The story matters more than the words

Howdy,

Did that "howdy" make you double take? Hi, hello, hey, yoo-hoo, yo, howdy - so many possible one-word greetings. Don't they each make you feel a little bit different?

I love words. As an avid reader, a writer, and just a human in this world, I love words.

And I do think they matter. As our little greeting exercise shows, words do evoke feelings, and they communicate all kinds of things (the mood you're in, how well you know the person you're talking to, how formal the context is, and so on and so forth).

BUT I don’t think words matter as much as policy or practice. It goes back to the old saying, actions speak louder than words.

If you’ve seen the conversation around whether to use the term unhoused or homeless or persons experiencing homelessness - I always come out of it thinking: 1) ask the people themselves (Folks have. The vast majority of them continue to prefer the term homeless.) and 2) WHO CARES if you aren’t DOING something about it?

As usual, McSweeney’s sarcasm captures it better than I can - “Our City’s New Initiative Will End Homelessness by Calling It Something Else”. Changing our words doesn’t mean we’re changing our actions - in fact, changing words often distracts from the fact that we’re not changing our actions. Much of the time, changing our words is a whole lot of virtue signaling and not much else.

When it comes to community health and well-being, changing actions - changing policy and practice - is what matters. That requires changing minds. And that, in turn, requires a compelling story.

This is where public health - and movements to advance public health - have fallen very, very short.

We should be FAR more obsessed with shaping the narrative than with word choice. As I’ve said before, we need to tell more stories (it's why PoP Health hosts a "Story Space" at the annual community health event we co-organize, sharing stories with kids about our minds, emotions, and connections to others).

But it's not just our kids who need stories. Our communities do too.

How do we tell compelling stories that place the blame on the system and not the individual? How do we tell powerful stories that make the case for prevention instead of after-the-fact treatment? How do we tell stories that build community and bring more people under our tent, instead of further alienating those we need to persuade?

THIS is what we should be obsessing about.

Words can evoke emotions, but stories are what change minds.

I find the work of organizations like Frameworks Institute and Hollywood, Health, and Society to be quite compelling on this front.

In my little corner of the world, I’ve tried to shape a story around our approach to health and am currently working on shaping a story around the impact of corporate power on our health and environment and what we can do about it.

How are you shaping stories in your work and in your communities? Or, if you aren’t yet, how might you want to moving forward? Drop me a line and let me know!

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HOW to tell a powerful story + tips to transport and activate your audience

I’ve been leaning on beach reads this summer (to be honest, I lean on them year-round) and have always loved being transported to new places through stories.

But let’s be real, it’s easy to transport a reader to a beautiful beach on vacation. It’s a lot harder to transport them into, say, the lives of families in rural America.

But even stories about the same place and same community can be quite different from one another.

As J.D. Vance hits the news cycle as the Republican vice presidential nominee, I’ve been thinking a lot about an alternative to his Hillbilly Elegy (a memoir about life in rural America, which I did not read) - namely, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (a novel about life in rural Appalachia, which I read and found deeply moving).

Hillbilly Elegy (although it received critical acclaim from many upon release) has been described as condescending and inauthentic. I suspect the reason for this is the nature of the stories the book tells. As one Appalachian Studies expert put it, “One of the most troubling things to me about the book is that it talks a lot about unemployment and poverty, domestic violence, the opioid crisis, but it never gives you context for why those things exist the way they do in Appalachia.”

In contrast, one journalist notes, “Kingsolver slyly weaves the history of her home into Demon’s harrowing tale. From the Whiskey Rebellion to the boom and bust of the tobacco and coal industries, she describes a community preyed on for decades as governments and companies extracted their resources. And then came the opioid crisis.”

If you haven’t read Demon Copperhead yet, pick it up now - it’ll show you the power of story in transporting us much better than I can. But you know me, I’m going to try anyway! Here are some tips, strategies, and resources for transporting and activating your audience via powerful storytelling.

Can you share some tips for effective storytelling?

Storyboard. I have loved Echo Rivera’s trainings around presentations (which are, after all, simply a story you’re telling!) and one thing she emphasizes is that Step 1 is storyboarding. You have to map out the flow of the story you’re telling from the get-go and make sure it’s going to leave the audience with the right takeaways. So don’t jump to writing, slide creation, or anything else until you’ve taken the time to storyboard.

Get personal. Here at PoP Health, we’ve been working on a project for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention focused on how to improve public health cancer prevention messaging and one of our key takeaways has been the need to get more personal. What does this look like? It’s not about dry facts or abstract concepts. Instead, think personal true stories from “people like me” that are accompanied by the faces of those people, embedding health information in TV shows, appealing to one’s identity (tapping into a shared identity of being a mom, encouraging kids to “be a helper” instead of “help others”).

Be relatable. Use words your audience would use. Use metaphors to help boil down complex concepts into something your audience can wrap their arms around. Keep it local.

Get visual. Drawings, photos, videos, GIFs, all can be helpful, especially when they feature real people, make your audience laugh, or convey a powerful message. Infographics and data visualization - when done well - are also great tools.

What are some specific strategies for effective storytelling?

Co-create stories and messages: You know who already knows the real stories that will resonate with your audience? The people who’ve lived those stories. Also known as your audience. Co-create stories and messages with them.

Interpret your data for your audience: Use a storytelling sentence. Don’t leave it to chance or someone else’s interpretation. Don't assume the numbers speak for themselves. It's your story - so, tell it! Along the same lines, take this great advice from Stephanie Evergreen and make your data dashboard a webpage. Why? Because then, you’ll be telling an actual story! And as Stephanie says, “That narrative is where you get nuance. Expansion. Explanation. Clarification.”

Tailor content: First, you need to tailor content to your audience (based on a wide range of factors that are too much to get into here - more to come on that in the future), to the channel you’re using (please don’t post your static flier content to Tik Tok or vice versa!), and to the current and local contexts. Also tailor content to the type of deliverable (Website? Report? Social media post? Podcast?) and tailor the deliverable you’re choosing to work for your particular goals and audience. Even within a single deliverable, try to make it modular, so you can easily toggle in and out “modules” for different audiences based on who needs X background information or who cares about Y data.

What are some resources to help me tell powerful stories?

Echo Rivera’s free 6 Gears of Creating Engaging Presentations training

Stephanie Evergreen’s “delightful, strategy shifting, and totally free ideas for your next data viz”

Potential Energy Coalition’s Talk Like a Human guide (I think their lessons on how to communicate climate change apply much, much more broadly!)

Here’s the thing, effectively sharing what we know, do, and learn is essential to transforming health in our communities. And there is no better way to do that than to tell stories. So embrace your identity as a storyteller and get REALLY good at it - the results will surprise you.

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Why people forget facts but remember stories - an intro to Effective Storytelling

Is your summer off to as hot and joyful a start as mine, Reader?

Our family spent the last week at an all-family violin camp in the Blue Ridge mountains, and it was a joy on so many levels (our girls did not want to come home!).

Being surrounded by music all week had me forgetting the heat (despite the lack of AC at camp) and remembering just how powerful art is and how every piece of art tells a story.

Have you heard the quote about how people forget facts but remember stories? That's definitely true but misses a key piece of the puzzle. People remember stories because they make them FEEL.

Which brings me to another quote, this from Maya Angelou: “People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.”

I have always been moved by stories in all their forms - as an avid reader of novels, as a dancer, as a journalist through middle/high school and college, as a mom (and chief bedtime book reader).

I’ve written about the power of narrative and why we need to tell more stories before, so today I’m especially excited today to dive into the final phase of PoP Health’s CAPE process - Effective storytelling.

What do you mean by effective storytelling?

Coalitions and collaboratives working to transform health in their communities need to tell their stories - stories of their communities, their work, their process, their successes, their impact, and also their struggles and the barriers that prevent them from having more impact.

They need to tell their stories with and to community members; they need to recount their stories to policymakers and funders; they need to share their stories with partner organizations and agencies.

Effectively sharing what we know, do, and learn is essential to community health improvement. Elevating the voices of community and coalition members through these stories and synthesizing your experiences and learnings in ways that resonate with community members, policymakers, funders, and other key audiences are not easy tasks - but they are vital.

What are some ways to think about effective storytelling?

There are many storytelling frameworks to choose from, from the Hero’s Journey to the Freytag Pyramid to the Pixar Story Framework.

They all have helpful components and are worth exploring. What might be even more helpful as a starting point, though, are these two highly simplified models of storytelling:

Hook / Story / Close: This is pretty much just what it sounds like. You start with a powerful hook that captures your audience’s attention, tell a compelling story, and close with a call to action or an offer. Each component might be quite different based on your audience (what hooks a policymaker won’t hook a community member and what you want a funder to do is likely quite different than what you want a partner organization to do).

The Golden Circle: Simon Sinek’s idea of a Golden Circle, popularized via his 2009 TED Talk, captures how inspiring organizations and individuals think, act, and communicate: They start with explaining why (what’s the purpose, cause, or belief?), then how (how is the why brought to life?), and only then the what.

While we’ve been focusing on storytelling, it’s not just about the story! Who’s telling it, who’s hearing it, the channel through which they’re hearing it, how they respond, the broader context, misinformation - all of these things matter, and they can matter quite a lot. In a current project focused on strengthening cancer prevention communications, we’ve been using this communications framework to organize our findings, and I find it quite helpful:

Eight Essential Components of Communication:

1. Source: Who’s creating and sharing the message?

2. Message: What are they saying?

3. Channel: How is the message traveling between source and receiver?

4. Receiver: Who’s receiving the message from the source?

5. Feedback: What messages does the receiver send back to the source?

6. Environment: What’s the surrounding physical and psychological context where messages are being sent and received?

7. Context: What’s the broader setting and scene, and what supports/barriers does the receiver face in acting on the message?

8. Interference: What blocks or changes the source’s intended meaning of messages, including misinformation and disinformation?

What are some questions I should be asking myself about effective storytelling?

• How can we elevate and center the voices of community and coalition members in our stories, and who among them will our audiences most deeply connect with?

• How can we transport our audiences through story (given that narrative transportation reduces psychological barriers, serving as a powerful tool for persuasion) and tap into their self-concept/self-identity - their sense of who they are as a person (given that people engage with communications that deepen their sense of self and reject communications that counter their sense of self)?

• Where and how can we best reach our audiences?

• What supports or hinders our audience from acting on what we tell them, and how can we address these factors?

Sometimes, we’re so tired doing the work that we don’t take the time to tell our story - much less tell it well. But it’s a vital part of the process of transforming health in our communities.

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Why we need to tell more stories

I’ve always loved stories - reading them, writing them, dancing them, hearing them.

One of the greatest joys of my work these days is partnering with community coalitions to tell their stories and the stories of their community members.

Narrative - that is, storytelling - holds immense power. Just in the last couple weeks, this has come up in three completely different projects PoP Health is working on:

• I was in Pittsburgh last week for the one-year celebration of implementation of the BIRTH Plan. A key part of PoP Health's role in this work is helping share the impact of implementing the plan in ways that resonate with community members. We’re lucky to be working with an amazing team over at Impact Aligned as well as our partners at Healthy Start Pittsburgh who are leading this work. All of us had many conversations where we grappled with how best to share our evaluation/learning data with partners and community, and ultimately realized we didn’t just want to share data - we wanted to tell a story. So, at the suggestion of our friends at Impact Aligned, we’re pivoting away from the idea of a traditional dashboard and instead considering storyboarding five key “impact stories” about the implementation of the BIRTH Plan and progress/outcomes to date that will be turned into videos - using data visualizations with an audio voiceover to tell a literal story. We are so excited about trying this approach and think it has the potential to be much more relatable, compelling, and easy-to-understand for community members.

• Earlier this week, I was at a convening of a multi-partner school behavioral health collaborative in DC, and one of the parent advocates around the table brought up the two key perspectives she thought were missing from our table: a media person and a historian. This really struck me because these are not common roles brought up around public health focused coalition tables. But they should be - especially when we are talking about transforming communities through policy and systems change. This work cannot be divorced from the history of the community - we need to acknowledge, account for, and learn from history (history, if you will). We also need to share our stories - the stories we are informed by, the stories we are shaping, the stories of our impact and our failures too. So then it feels like of course we should have historians and media/communications professionals around our tables.

• My colleague over at AES Consulting and I are working on a report related to cancer prevention communications and there are so many examples of the power of personal stories - one of them is about how colonoscopies increased 20% nationwide after Katie Couric received her first colonoscopy live on the Today show (i.e. “the Couric Effect”), a phenomenon I’m sure was also driven by her own moving personal story about her husband’s death from colon cancer. Similarly, when Magic Johnson went public with testing positive for HIV, this led to an uptick in testing in minority communities known as the “Magic Johnson effect”. Personal stories can often be more persuasive than data. I love the example of “deep canvassing” from door-to-door political campaigning. The strategy involves, first, a LOT of listening, followed by the canvasser trying to get the person at the door to reflect on a situation in their own life that might parallel the experience of someone the canvasser is hoping they can get the person to relate to - and it’s been found to be quite effective! (This is a strategy I learned about via the book Persuaders. Read my takeaways, which include a more detailed description of deep canvassing, here).
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I’ve written about the power of narrative before (preview: I discuss in detail the TV show New Amsterdam and also share a fun exchange from when I met Atul Gawande at a book talk) and more recently the power of a storytelling sentence. I’m sure I’ll have more to share about the power of stories in the future too - it’s really a thread that runs through all aspects of my work and life.

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The power of a storytelling sentence

When it comes to community health improvement, we often find ourselves in situations where we need to tell a compelling story. To name just a few:

We need to convey the impact and value of a particular health issue to a policymaker so they are motivated to write or pass legislation that would help address it.

We need to share the impact a policy or program is having with our funders and communities so they are inspired to help sustain it.

We need to share data from a community survey so community partners understand the top health-related needs community members are facing so that their organizations can take action to meet those needs.

PoP Health is knee-deep in each of these types of storytelling at the moment. And we’re often using data - both quantitative and qualitative - to tell these stories. We typically have a LOT of data - thankfully we work with amazing analysts who can synthesize this data into powerful, digestible visualizations.

But visualizations only tell a story if you can interpret them effectively.

One of the things I’ve come to appreciate deeply is the immense power of a storytelling sentence.

Take a data visualization and ask yourself, what do I want the person seeing this to takeaway from this?

And then write that down as simply and briefly as you can.

That’s your storytelling sentence.

Maybe it’s the title of your graph or visual, maybe it’s a summary sentence you place to the side or below.

It sounds so simple but it’s amazing how often we skip this step. This happens a lot especially with data dashboards.

You might build a high-quality, dynamic data dashboard. But will a community member or community partner seeing that dashboard know at first glance what they should be taking away from it? If you add those storytelling sentences, they will!

So this is a call to tell your story. Don’t leave it to chance or someone else’s interpretation. Don't assume the numbers speak for themselves. It's your story - so, tell it!

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Simplify your messaging with the "Kindergartener test"

Have you ever struggled to explain what you do or what public health is?

One of my colleagues has a "grandma test" for anything he communicates to a general audience - if his grandma will understand, then he can share the message. Today, I want to share another twist on that, the "Kindergartener test". Will a Kindergartener understand and stay interested and engaged in what you're saying? This requires a simple, relatable, creative, and - where possible - interactive messaging approach.

Let me share an example.

A couple weeks ago, I participated in my daughter's elementary school career fair.
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Public health is pretty abstract (preventing something before it happens means there's nothing to show!) and I needed to explain it to Kindergarteners-3rd graders. Yikes.
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I was momentarily stumped and walking around the house looking for a good prop to illustrate the upstream/downstream story when I came across my daughter's marble maze.
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It was fun and colorful enough to draw in the kids AND - with the addition of a small round paint sponge I found - had all the elements I needed to illustrate the story.

I had the kids drop a marble in at the top and tell them to pretend it's a person going along for a walk when all of a sudden, they fall into a river. Without anything to protect them, they'd fall all the way down the river and (as the marble drops down the last ramp and off the maze) might get hurt or even drown.
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BUT if there was something to protect them (enter round sponge), where might they put it to protect the person?
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Some kids suggested putting the sponge on the first ramp to prevent the person from going downstream, or at the entrance to the maze to prevent the person from falling in at all. These are the ideas I originally had as well - and when kids said this, we got to do it, see how the marble stopped at the sponge, and talk about how "that protects the person BEFORE they get hurt or sick, which is exactly what we do in public health!".
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But the best part were the other ideas kids came up with that hadn't occurred to me at all.

• Some kids suggested putting the sponge on the floor below where the last ramp ended to cushion the person's fall. So I said, "That's such an interesting idea, and you're absolutely right, that would cushion the person's fall, but they might not land right on it or they might get hurt anyway. But where else could we put the sponge if we didn't want them to fall at all?" This would prompt them to suggest putting the sponge somewhere further upstream.

• Others suggested putting an extra marble on the opposite side of the green entrance to the maze, which meant even if the marble person in question began the maze, they would never get tilted down into the blue "stream", because the extra marble acted as a counterweight - a true systems solution!

• A few kids got so excited about the marble maze, they dropped several marbles in at once - the sponge stopped all of them, and I explained how that's how public health solutions work too, once you put them in place, they protect MANY people at once.

None of these ideas had occurred to me beforehand and they all allowed me to have a meaningful conversation with these smart and thoughtful young kids about public health. I loved every minute of it.

The thing is, simple, relatable, creative, and interactive messaging isn't just helpful for Kindergarteners and grandmothers, it's helpful for everyone.

When you're trying to get an entire community on board with pursuing prevention and public health, you're communicating to a wide range of people with a wide range of existing experiences and understanding - this kind of messaging can help you reach more of them.

Also important to consider is that policy changes that support public health are rarely possible without widespread community support - and community support for public health requires an understanding of what public health is and why it works. This was the motiviation behind my talk on the topic a couple years ago, and I hope we see a true understanding of public health spread more widely in the years to come.

Have you had success with simple, relatable, creative, interactive messaging in your work to transform health in communities? Or is there a message you're struggling to communicate in this way? Tell me all about it!

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