Telling others about your story allows individuals to understand your perspective and form a connection with you. It can also create trust between you and your audience. Stories are a powerful advocacy tool. Stories can change people’s hearts and minds.
Stories powerfully influence others’ beliefs and actions. They strengthen advocacy campaigns by grounding policy proposals in real-life examples. Stories humanize information and remind people your proposal is about people, not politics. By combining the facts of your position with relatable stories from your own life, you are better able to bring people to your side and drive them to action.
The more time an advocate spends thinking through their story and how to talk about it, the more effective it will be when the story is shared as part of an event or conversation.
Examples:
- Argument with facts only:
“If the current private property rights are weakened in a way to allow phone companies to use non-fiber methods to upgrade to high-speed broadband, then I will have to quit using electric fences on my own property. That’s just not fair!”
- Argument with a factual story:
“My farm is located along the side of a river that often floods. We have used permanent fencing before, but it would break and get torn down every time the river would flood. Having to continually repair the fence became too much of a cost, and I just didn’t have time to keep fixing the fence while tending to everything else on the farm. Switching to an electric fence helped change all of that. It allows the debris from the river to run under it without breaking wires. If the private property rights get changed and the phone companies are allowed to ask me to change my fencing methods so that they can use non-fiber materials on my property, then I will have to go back to putting more money into a fence that I just can’t afford.”