Guest post by Emily G. Culbertson, a Chicago-based nonprofit consultant

Why do we tell stories? To make friends, entertain, and teach, no doubt, but I also suspect we tell stories to make sense of the world around us. If we're working for social change, we tell ourselves stories -- about hunger, homelessness, lack of health care, you name it -- to help understand urgent problems and bring them to life, and more importantly to human size, where we might do something about them.

I took away five thoughts -- some lessons, some questions -- from the 2011 Independent Sector Annual Conference session, "Telling It Like It Is: The Power of Stories to Spur Change." It was moderated by Kate Emanuel of The Advertising Council and presented by Cathy Tisdale, Camp Fire USA; Marc Fest, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; Enrique Ball, Public Allies, Inc.; Kelly Matheson, Witness and David J. Morse, Civic Ventures.

1. You have to make it easy, and maybe even fun, for people to tell the stories you want to tell.

Marc Fest talked about the "message house" (http://www.messagehouse.org) -- his tool for making it fun for people to tell a specific story. He frames four main questions in a drawing of a house:

Question 1: What's the big picture? Ideally, the answer “makes you feel like you're part of something big and special."
Question 2: What's in it for the audience?
Question 3: How can you respond to a common criticism?
Question 4: What do you want people to do? “If you're not doing that, then you're missing the point of communications," Marc said.

This final point was echoed by Kate, who said good stories need an objective, a target audience and a call to action.

2. Stories need data, but too much data can kill a story.

"How do you kill emotions? By throwing lots of numbers at them," said Enrique. Too many numbers are "emotional Novocain."

Cathy Tisdale of Camp Fire USA demonstrated that using data to power stories is a delicate balance. Her story was about the 14 million people who are unemployed today who were not unemployed in 2006. While Cathy defined those 14 million by numbers, she also reminded us that their numbers are not the whole story. They're "our sons and daughters, our friends and neighbors," Tisdale said. "They're people we stand in line with at the grocery story. We worship together, and our kids go to school together. Her challenge: how will we, as a sector, work together to help our friends and neighbors?

3. "People are informed rationally and motivated emotionally."

David Morse (who, for the record, was my former boss at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation) introduced us to his dark horse candidate for the New York Times Magazine's "The Lives They Lived" cover: Ronald Reagan's pollster, Dick Wirthlin. (David’s no fool: he knows that most likely Apple CEO Steve Jobs will be on that cover.) The quote above is Wirthlin’s, as he certainly understood the role of emotion in politics.

David told a story that Wirthlin would have recognized as full of potential to motivate people. Sheila, Bob, and their two children, struggled for years with Sheila’s breast cancer and unemployment that left them on the brink of losing their home. Twice Sheila stopped treatment due to escalating costs and once she turned to panhandling: "I'm not a bum, just a mom. Please help." Way too late -- a day before she died -- she found out she qualified for Medicare.

4. Is a good story like porn (you know it when you see it)? And how do you know when a story is effective?

Can you know if heartbreaking stories like Sheila’s contribute to policy change? Her story was made into a short documentary, Denied, that was released in 2009 in the context of the health care reform debates (Learn more at http://talkingeyesmedia.org/denied). During one of the small group discussions, the group talked about how you know if a story works and how valuable it is to know when a story doesn’t work. Sometimes messaging research tells you when a story won't work, but sometimes you have to tell it and see if it sticks.
 
5. We have an ethical obligation to help protect the people whose stories we tell.

While video has become more central to the work of human rights work, standards have not kept pace, which make it easier for regimes to retaliate against people filmed on camera. "We have to protect the dignity, privacy and personal security of people telling stories," said Kelly Matheson of Witness. Cameras Everywhere (http://www.witness.org/cameras-everywhere) focuses on ethical ways to shot and use video in documenting human rights issues.

For those of you focusing on storytelling in e-mail, Kate referenced a report by M+R Strategic Services: Storytelling and The Art of Email Writing, available here: labs.mrss.com/storytelling-and-the-art-of-email-writing

Were you there? What did you remember and take away?