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:
Source: Who’s creating and sharing the message?
Message: What are they saying?
Channel: How is the message traveling between source and receiver?
Receiver: Who’s receiving the message from the source?
Feedback: What messages does the receiver send back to the source?
Environment: What’s the surrounding physical and psychological context where messages are being sent and received?
Context: What’s the broader setting and scene, and what supports/barriers does the receiver face in acting on the message?
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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