It’s been five months since we officially launched Building Our Narrative Power (BONP) and began working with our cohort of 14 community organisers, campaigners, and activists.
January
We hosted our first residential in January, nurturing a space to build trust, community, and to strengthen group dynamics. Together, we celebrated a shared sense of leadership, renewal and building connections and bridges between our issues and work. In laying these initial foundations, participants opened up and engaged in honest, meaningful discussions, while beginning to take ownership of crucial aspects of the programme – including leading their own sessions. It was a joy to see the non-hierarchical and co-created approach that we envisioned underpinning this journey, being reflected so early on.
You can read more about the residential here.
Since then, a strong spirit of community has continued to flourish. Following the residential, participants set up their own ‘Community of Practice’ calls between BONP sessions, sharing tools, resources, and opportunities with each other. They’ve organised their own in-person meetups and peer-to-peer learning. Through this self-contained space, they’ve created a shared “narrative north star” to guide them through the year.
…you could really tell how invaluable being part of a group was. I think bringing isolated campaigners to the space was a good idea.” – Facilitator
March
In March, two months after the residential, we hosted our first online session. Introducing the concepts of Audience Theory and Landscape Mapping, we explored a variety of tools to help us with developing an audience strategy – a crucial part of narrative change work. Analysing how people tend to approach or engage with particular issues and what these default tendencies might mean for our narrative work, we used the Spectrum of Allies tool (developed by George Lakey of Training for Change), to support participants to think about narrative change within the context of community organising.
Mapping things out this way helped our campaigners to understand the people-dynamics at play within their narrative campaigns. For example, a participant working on trans issues pointed out that health professionals can be active allies in some instances and active opponents in other instances, enabling them to consider a more nuanced approach to their strategy development. Participants discovered that mapping active allies is useful too, as even allies can have strong disagreements on tactics or ideas. Together we established that if you can understand how people think and understand the world, then you can influence the way they think and subsequently how they act.
We also used part of the session to delve into one of the more complex parts of this work: tracking whether people’s mindsets and thinking are shifting and changing. For this we were joined by Tamsyn Hyatt from FrameWorks UK and PIRC’s Trustee Board, who shared their Moving Mindsets project, which tracks UK mindsets to help us to measure the impact of social and narrative change efforts.
We learned that according to 20 years of global research, when people have a wider understanding of the world, in terms of solutions or systems thinking, people tend to make more progressive choices. Together we acknowledged that the vast majority of people don’t have time to become experts in all of the things that matter, so it’s important to think about how we might deploy resources to build their understanding in our efforts to create real change.
May
Our third session in May came around quickly. We were now ready to explore the practical application of narrative strategy: investigating the root causes of the issues we were choosing to focus on, as well as any potential underlying power dynamics. We carved out space to define our vision, values, and solutions. We also explored how to better engage with audiences that exist outside of our base of supporters. Finally, we looked at a few past examples, examining how their narrative strategy was created.
Components of a Strategy
- A clear understanding of the problem
- Your visions, values and solutions
- A defined audience
- A map of the audience context (narrative landscape)
- Overarching goal
- Action plan for meeting your goal (narrative ideas) – and how we’ll know if we are on track…
One of the examples we examined was Framing Climate Justice – a cross-movement project led by PIRC, NEON, and 350.org in 2021. In this example, organisers from large NGOs and smaller grassroots organisations started by identifying key gaps between the movement’s core ideas and their audience’s beliefs. At the time, groups like Extinction Rebellion focused on highlighting the severity of climate change, but research showed that most people already knew this and so it wasn’t as effective of a message as originally assumed.
This exercise revealed that the biggest gaps between the movement’s core ideas and the audience’s beliefs were beliefs about the causes of climate injustice: was it by accident or by design? Does colonialism play a part? Are governments or individuals responsible? By understanding these ‘belief gaps’, campaigners were able to develop an intentional narrative and start to close the gap.
We also welcomed Lucila and Paloma from Intrasentido in Mexico, who walked us through a 2018 campaign aimed at protecting an ancient lake from being damaged by airport construction and preventing the nearby community from being displaced. Although land protectors were often seen or depicted as being disruptive, Intrasentido garnered support by tapping into a shared concern. While they found that the public did not necessarily feel as strong of a connection to the land as they’d hoped, they did have a strong connection with the body of water; a necessary resource that held a sacred and historical significance to which most still felt significantly connected enough to fight for.
Connecting to the deeper values of the community, Intrasentido decided to hone a narrative strategy that positioned the audience in a way they felt would truly resonate. They positioned the community as having a choice and led with a simple message: choose the lake, or choose the airport.
Reflecting on these examples helped participants to contextualise narrative change work in the real world, with the inclusion of guest speakers and peer discussions offering an effective way to ground the learnings. Leading on from this were fruitful discussions about finding unlikely alliances, the type of resistance that campaigners may face, and the impact of positionality and power dynamics.
July
Our latest online session in July was led by Alex and Funmibi from NEON. They introduced the group to the basics of messaging and explored impactful approaches to incorporating race and class into our messaging. We discussed the narrative ingredients of messaging (the words, images, examples, and statistics) and framing (the approach and angle that our story takes), as well as the psychology of our audience. With the latter, we explored how to understand our audience (identifying our base supporters, persuadables, and opposition). We reflected on what it might take to energise our base and turn them into ambassadors for our cause
Moving on, Alex introduced us to some key approaches to naming race and class in our messaging in a way that is empowering, effective, and sensitive to privilege-based power dynamics. We looked at how naming race, class, and gender can help us to demonstrate that unity across race and class is essential for change. It can also neutralise the opposition’s divide and rule tactics. During an exercise where we practised naming race, class, and gender, a beautiful example emerged from one of our participants:
Whether you live in bricks and mortar or live in a caravan, we all still need clean water, fresh air and healthy food to eat.”
We took some time to reflect at the end of the session, thinking about what had energised us and what we thought might be challenging. Participants felt energised by the dynamic space to reflect and apply their knowledge, and they felt lots of excitement about putting these concepts into practice within their work moving forward.
We talked through some of the challenges they might face, such as a lack of funding, insufficient time and resources, concerns about burnout, finding allies, and the challenges of stepping into a leadership role. These challenges really resonated with all of us and we plan to work alongside our participants using co-design, mentorship, and peer learning to address some of them.
It’s been such a joy and privilege to accompany our participants on this learning journey and we’re excited to discover the group insights which will emerge during the next phase.