Positioning Your Organization:

Advocacy and Stakeholder Engagement Success Through Storytelling

In an age with an overwhelming amount of information – some that is compelling, some that is not quite true, and some that might be confusing – audiences crave authenticity, and organizations yearn for the ability to cut through the clutter to form meaningful connections.

One powerful tool for engaging with key audiences like the public, media, government officials, as well as business and civic leaders is storytelling. Storytelling is a medium for sharing information, providing education about an initiative or issue, and for building a community that is oriented towards gaining understanding and taking action. It means more than simply describing your programs and initiatives, but telling the actual stories of actual people affected by them and how the work of your organization helped change their lives or communities for the better.

This blog will explore why storytelling is central to modern PR and how your organization can craft narratives that inspire trust; advance your organization’s advocacy agenda, initiatives, fundraising, or programming; and increase the visibility of your organization as well as its team and mission. As you read, consider two common frameworks for telling your story:

• Problem, Solution, Benefits: Show people the problem you solved / are working on solving or need you have addressed / continue to be addressing, detail the solution (as well as how you came to it), and shine a spotlight on the benefits to your audience(s).
• Opportunity, Strategy, Outcome: Explain what your organization sees as a need or an opportunity to advance positive change, detail how you plan to act on it and how others got involved, and explain the outcome through people-centric mediums like testimonials or place-centric images like capturing the same site before and after your work.

Why Storytelling Matters

• Humanizing Your Organization and Showcasing the People Doing the Work:

Stories help give faces and personalities to organizations and brands, making them more relatable and helping them connect to a multitude of key audiences with different preferences and lived experiences. Are you putting faces to the people who make your organization tick and serve as its thought leaders? Are you sharing behind-the-scenes looks at the processes that drive successful outcomes? Storytelling is critical for highlighting the impact of your organization’s mission, activities, and impact.

TIP: Is your organization getting ready to release a report or looking to build an audience for a program? As part of your stakeholder outreach and PR and marketing activities, consider sharing a story through a testimonial format that shares how one person or group was or will be impacted by the underlying issue you are trying to promote.

• Providing Education and Communicating How People Can Get Involved:

As the old saying goes, if you build it they will come. In the case of getting people more aware of your organization, its thought leadership, and its activities, by providing people with the information they need about how and why they should care about an issue or participate in an activity, you create pathways for them to increase or deepen their involvement. Collectively, this helps promote shared values and understanding that are key ingredients for building coalitions that drive change.

TIP: Text-based information is great. Have you ever considered leveraging infographics, quotos, or short videos to share information about your organization’s work or to preview an upcoming event? Are you sharing information across your owned media channels and leveraging in support of public relations activities? Varying the formats of your content and sharing it across your communications vehicles (email marketing, social media channels, website, etc.) helps you better engage your audience and meet them where they are.

Key Elements of a Powerful Story and Storytelling in PR

• A Relatable Protagonist: Whether it’s a population served, a stakeholder in the business or civic community, members, investors, or the organization itself, by positioning your organization and its team the “heroes” of the story, you help increase opportunities for the story to resonate with your audiences and inspire them to deepen engagement.
• Conflict and Resolution: Show how challenges were overcome by sharing information about the process and people behind the work. Are you sharing what inspired the work in the first place and how its success should be measured? This adds drama and relatability.
• Authenticity: Avoid over-polished narratives; realness builds trust. Think about how you can use imagery and videos to add personal touches to your story.
• Call to Action: End the story with a clear message or takeaway for the audience. Once your organization has acted to educate and inspire people, be sure to take the next step in guiding them on their journey! Calls to action can include clicking a link to reach more, sharing fundraising or advocacy appeals, and signing up for an event.
• Examples of Storytelling in PR: Sharing anecdotes from an impacted party, highlighting a behind-the-scenes story of innovation and/or bringing about positive change through the work of your organization, sharing “bite-sized” bits about your organization’s mission and milestones.
  
  

Looking to sharpen your storytelling and strengthen the position of your organization? We’d love to partner with you to help uncover and amplify stories that showcase your brand voice and values. Together, we can help your organization cut through the clutter in a crowded news and digital landscape by ensuring that your story resonates with the right audience at the right time.