward the target narrative. Some highlights are below, with the complete project findings here.
For content creation and testing, we partnered with Story Strategy Group, which convened experts and creatives to generate hypotheses and make media we could test for audience effects. There was the Narrative Power Team, led by Melinda Weekes-Laidlow, with health equity advocates, community leaders and narrative change experts; Kirk Cheyfitz, a professional storyteller and journalist known for his Story Platform work and political narrative strategy; Michael Ahn, a story consultant who works with nonprofit organizations and public defenders to provoke empathy and action; and a group of creative writers and content producers including the DC Sparkle Squad. Together, they generated 56 different ad concepts, embodied in 103 pieces of content. We tested this content with our four values-based audiences for engagement and transportation, or movement toward our target narrative.
The big learning from this testing work was that it is possible to tell a story about health equity that engages and moves all four of our values-based audiences, even authority-minded Don’t Tread On Me. Content that performed well across audiences tended to lift up choice and control, in addition to injustice and outcomes. We were also able to identify uniquely effective entry points to the target narrative for each audience, pictured below.
In addition, here are a few general recommendations based on testing results:
- Put People In It. Content featuring people outperformed content that did not, and photography tended to outperform illustration.
- Get Specific. Content that established a specific time, place, situation, characters, and some kind of development performed better than more conceptual content. Good storytelling wins again!
- Tell a story with a future. In general, the diptychs we tested outperformed single-panel ads. Finding a structure to name the problem and the desired future is key.
We invite you to explore our findings in the full report. Soon, we’ll be sharing reflections from three of the strategists and creatives who participated in the project, and we’ll launch an interactive version of this research at the Narrative Observatory in February. Stay close to this space for updates. In the meantime, we welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions about how to convert these findings into real-world action.
