Spotlight On Impact Storytelling

The fields of practice that utilize narrative and cultural strategies to advance social change have grown considerably in the past five to seven years. We wrote a new report — Spotlight On Impact Storytelling: Mapping and recommendations for the narrative and cultural strategies ecosystem — to help those of us who do this work to better see and understand ourselves: our roles, our relationships to one another, our strengths, and the opportunities we have to make improvements that will result in greater impact. 

With that growth, we believe now is an opportune time to take stock and offer suggestions for how all of us working together can do more and do better going forward. As inputs, we reviewed nearly 50 other reports and interviewed and consulted with 24 field leaders. In light of what we learned, we offer five key recommendations that we urge the field — practitioners and funders alike — to adopt so that we can see greater impact and accelerated progress towards the creation of a more liberating, just, welcoming, and beautiful world. Specifically, we need:

1. More coordination, production, and distribution of impact storytelling;

2. More training, more talent to address looming leadership and practitioner pipeline challenges;

3. More practical, useful, and affordable research and measurement;

4. More spaces for coordination and collective learning; and 

5. More abundant, more efficient, more strategic funding.

Details on these recommendations — and our mapping and analysis of the current narrative and cultural strategy ecosystem — can be found in the report.

Authors: Erin Potts, Dom Lowell, Liz Manne