Getting Started With Narrative Change #9

Planning for impact

We now have all the components of a full narrative strategy:

• Compass: a strong sense of our values, analysis and vision.
• Audience: a clear idea of who we’re hoping to bring with us on this journey of change.
• Map of the narrative landscape: an understanding of dominant narratives and beliefs that influence how our audience thinks about our issue.
• Narrative Goal: a decision about what specific and tangible change we want to make with our narrative interventions.
• Narrative Ideas: our core ‘translated’ story, key messages and/or other framing elements—which we’ve done some initial testing on, and adapted them to what we’ve learnt so far.
• Communications content or key ingredients for your narrative intervention.

Narrative strategy only works when new stories and ways of thinking reach and engage their intended audiences. Far too many wonderful and important stories never get a chance to meet their people. So let’s work out how you’ll share yours.

In this chapter, we plan the path ahead for implementing your communications content or narrative intervention, and explore (meaningful) ways to monitor your impact.

“Narrative change isn’t something that any one organization does in isolation; it generally requires the work of many different actors employing various different strategies toward a shared goal. Different organizations are positioned to make different contributions to narrative change efforts based on their focus, skills, resources, and connections. Thinking about what role you are playing in this space—and how that fits into the grander scheme of things—can help you make a fairer assessment of what change you can expect to see.”—ORS Impact

The path ahead

It’s implementation time: distribute, share, build, grow, go!

So, what are you going to do—with who, and when—to put your narrative strategy into action?

We find it really helpful at this stage to build a rough timeline, mapping out our next steps: organising meet-ups, creative comms design sessions, campaign actions, media work, etc. And in this, we always want to be planning for rest, reflection and learning along the way.

Think about how you could sequence your next steps to maximise your impact. For example, if you’re targeting a corporation or institution with a campaign, you might want to follow a planned escalation so they are under increasing pressure.

Your timeline may need to be adjusted later if you spot new opportunities or decide that things aren’t working the way you hoped. Reality-check your timeline by considering:

• What external events (political, cultural) are happening in this timeframe that might help or hinder our plan? Do we need to adjust for these?
• Are there any potential blocks or curve-balls that we might encounter along the way? If so, what could we do to minimise these?
• Is there space for rest, reflection and learning?

Will it work?!

Once your narrative intervention is out in the world, it’s a good idea to monitor and evaluate the impact in order to know what works and what doesn’t. This is particularly true for bigger campaigns or communications with a broad reach. It will help to define your narrative goal better next time.

Define your impact measures

• Polls, focus groups, interviews
• Crime and reporting statistics, surveys, voting records
• Polls, focus groups, interviews

The first step (as with testing) is to define what success looks like—what sort of changes you’re looking for—and how you’re going to measure these. There are many tools that will allow you to measure reach online, particularly on social media (how many people have engaged with your communication). But it is also helpful to measure change: such as in how your issue is being framed more widely, or in shifting attitudes. Below we outline some examples of the types of things you might be looking for and how you might measure them.

Not sure where to start? We think Brett Davidson’s approach to measuring in concentric circles makes a lot of sense! He suggests that groups “start off by finding ways to measure and assess what is closest to them and their power to influence in the near term, and expand in ever-increasing circles as time goes on and as resources are available”:

1. Closest to us, short timeframe: are our group’s narrative capabilities improving? Have we developed compelling new language, stories, and frames? Have we managed to collaborate with others in the movement on developing these? Have we tested them with our envisaged audience and adapted/changed accordingly?
2. A little further out: Are our collaborators making use of the new language, stories, and frames? Are new voices speaking out on the issue in new ways?
3. Moving further out: Are the new language, stories, frames, and voices being heard, quoted, and repeated? Are they reaching our collective audiences? Can we see any shift in the way others are talking about the issue, and in the nature and amount of media content?
4. Rippling out even further: Is all of this leading to a shift in the public discussion? Are decision- makers starting to talk or respond differently? Is the broader culture changing in any way? Are we seeing changing beliefs and mindsets, people taking action, changing the way they behave?

So, what kinds of impact are you most interested in tracking? And which levels of impact are visible and measurable to you at this point?

Monitor

Monitoring is the act of observing your impact over time.

It generally involves keeping a record of where your framing is being heard and any shifts in framing in these places. If you use social media, there are some really simple tools for keeping an eye on your reach, and you can tweak some of these to see wider impacts. You might also want to try keeping a media journal or similar for your issue.

Monitoring your impact can also allow you—in many media—to troubleshoot as you go. You might see, for instance, that one of the images you’ve used is much more popular than another, and decide to use that one more frequently. Or you might see that the comments provoked by a particular social media post suggest that you may be reinforcing some unhelpful beliefs, and adjust the wording accordingly.

You can check trends on social media using hashtag searches on Twitter or Facebook, or use tools like Keyhole to monitor trends in real time: keyhole.co.

Use tools such as Google Trends to measure change in the usage of terms over time. See platforms such as Better Evaluation for more ideas.

Evaluate, Rinse & Repeat

Evaluation is the act of reflecting on the impact and achievements of your narrative strategy. It’s a critical bit of learning for you and your team in what has changed, and what has worked. It will also enable you to best decide how to act next.

To evaluate your efforts you should gather information about the impacts—particularly from your audience—and assess how well your narrative intervention achieved your goals.

The testing activities we carried out in chapter 7 combined with your impact assessments in this chapter should give you some good insights into how to refine and improve your framing. You should also be able to get a good idea of whether you need to run another campaign or intervention, and if so, what it should look like. You can revisit your purpose with a better understanding of your audience and set new narrative goals, and do the process all over again.

“Sometimes we have to keep planting the seeds and tending the soil, not knowing how long it will take for the plants to grow and bear fruit, or even whether anything will germinate. [We] may need to accept that ultimately only so much is knowable, and this is an inherent part of the sort of emergent strategic work that many narrative change actors are engaged in. What we do know for certain though is that if we don’t do the work, we can’t expect anything to change at all.”—Brett Davidson

Let’s get reflective…

Learning links

If you’ve got 15 minutes:

If you’re keen for more:

Got lots of time? Great:

In our next and final chapter, we’ll take stock of what we’ve learnt together through ‘Getting started with Narrative Change’, and signpost you to further learning, practice and support opportunities. Meanwhile, if you’ve got any questions or feedback you’d like to share, feel free to drop us an email on courses@publicinterest.org.uk.