The Six Secrets of Storytelling that Every Campaigner Should Know
As campaigners, story-telling is a key skill. People remember and retain stories much better than they remember statistics. Stories help people to understand an issue and can influence and inspire people to take action.
In their book, ‘Made to Stick’[i], Chip and Dan Heath reveal six secrets for creating memorable (‘sticky’) messages or ideas. It consists of two steps. Step 1 is to find the core of your message and step two is to translate the core using a ‘SUCCESs’ checklist. This acronym stands for Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional and Stories.
The interesting, and surprising, truth that they discovered through repeated classroom research with Stanford students, is that there is almost no correlation between ‘speaking talent’ and the ability to make ideas stick. The stars of stickiness are those students who made their case by telling stories, or by tapping into emotion, or by stressing a single point rather than ten. The good news for us is that we can use their SUCCESs template for creating an effective and memorable campaign message or story that inspires people to take action, whether we are confident public speakers or not.
You don’t have to tick all the elements on the checklist, but the more you do, the more powerful the experience will be for the audience. A summary of the six secrets and how they map against the communication framework can be found at the end of this briefing.
Secret One: Keep it Simple (or… ‘communicating the most important thing’)
Find the core of your message. This is a key skill for campaigners, but not one that necessarily comes naturally when you are passionate about an issue. Determine the single most important thing that you want to communicate and don’t bury it with lots of irrelevant detail so that your audience has to work hard to understand the point you are trying to convey. Ask the question – what single thing do I want people to remember after they’ve heard my story?
A useful rule for creating a simple but memorable message is simple = core + compact. A great campaigning skill is the ability to create a message that is compact enough to be ‘sticky’ (memorable) and meaningful enough to make a difference. The detailed research undertaken for the ‘Stop for me, speak to me’ bus campaign revealed numerous different problems that blind and partially sighted people were experiencing when trying to use buses to travel independently. The challenge was to find a simple way to communicate a complex problem to bus companies, the media and members of the public. One research finding really stood out: 9 out of 10 visually impaired people couldn’t see the bus to flag it down in the first place – stories of people flagging down red articulated lorries surfaced. This was translated to the core message; ‘Catching a bus shouldn’t be a sight test’. To drive home the message, the Stop for me, speak to me campaign report was published with an image of a bus blurred out. This helped us to quickly and effectively communicate the fundamental problem to an audience that had no previous experience or understanding of the impact of sight loss on bus travel.
Proverbs also provide a good illustration of how a message can be both meaningful and short. Proverbs like ‘a bird in the hand, is worth two in the bush’ are short sentences (compact) drawn from long experience (core).
The Curse of Knowledge
Being passionate and having done a lot of research to try to build the evidence to convince people of your case, the temptation is to introduce complexity and nuance. We start to forget what it is like not to know what we know and feel like trying to make something simple is ‘dumbing down’. But our messages have to be compact, because we can learn and remember only so much information at once. If you’ve identified the ‘core’, your compact message can still have integrity and truth. As a campaigner, if a message can’t be used to inspire others to make a decision or take action, it is without value, no matter how accurate or comprehensive it may be.
A tip for avoiding the Curse of Knowledge and useless accuracy is to use analogies. Analogies make it possible to understand a compact message because they invoke concepts that your audience already know. Think of the Hollywood ‘elevator pitch’ where you only have three minutes – the length of time it takes to ride ten floors to a movie producers executive office – to persuade them that your script is the one they should invest in. E.g. a pitch for the movie Speed might be ‘Die Hard on a bus’. By invoking schemas that already exist, we radically accelerate both the ‘stickiness’ of the message and the learning process for our audience.
The ‘simple/core’ principle should be applied to all the remaining elements of the communications framework.
Secret Two: Incorporate the Unexpected (or… ‘grabbing and holding their attention’)
As a campaigner we need to be able to get people to pay attention to our message.
The problem is that humans adapt incredibly quickly to consistent patterns – we all have internal schemas or guessing machines that help us predict what will happen and, consequently, how we should make decisions. Think of the frequent flyers who no longer hear the safety announcements the stewards run through at the beginning of a flight – their brains tune out because they’ve heard the message a hundred times before. But evolutionary development has ensured that our brains are designed to be keenly aware of changes – surprise is triggered when our schemas fail; it jolts us to attention and prepares us to understand why the failure occurred so that we can be better prepared to avoid danger in future.
Incorporating an unexpected element in to your story can help you get your audience’s attention. An effective technique used by one of our campaigners who runs visual awareness lessons with groups of school children is to wait until ten minutes in to her presentation to reveal that she herself is visually impaired. She says this ‘blows their minds’ and from that moment on they are listening to her every word. Their schema or assumption that it will be obvious if someone is blind has been disrupted and now they are curious to find out more.
If you’re not sure how to introduce the unexpected, try identifying the central message that you need to communicate (core) and try to work out what is counterintuitive about the message – ie. what are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn’t it already happening naturally? Use this to try to communicate your message in a way that breaks your audiences guessing machines.
As well as getting your audience’s attention, it’s useful to know how to keep their attention. To stop attention wavering, consider creating a ‘knowledge gap’. Tell people just enough for them to realise the piece that’s missing from their knowledge, or create mysteries or puzzles that are slowly solved over the course of the communication. By posing questions or describing a state of affairs that makes no sense the audience will be mentally prompted to help solve the mystery which can create a more enduring interest than the punchy immediacy of a surprise.
Secret 3: Make it Concrete (or… ‘getting people to understand and remember’)
Using concrete language and real-world examples helps you to use what people already know as a way to make your intentions clearer. For example campaigners came up with a way to make a campaign about the importance of rehabilitation support and social care meaningful for MPs by providing them with a box of props containing key daily items. Once the MP donned a blindfold, the items became concrete challenges and experiences (‘select the tinned soup for your dinner by touch alone, but be careful you don’t mistake it for the tinned dog food!’) that allowed campaigners to talk about the vital difference getting the right support makes – in terms of preparing meals, cleaning the home, reading important documents, getting out and about safely and independently.
Where possible, talk about people rather than data or statistics and provide context to your story by using the Velcro theory of memory – the more hooks there are in your idea or message, the more people will remember by associating your new ideas with things they already know.
Aesop’s fables provide a good example of concrete story telling because they illustrate universal human shortcomings (truth or core) in an enduring way that have survived for 2,500 years. Think of the well known phrase ‘sour grapes’ which comes from “The Fox and the Grapes”. The concrete images evoked by the fable – appealing to the senses with the sourness of the grapes, the exhaustion of the fox, the dismissive comment about sour grapes – allowed its message to persist. Language is often abstract, but life is not abstract so it’s easier to understand tangible actions like a fable than to understand an abstract commentary on the human psyche - Don’t be such a bitter idiot when you fail.
Abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and to remember it, but it also makes it harder to coordinate our activities with others, who may interpret the abstraction in very different ways. Remember the Curse of Knowledge – it can feel unnatural to speak concretely about a subject matter we’ve known intimately for years, but if we’re willing to make the effort we’ll see the rewards: our audience will better understand what we’re saying and remember it. Unlike abstract concepts, choosing concrete language and real-world examples can provide a diverse audience with a universal language that is much less likely to lead to misunderstanding.
Secret 4: Ensure it is Credible (or…‘getting people to believe and agree’)
What makes people believe ideas? We believe because our parents or our friends believe. We believe because we’ve had experiences that led us to our beliefs. We believe because of our religious faith. We believe because we trust authorities.
These ‘frames of reference’ have interesting implications for us as campaigners with a story to tell or message to share. If we’re trying to persuade a sceptical audience, the reality is that we’re fighting an uphill battle against a lifetime of personal learning and social relationships – people will judge your message based on their own frames of reference and if new evidence doesn’t fit, the theory goes that they are more likely to reject the evidence than change their thinking or behaviour.
If we can incorporate external or internal credible sources into our message, we are more likely to be able to get people to believe us and agree with us.
External credibility: Authority and anti-authority
Authorities are a reliable source of external credibility for our ideas. When we think of authorities who can add credibility, we tend to think of two types of people. The first kind is the expert – scientists or doctors for example. Celebrities and aspirational figures make up the second class of ‘authorities’- we trust the recommendations of people whom we want to be like. But what if we don’t have access to or it’s not appropriate to use authority figures to endorse our idea?
The answer is, utilise ‘anti-authorities’. This is a term that has been coined to describe the credibility that real people with real stories can bring in terms of persuading us of the value of an idea or message. They may not be scientists or medical experts, but they are experts in their own experience. These individuals can be hugely effective advocates for an issue because in the modern world, where we’re constantly inundated with messages, we develop scepticism – who’s behind these messages? Should I trust them? What do they have to gain if I believe them?
In 2011, RNIB recruited and trained a group of Eye Health Ambassadors who all had experience of sight loss or experience of receiving sight saving treatment. As part of the prevention of avoidable sight loss strategy, the volunteers took responsibility for engaging directly with health decision makers and members of the public in order to raise awareness of eye health and sight loss prevention messages and influence decisions about provision of treatments and services. As ‘anti-authorities’ the Ambassadors were much more influential than authorities – it was their genuine experience, rather than status, that allowed them to act as authorities and increased the credibility and trustworthiness of the message they were delivering.
Internal credibility: Details and statistics
We don’t always have an external authority who can vouch for our message: most of the time our messages have to vouch for themselves. They must have ‘internal credibilty’. The use of vivid details is one way to create internal credibility – to weave sources of credibility into the idea itself.
Another way is to use statistics – since school we’ve been taught to support our arguments with statistical evidence. But beware - statistics can often switch people off and cause them to zone out. To avoid this, and ensure our stats are accessible, we can use the human-scale principle – to contextualise them in terms that are more human, more everyday.
RNIB’s EyePod makes good use of both vivid detail and statistics. The EyePod is a mobile sight loss simulator, the size of a small caravan, that travels around the UK to affectively deliver eye health and sight loss prevention messages to decision makers. In each town the EyePod visits, a briefing is produced for local health and council decision makers that provides detailed information which is highly tailored to the local area and is therefore much more credible to local decision-makers than a briefing containing national statistics. Before the local briefing is shared, decision-makers get a vivid experience of what sight loss means for individuals who have glaucoma, AMD, diabetic retinopathy and cataracts by looking through the sight loss simulator which simulates each of the four conditions. This combination of vivid detail and local statistics delivers a powerful and memorable message.
The important thing to remember about using statistics effectively is that they are rarely meaningful in and of themselves. For example, nobody knows what 20,000 km squared looks like; but say it is an ‘area the size of Wales’ and it suddenly becomes much clearer. It’s far more important for people to remember the relationship than the actual statistic or number. There is even a website called SizeOfWales.co.uk which can give you a set of conversion utilities for lengths, heights, areas, volumes and weights to enable you to express your statistic in terms of something more familiar!
Secret 5: Harness the Emotion (or… ‘getting people to care’)
Secret 4 revealed the importance of convincing people that our ideas are credible in order to make them believe. Belief counts for a lot, but belief isn’t enough. For people to take action, they have to care. There are a number of useful methods that you can use to help make people care about your idea:
Use the Mother Teresa principle – “If I look at the mass I will never act, if I look at the one, I will”: focus on the individual story rather than the pattern or the masses. Fundraisers are well aware that if they can get people to take off their analytical hats by creating empathy for specific individuals, donors are more likely to give more cash than if they talk about an issue in more abstract terms.
Use association between your idea and something they care about already
Appeal to self-interest and apply the theory of motivation – the WIIFY – ‘what’s in it for you’ should be a central aspect of every speech and campaign target analysis. In the 1950’s a psychologist called Abaham Maslow developed a theory which is now known as ‘Maslow’s hierarchy of needs’. His research revealed that people try to fulfil a list of needs and desires – from the basic ones, such as physical, security and belonging needs to higher needs such as esteem, learning, aesthetic, self-actualization and transcendence. When you are thinking about what elements of your story may motivate others, it can be useful to think about how your message may satisfy some of the elements on Maslow’s hierarchy. Advertisers and marketers focus on ‘Maslow’s Basement’ – the three fundamental needs. But as campaigners, we shouldn’t overlook the opportunities to motivate people by focussing only on the most basic aspects of the hierarchy. Appealing to the higher identity needs can also be an effective technique for motivating people to care and act.
The ‘three why’s’ tactic. Remember the Curse of Knowledge? Just because you are passionate or emotional about something, doesn’t mean that someone else will automatically care, or even understand what you are talking about or why it matters. This is an important principle to remember when crafting your message. If in doubt, ask ‘why’ should my audience care? And keep asking why until you have an answer that reveals a core truth that needs no specialist knowledge in order to be understood.