Telling Your Story

Stories powerfully influence human beings' beliefs and actions. They strengthen advocacy campaigns by grounding policy proposals in real life examples. Stories humanize information and remind people your proposal is about people, not politics. They make it much easier to discuss difficult information and promote understanding by being concrete rather than abstract. Stories about your organization, coalition, or community effort inspire others and show how community change is carried out. To successfully integrate stories into your efforts, you need to decide the types of stories you need, identify messengers, collect stories, and organize them so they can be used for a public events, testimony, publications, videos, advertisements, or other purposes.