Story Based Strategy

Effective strategies can advance stories that frame the terrain of debate and win the battle of ideas.

Storytelling as Social Change

Storytelling has always been central to the work of organizers and movement builders. Narrative is the lens through which humans process the information we encounter, be it cultural, emotional, experiential, or political. We make up stories about ourselves, our histories, our futures, and our hopes.

In today’s media saturated world, soundbyte news coverage seamlessly blends with “image management,” misinformation and the global advertising-marketing-complex. To keep our work for positive change from getting drowned out, grassroots activists need a sophisticated grasp of the cultural environment and deeper understandings of how power operates through narrative.

This is why we founded the smartMeme Strategy and Training Project in 2002. Drawing from many disciplines, the founding collective integrated practices from organizing, broadcast media, advertising, strategic communications, education and systems thinking into our strategy and training work. Our experiments have evolved into a set of tools we call story-based strategy -- a framework to link movement building with an analysis of narrative power by placing storytelling at the center of social change strategy.

Often times those of us working for change make the mistake of focusing on what the public doesn’t know (“If they only knew the facts…”) Story-based strategy flips this approach to examine what people DO know – what are the existing stories and assumptions of the people we are trying to reach? What is their existing story relating to the issue and how does that story limit possibility? Story-based strategy works to reach past people’s narrative filters and change the dominant story around an issue or campaign.

The Story-Based Strategy Framework

Working through the story-based strategy framework can create a common narrative to integrate messaging, media, advocacy and organizing efforts by focusing on a few key cornerstones of storytelling:

The Conflict: What is the problem we are addressing? How is it framed? What is emphasized and what is avoided? How can we change the framing?

The Characters: Who are the characters in our story? This can be a profound organizing question: Who are “we?” Are we amplifying the voices of the most impacted people? Who are the other characters in the story?

Show Don’t Tell: What is the imagery of this story—what pictures linger in our minds? Are there anecdotes that we tell people to show them what we’re talking about? What about songs? Poems? Metaphors that describe the issue?

Foreshadowing: What is our vision of resolution to the conflict? What is our solution to the problem?  How do make the future we desire seem inevitable?

Assumptions: What are the assumptions underlying the story we want to change? How can we expose and challenge them? What assumptions and core values do we share that unite our communities around a common vision?

Memes

Our story-based strategy work also combines storytelling and grassroots organizing with meme theory - the study of how memes spread and replicate. A meme (rhymes with dream) is a contagious information pattern, an idea that has taken on a life of its own. Memes are self-replicating cultural units such as ideas (“Fair Trade”), rituals (shaking hands), and symbols (the Nike swoosh or the peace sign) that spread virally from person to person. Memes are like capsules for larger stories. When we reproduce the meme, by using the phrase, discussing the idea, or replicating the ritual or symbol, we spread the story.

Memes can of course be carriers for oppressive stories (like the myth of white supremacy), or become misleading sound byte packaging on complex systems (like the story of “better living through chemistry”). But memes are also an effective way for social movements to create a common story that unifies people to make change – “Think Globally, Act Locally” or “Black is Beautiful.”  

Changing the Story

Memes are not magic words– but when combined with broader organizing and advocacy strategies they can make social change work much more effective. An effective meme can become the cornerstone for a powerful campaign like the scarecrow meme campaign which smartMeme created to support the organizing of Rural Vermont’s family farmer membership.

We named our project after the idea of smart memes – memes that agitate to change the dominant stories in our culture to promote a more democratic, just, peaceful and ecological future. Memes are trickling up and out from grassroots movements all the time, but what if many more of us thought strategically about our memes and used story-based strategies to change popular culture? At smartMeme we’d like to collaborate with you to find out…together we can change the story!