Build your own narrative change strategy.
A strategy is a general plan for achieving one or more long-term narrative change goals. It’s the guide for why and how you’ll create change, and it helps define your tactics for reaching and influencing your desired audience(s).
Narrative change doesn’t happen overnight. While it’s good to set ambitious goals, it’s also important to be realistic about what your organization can achieve given your budget, core competencies, and timeline.
Theory of change template
Below is a roadmap for you to create an effective narrative change strategy. There are five key elements, with worksheets to help you get there. Follow the steps below and use the provided worksheets to create a blueprint for your project.
Step One: What's your goal?
Step Two: Who is your audience?
Step Three: What are you going to do? What are your tactics?
Step Four: How will you reach people? What's your distribution plan?
Step Five: How will you measure and evaluate success?
Theory of Change
This narrative change project aims to [1. Goal]. With it, I hope to shift [2. Audience] from [Belief/Action] to [Belief/Action]. I will do this by [3. Tactics]. This content will reach my audience via [4. Distribution Plan]. I will know if I’m successful by [5. Measurement and Evaluation].
Tools for Narrative Change
Goal
The first step in creating a narrative change strategy is defining your goal. Use this Creative Brief to help you think through your vision, objectives, and overall approach.
What is it
Your goal is the overarching, positive vision of what your project hopes to achieve related to changing a harmful or false narrative. Ask yourself: What needs to change and why? Who is impacted by the harmful narrative? What positive narrative would replace the existing one? How can your narrative be inclusive, address stereotypes, and/or reduce harm?
Use it to
Consider whether your goal is mobilization or persuasion. Mobilization is getting people who are ideologically aligned with you to take greater action. Persuasion is shifting the mindsets of people who have opposing views. These are not mutually exclusive, but one may be a better fit for your project. Will you focus on inspiring action or changing minds?
Remember to
Convey a systems narrative. A systems narrative rejects the idea that an individual is solely responsible for their success or failure, by examining the larger context shaping their circumstances, such as historical events, social norms, and government policies. People may not present their personal stories in a way that speaks to these systemic issues, which can unintentionally reinforce harmful narratives, such as the idea of “bootstrapping” one’s way to success. Be sure to define—and understand!—your systems narrative upfront, and keep it in mind as you edit and shape the stories you gather.
Audience
Knowing your audience, or the people you aim to reach with your work, is essential. Many organizations find it challenging when their audience is ideologically different to them, which may require them to use different vocabulary and appeal to different values. Use this Audience Persona and Insights Worksheet to help you define and understand the key audience(s) that you want to engage.
What is it
Your audience includes both who you hope to move and what you want to move them to do. An audience is simply a group of people defined by any characteristic that seems important (race, age, gender, immigration status, ideology, location, etc.).
Use it to
Ask yourself: How does communication with this audience further our strategic goals? What beliefs do they currently hold that we want to shift? What habits, interests, or value systems help us to understand those beliefs? What will we ask this audience to do (what is our call to action)? Can we reach this audience? Consider which audience actually needs convincing or persuading and understand that this group may be distinctly different from the audiences you have historically targeted.
Remember to
When defining your audiences, think about how you can avoid tropes and harmful stereotypes. Are we asset framing or deficit framing? Meaning — is the work defining people by their challenges, or their strengths? Does this help reinforce our narrative, or work against it? Are we using audiences’ preferred language when talking to and about them?
Tactics/Production
Key to understanding how your work will come to life is establishing effective messaging. It’s important to craft messages that are aligned with the format you’ve chosen to produce, appropriate for the platform or channel you’ve chosen for distribution, and compelling for the audience. Your messaging will be shared widely through your tactics, which may involve creating new content, programming, events, and/or campaigns. Use this Tailored Messaging Checklist to think it through.
What is it
Your tactics are how you hope to do the work. This could range from a series of live social media conversations, to local radio ads, to event programming. Across your tactics, your messaging should remain consistent in order to reinforce your ideas. Make sure your tactics are something that your organization has experience in and a sufficient budget for, and be specific about how your tactics will further your goals. You should be able to articulate, “If I do X, I expect Y to happen as a result.”
Use it to
Ask yourself: What can I do to accomplish my narrative goals? What are the key activities and tasks involved? What format will my work take? What organizational strengths can I leverage to do the work? Do I need to hire contractors or find a partner to help? Studying existing, successful narrative change work is a great way to get inspired and come up with your own tactics. Focus on campaigns or movements that share your target audience, formats, or resources. What can you learn from them?
Remember to
Beware of bias! Do your research to ensure that you’re depicting communities and individuals with dignity and respect, avoiding stereotypes, and making your work accessible to a wide range of abilities. Make sure your content meets accessibility standards such as these. Involving impacted communities in your work will only make it stronger, and it has proven benefits: The Voices Incubator found that audiences’ receptivity to narrative change messaging hinged on the extent to which it targeted their values, language, and life context.
Distribution
Your distribution plan is your method for getting your content in front of your audience. This may include channels like Facebook, TikTok, television, local newspapers, community pamphlets, and more. There are many ways of thinking about distribution, including a popular framework, POSE—short for “paid, owned, shared, and earned” media. This tool will help you apply the POSE Framework to your project.
What is it
Distribution is a core element of a sound narrative change strategy, and arguably more important than finding exactly the right message. A winning strategy must have a convincing approach to reaching a large number of people, beyond the hope that something will go viral. This may require more funding, more time, or both, but it shouldn’t rely on external events outside of your control, such as a major media outlet picking up the story.
Use it to
Ask yourself: How will my tactics get to my audience? How many people will the tactics reach, and how often? Which channels does my audience pay attention to? If I put my content in front of people in the way I envision, how will it resonate with them? Will they understand the words, relate to the storytellers, etc.? Will it move my audience in the direction I want?
Remember to
Make it easy for your audience to experience your work. That means your tactics and distribution should inform one another. If people must actively seek out your content, that will eliminate a large portion of your audience, making engagement less likely for those who aren’t ideologically aligned. Re-examine your tactics in light of your distribution plan, and make sure they work together to advance your goal.
Measurement & Evaluation
Measurement and evaluation should be built into your strategic planning from the start, and your plan should help you tweak, refine, and improve throughout your project journey. Don’t think of measurement and evaluation as a separate deliverable, but rather as a tool that will enhance each stage of your work. Use our Measurement & Evaluation Tool to explore ways of measuring success as you go along.
What is it
We often need ways to measure and evaluate short-term progress toward a long-term goal. Every project is unique in terms of the types of metrics that could be most useful in monitoring progress. It is critical to think through what elements of your work you want to measure, how you will conduct those measurements, and how you will use the results.
Use it to
Narrative change can occur on a personal, cultural, or structural level. When evaluating narrative change on any of these levels, explore two important elements of measurement: reach and impact. Measuring reach is identifying whether the right people are seeing, hearing, or otherwise encountering your content. For example, the number of people who viewed your video. Measuring impact means evaluating to what degree your work is delivering the outcome that you planned for, e.g. a survey measuring behavior change. One example would be survey responses from your audience that show how their views have changed after watching your video.
Remember to
Consider your definition of success and KPIs with equity in mind. What would signify success in terms of the audiences you are seeking to reach, mobilize, and impact? What does success mean to the impacted communities at the center of your work?