Storytelling as a Tool to Create Social Impact
As one of the country’s leading social design firms, storytelling is at the center of everything we do. The most impactful way to communicate and engage with a community is through storytelling. Let’s talk about how you and your organization can also use storytelling to create social impact.
Written by Kylan Stephon Hayes
The Concept of Storytelling
Social Design sits at the intersection between art, design, and social policymaking. It is a highly complex and specialized field working specifically for the 3rd sector and those with a bottom line of creating social impact. Art and design combine to create the field of visual communication. We use visual communication to change perspectives and narratives of social issues from the ground up. The best way to introduce a new perspective is to tell it in the form of a story.
Storytelling at the simplest form is about creating an emotional connection between the issue you want to address and the audience who needs to understand it. It’s about building bridges of understanding from a refined perspective designed to create solutions. The issues we work to solve in the 3rd sector are often complex. They aren’t easily understood. Break them down into parts. Communicate how these separate parts work within the big picture of the social issue. Communicate this through the form of a story.
Storytelling to Generate Community Engagement
The 3rd sector seeks to be as practical as possible when creating solutions to social problems. This comes with the benefit of being able to achieve realistic goals with limited resources. The downside is that these solutions (and sometimes problems) are so practical that they don’t generate the community engagement necessary to create long-term impact. The challenge is in the ability to get a community excited and active around the issues and solutions your organization is working to solve, no matter how bland or complex.
Many 3rd sector members seek to use marketing tactics to counterbalance this challenge. Here at Verity, we encourage an alternate option. We encourage a step-back view of the problem you are working to solve. We encourage you to reframe this problem from the perspective of those you wish to engage. Tell the story from their eyes, make your community the main character, and empower them with the knowledge and resources to make change alongside your organization. A storytelling approach will render your audience engaged and empowered to face social injustice at your side, not just in donations.
Image by Elyssa Fahndrich
Social Design to Create Storytelling Strategies
Storytelling is similar to traditional marketing in the sense that it is about communicating a message with an intended call to action. The difference lies in the bottom-line. Traditional marketing is about promoting a product or service for your organization, while social design is about promoting community engagement to create social impact.
Social designers have the specialized skillset allowing them to use design-thinking to reframe and redesign perspectives on social issues. It works specifically for the 3rd sector to be a partner in creating social change.
Send us an email today to schedule your FREE CONSULTATION to learn more about how we can leverage the emerging field of social design to increase your ability to impact social change.
