Before you start: how can storytelling help you?
Stories are a crucial means to communicate messages about nature conservation. This course helps you to use stories for:
- Getting attention and informing
- Changing behavior for conservation action
You can use stories for many other purposes, just to name a few: building your brand, evaluation, fundraising and strengthening your organizational culture
Storytelling is most effective if you first truly understand your target audiences and have a clear picture of what you want to achieve. Investing time and energy in preparation will pay off in a later stage!
Who are you and why are you here?
Before you start, it’s best to first develop a core story about your organization and about yourself. Why? To be able to influence, people must first know you and trust you.
As Annette Simons explains in her book ‘The Story Factor’, people you first meet are unconsciously and automatically trying to answer the question: Who are you and why are you here? What’s your gain and what could be our loss of this interaction?
Humans are suspicious. We all have negative experiences of somebody trying to take advantage of us. When an unknown person approaches us with a request, the first natural reaction is defensive: What does this person want from me?
Trust is best built with experience. Working together on a shared goal is the perfect way to create faith in each other and in your project.
Sometimes you don’t have the time to build trust based on personal experience. In that case, you can tell a story illustrating your trustworthiness and showcasing the reliability of your organization. You need to initiate a relationship before you develop your communication strategy. You can also see building trust as the first step of your strategy. It is a prerequisite for successful cooperation.
Telling a ‘who am I and why am I here-story’ is far more effective then saying: ‘You can trust me. My organization is trustworthy because of fact number 1, fact number 2 and fact number 3.’ A story will take your audiences along so they experience for themselves what you are trying to say.