What's the storytelling?

Storytelling seems to be on the verge of having a moment in nonprofit advocacy and communications. The source is the rise of corporate storytelling roles and teams that are complementing or even replacing communications roles.

In part, this is a result of the weakening role journalism and media outlets more generally have in persuading or even reaching the public. Video - on social platforms, YouTube, in messaging apps, and streaming platforms like Discord or Twitch - is a medium of choice on our phones, laptops, TVs and tablets.

A press release posted to a website or emailed to a distribution list probably won’t generate a news story and if it does that story won’t be read by many people. But a 90 second video of your field organizer walking through the neighborhood and telling the story behind the data about drinking water pollution in that neighborhood…that could be watched and shared by thousands, tens of thousands, or more people.

Storytelling is more than reach or distribution

Optimizing for storytelling for impressions is just part of what’s possible. If your storytelling journey is motivated by scale you’ll end up frustrated, tired, and out of money. You’ll be running a video first press release shop.

We write and read stories to make sense of the the world. By making sense of the world - and helping others do the same - we shift perspective enough to where we’re on (or at least close) the same level. We expose the reader, the viewer, the listener, the questioner, to language that lets them solve problems, understand obstacles, and trust us with their time and hopes and ideas.

Willy Vlautin’s book The Night Always Comes tells the story of two days in a young woman’s life as she frantically searches for money to make a down payment on the ramshackle home she’s lived in for decades with her mom and brother.

The story is a tragedy, a thriller, and, like Vlautin’s other books, a deep study of characters who were given few if any advantages in life.

The Night Always Comes also brings an awful lot of present day public policy to life - economics, housing, disability care, and more.

Willy Vlautin mentions some of the backstory in the acknowledgments when talking about coming to own his first home in Portland. He takes us along on his visit to the house with a friend:

When I moved to Portland I was twenty-six years old. After years of working in warehouses, I began a ten-year stint as a housepainter and started a band called Richmond Fontaine. Sean Oldham, the drummer, was called HQ because he was the smartest and most successful. He and his wife owned their home. He even had a passport. One day I drove him to a derelict 480-square-house that was for sale. It was on a busy street next to a mini-mart but in a good neighborhood. I told him my dream was to buy it and he said I’d be an idiot not to try. I had no confidence in myself but I was raised to believe that success was owning your own home. Over the course of fifteen years I had saved twenty thousand dollars for the down payment, and I bought the derelict house for seventy-two thousand dollars in 2000. Portland then was a city of beautiful houses that working-class people could afford to buy. It seems like a dream now.

My life changed when I bought the house. I quit going out so much, I began taking better care of myself, I mowed my lawn, I bought a semi-new couch and a brand-new color TV, and a Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. I began to like myself. I want to thank the Rose City for giving me a home and a chance when for a lot of my life I didn’t know there was a chance to be had.

A little bit of personal storytelling connects us to Vlautin. It sheds light on the context of his book.

And those 252 words show us what a home can mean to a life, a sense of self, to outcomes, to a community. It’s a personal story that may or may not give away the plot.

Regardless, its clarity and presence speak volumes about about how the dire state of home ownership and housing access has destabilized personal futures, neighborhoods and communities.

A storyteller and, if we must, a “storytelling” program isn’t there to maximize audience reach and engagement in a world of vertical video.

A storyteller gives humanity, a soul, a personal connection to the data, analysis, and case studies that form the backbone of our advocacy and policy.

Storytelling is about connection, depth, and understand–not just reach. You can buy reach. You can’t buy care. So tell stories about care with care.