Storytelling in Development Communication [II]
In the previous post, I said that stories are like mirrors through which we see parts of ourselves in others. They are becoming the go-to strategy for development communication professionals especially for the outward-facing image of organisations.
In this short blog, I would like to offer some strategies to storytelling to better position the organisation you serve. While the focus is on development stories, it can be adapted to different environments and contexts.
First things first: What problem is your organisation trying to solve?
From access to health support to skills training and mentorship, education, or short-term disaster relief, a good understanding of this work will shape how you tell the story. You have an opportunity to use the story to make the public aware of the work your organisation is doing.
Secondly, plan to and visit the project or programme locations of your organisations. This is so that you can get acquainted with the very people benefiting from the programmes. For the development communication professional, seeing is believing. Development work is not fictional; you are dealing with real people, real environments, real experiences. Visiting the places and people not only shows them that you see their inherent value, but you also realise that your responsibility is to carry that value forward to the various audiences of the organisation.
The third thing is the only thing left to do: prepare to and tell the story. Your visit, ideally, would have afforded you a chance to observe the environment around you: is there family? What structures do you see? What do they say about the person or people you are here to see? What looks amiss, if at all? Any chance of neighbours? Is what you are seeing matching the organisation’s goals? What does accessibility look like for the people you are visiting? For you? What makes this story so special or different from the next? How can you make the story stand out if it is a story that is not “new”? The fact is that because we are all different, no one story is the same as next.
Telling development stories can be fun and challenging. The stories can be difficult to write – perhaps because they hit so close to home for some of us. Writing on HIV/AIDs, hunger, running from war, surviving rape, children being orphaned when they have barely latched for milk – they are gut-wrenching stories. They are also stories of hope, and this is one of the reasons they are worth telling.
Thumbnail image by Cynthia Ayeza for USAID, Uganda.
