Storytelling & Narrative Development Roundtable 3/1/22

4:48PM Mar 1, 2022

Speakers:

Valerie Neumark

Sia Magadan

Ian Madrigal

Keywords:

people

story

narrative

audience

folks

share

group

session

target

constituency

land

framing

chat

community

important

thinking

next slide

little mermaid

conflict

new jersey

Welcome welcome. Come on in. Good morning.

We'll be getting started soon. So if you need to grab anything, be it your morning pick me up or a notepad or whatever it is you need to make this session successful. For you. Go ahead and do that now.

As you're coming in as sia said, Please do your intro in the chat. If the chat is not accessible to you, please let us know. And we'll you know turn on your mic and or raise your hand or whatever you need to do to let us know that so that we can make sure that we're repeating things that are happening in the chat. We'll be doing that anyway. But we'll take extra care to do so. Give it another minute or so Val and then we'll get started.

Good. My furry co worker is complaining

all right. Good morning and welcome everyone to storytelling and the narrative development section no worries. So for those of you who did not know you are being recorded. The session is being recorded and everyone will receive an email with the information and the transcript afterwards. Thank you so much for joining us on this fine March morning. We are excited and looking forward to everything that we're going to be sharing with you today. So let's start off with who is rooting

for so those of you who are new to us, rootid is a brand and communication strategy. We also do website development and user experience designs. We do convenings for nonprofit organizations and foundations and we provide spaces for everyone to work collaboratively. Our core promise as an organization is that whether we are partnering with nonprofits, funders or other service providers, we're building and fostering a focus community on the most impacted although we believe that community is critical during any time, I think we can all agree that in the face of current events, collective action is more important than ever before. We have rooted use communications and brand strategy as a vehicle to envision an anti racist, equitable and liberated world we work with organizational leaders do their own self reflection, as it is infused in their communications work across brand print, web and social and we have our values listed here so that you can see them. Thank you so much. Next slide. We are rooted in community and for those of you who need to take a special look, don't forget to stop by our website rooted.com our OT ID is how we spell it. Next slide. So today your co facilitators are myself co Magadan. I'm the director of community engagement for our visually impaired friends. I am a highly chocolate FIDE African woman with a brown fro I also for those of you who can hear him have a co worker who was about seven months old so he may hopefully you know contain himself with a few toys here. If not, then he'll be joining the session as well. We also have our lead facilitator in magical and you can go ahead and introduce yourself. My name is Ian magical I use they them pronouns. I am communication strategist and facilitator at routed I'm also a lead trainer with the Center for story based strategy where a lot of the content for today comes from and for those that are visually impaired I am a white presenting trans masculine person who's working on my first beard, so bear with me.

Hi, everyone. I'm Valerie Neumark, my pronouns are she and they and I'm one of the cofounders of rooted for today I'll mostly be behind the scenes getting everyone coordinated into rooms and spaces. But I am the Director of Strategy and education for rooted I live in the San Francisco East Bay on the stolen lands of the Chaitanya Aloni people and we like to begin events with a land acknowledgement to challenge their ratio of indigenous and native peoples knowledge and practices as part of our commitment to working to dismantle systems of oppression. So thank you all for those who have shared that information in the chat. I can also paste the link if you're not sure of the lands that you are residing. On. And I also encourage everyone to consider if you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, the shumi participating in the shumi land tax. There's also honoring your native honoring native land tax and Albuquerque the Mannahatta fun in New York City and many others around the country where we can support the indigenous and native communities and First Nations whose land that we are residing upon.

Thank you so much. So for those of you who have not already done so and those of you wondering what's going on, we are sharing our name and our organizational pronouns. Also feel free to share where you're coming from. If you are here in the East Bay or if you are across if you're in the Midwest, even if you're not in the United States, go ahead and share that. We're so excited to have you with us here today. Share what brings you here what are you looking to gain and any accessibility needs that you may have? If you have to leave early please note that we do have a survey and we would love to take it because we use your feedback to continuously provide sessions that are timely and that are requested. So please make a note to take the survey link which is a Survey Monkey survey and we will also drop it in the chat that you're leaving early. Please make sure you fill that out and just share with us your thoughts and sentiments. Thank you so much. All right. Next slide.

Okay, so today's agenda, we're going to try to make this a lively, fun and interactive session because this is a great topic. This is a great session. And we are looking forward to seeing how this turns out for all of us. So we're going to start with 10 minutes of welcoming community agreements. Then we're going to go into an intro about storytelling and narrative development. There will be some time for individual writing and reflection. Then there will be a fun time to have focused conversation rooms where you all will be broken into groups to be able to connect with others and share and also received some information. Then we will come back as a whole and do a 20 minute share out with the larger group and then we will close and provide you with additional information and resources at the end zoom etiquette so be aware of your camera angle and let me say this if you are zoomed, fatigued and do not desire to be on camera, please feel free to turn your camera off. We see as long as we see your name and pronouns. We know that you're still with us. Whatever the situation is do what you need to do to make this session and experience successful for you. We ask that you stay fully clothed those of you who are on camera. If you need to move near the window because it's a little too warm. Please do so. Stay fully clothed, but remember no dry cleaning is necessary. Please use your name or organization don't forget to use your pronouns so that we may address you accordingly. And keep your mic on mute. Alright, so the design Justice Network what are we talking about? If you don't already think of yourself as a designer, now is the time to start thinking that way because in this session you will begin to learn about principles and frameworks that will help you to read change or to basically change the way your mind is operating when it comes to messaging and storytelling. So the liberatory design process came from Stanford's School of Design and what happened. What it does is allows us to be intentional about being equity center. It framed the work in a way that allows us to make authentic connections between who we are and who we are designing with. Design justice rethinks design processes centers, people who are normally normally marginalized by design and use this collaborative creative practices to address the deepest challenges our community space, we see the role of the designer as a facilitator rather than an expert. So all together what we're doing is we're calling on each other's lived experiences. No one person is the purveyor of all truths. We can all contribute to this this is why rooted in our fellow event collaborators have designed these roundtable convenings with solution room breakouts as the core driver. As you see above, we believe change will only emerge when we level set and collaborate through a lens that is anti racist and equity focus. And if you want to learn more about the design Justice Network, you can go ahead and type that into your Google search engine. And there are so many resources that will come up. Finally, we have our community agreements with curiosity, open to new ways of doing and thinking sit with discomfort because not everything will always be easy to just ingest, accept and expect non closure. Engage and be present. practice mindful listening as much as you can. Be aware of power dynamics and consider the space you consume. Be willing to share space. Speak from your experience. Please try to assume best intent and acknowledge the impact of your words on others except restraints as they are presented. We invite you to ideate yes and embrace being messy for those of you who are perfectionist, we're going to ask you to try as much as you can to put aside the perfectionism so that you can enjoy this and maybe come away with some new skills, tools and competencies. Be willing to slow down notice and name what is coming up in the room. Take care of yourself. Most importantly, have fun. there's anything else that you feel like we should add, feel free to drop it in the chat and we will include it. And with that, I am going to turn it over to in to begin our session.

Welcome everybody. Thanks for coming to this session on narrative development and storytelling. As I mentioned earlier, I'm a lead trainer with the Center for story based strategy. I cannot recommend their work highly enough. A lot of the content today is going to be pulled from their tools. And they also do custom trainings for organizations on these kinds of issues. To get us started today, I wanted to actually do a quick little checking in the chat about a story, book, movie, Song fairy or fairy tale that impacted you as a child or teenager. Because we're really going to dig in today to the power of storytelling that the ways that stories can stick with us and in ways that facts don't. And so if anyone can share their favorite favorite any type of media really from your formative years of childhood and teeny, and your teens see Little Mermaid

Tales of a fourth grader nothing lord of the rings. Breakfast Club Charlie in the Chocolate Factory Land Before Time I recently re watched that during the pandemic holds up. Hunger Games Star Wars, feeding the beast Charlotte's Web Little Shop of Horrors different world is there a lot of good answers? I'm actually surprised usually it's like almost half Disney movies Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Bazeley Frankweiler books about corduroy. Okay, these are some good ones. I'm crazy. I am happy that you all have a story that is close to your heart and we will be talking about how to how to write our own stories. So if you want to go to the next slide, Val, I'm going to start just with the basic elements of story. Overview. So this might take you back to high school English class. But we look at the different pieces that create the stories when they come together. So of course, every story has to have some sort of conflict. It has to have characters that are centered within the narrative. It usually includes some sort of imagery, and there's often foreshadowing, and then the piece that we really add and dig deeper into with story based strategies, the underlying assumptions. So we'll talk a little bit more about each of these. Conflict of course is what is the story about on the next slide. We have an example of an action that centered on conflict. So of course, when you think about conflict, you think about the backbone of the narrative, what defines the drama, the point of view, and it really makes the story interesting. So you want to think about who or what is your conflict in your organizational narrative between what is at stake? Um, and for example, the the photo that's included on this slide is an action from actually a an artist who replaced a statue of a 17th century British slave trader in Bristol, United Kingdom, with a sculpture that they made of a local Black Lives Matter activist. And so this is one example how conflict between the past and the future white supremacy and racial justice can play out in an action at the organizational level. Um, for imagery, we often say, oh, sorry, characters, getting ahead of myself. characters you want to think about who is in the frame. So who are we acknowledging as actors in this story? And you will often see, you can be talking about one issue, but your opposition thinks there's a certain set of characters and you might think there's a whole other set. So it's thinking about who are the protagonists who are the villains? Who are the victims? Any of those kind of pieces, who is an actor in the story? And also what role are you casting them in? So the examples on here, the first one, there is actually one of my actions, where I showed up at the Google CEOs hearing before Congress and sat behind him dressed as the monopoly man and kind of trolled him. So that is literally me getting a character in the frame. that completely changes the dynamic of the hearing, right. So that's one way to use characters in a powerful way that changes the meaning of everything and also in this case, got a lot more attention on certain issues that I was advocating for. Um, the second example on the right here is actually a, an action from Hakka youth in China. They were placed pictures of protests leaders that were wanted by the military with photos of police officers who ordered killings, and they put them there as international fugitives wanted for crimes against humanity. So of course, they're inverting like, who is the villain who is the victim and the power of like, even having the same characters but switching their roles is very effective. So next one is imagery. And when we think about imagery, we think really about show don't tell.

We can spend a really long time crafting a narrative but we need some sort of visual element to it, even if it's not actually you know, a photo or an illustration but just illustrative language is very important. We don't want to just have facts and figures. We want to have a coherent story that people can picture in their minds. If not see demonstrated with visual elements. So for this example, on the left, we have the Capitol Crawl, which occurred in 1990 when folks were fighting for the Americans with Disabilities Act, and this was a way to show and not tell how inaccessible various elements of public life were so showing that they actually couldn't get into the Capitol Building of the United States because it wasn't accessible to folks with wheelchairs or walkers. Second image on the right, folks might remember this from a few years ago, shortly after Donald Trump got elected, he scrapped plans to put Hillary or Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. And so an artist 3d printed a stamp where folks could stamp Harriet Tubman space on their own $20 bills to demonstrate you know, who has the power in certain situations, how we can kind of take those things back and also just, you know, show it I think just having the image of her face is really powerful to show how easy it would be to make this change. If we had the governmental will um, the next element of story is foreshadowing, and foreshadowing of courses, clues that kind of show us what is going to happen in the future or what might happen. And so you can think about this in terms of, you know, kind of warning people about bad things that could happen but of course, also, I think sometimes it's more powerful to show people a better future that is possible. So this example here is more about warning. This was a light installation in a Scottish coastal town that shows where the future sea level would be because of climate. Change. And so actually being able to visualize what the town would look like, if we don't act on climate is a lot more powerful than say, rattling off facts and figures about what climate change would look like in numbers. The last element of story is probably the newest one, I imagine for folks here. And that's underlying assumptions. And these are really, really key for story based strategy because these are, what you need to challenge in order to change the story and move people to your side of an issue. So underlying assumptions are basically what someone has to believe to accept the story that you're telling as true. And so these are often a lot of like cultural values, you know, shared ideas, biases, any of those kinds of things. So, for example, in these photos, the one on the left is a professor of architecture, who installed bright pink seesaws to allow people to interact over the US Mexico border. So he obviously was trying to show that these borders are completely made up, they aren't actual things that keep us from each other, and we have the power to connect across them. And then of course, you know, the non to childhood kind of under the challenges the assumptions of who we should and shouldn't consider our friends as adults. So here, I think it's really important because he's obviously targeting the assumption that countries are real borders are real that people across borders are different from one another and shouldn't Connect. The second one here is a statue of the famous soldier kissing a nurse as soon as he got out, or as soon as he heard the news of our victory in World War Two.

And so this is often obviously seen as this wonderful moment in American life where people were celebrating the end of war. But in reality, the woman came out several years later and said that that was a forced kiss that she was being assaulted. And she had a terrible experience of it. And so someone, I think just a lone actor took to the statute and sprayed me to on her leg to kind of connect her struggle to the larger me to movement that was growing at the time. And so they're, of course, we're challenging the assumption that this was a celebratory moment that this was a way of showing national unity and pride when actuality it was an assault and a traumatic moment for this woman. Okay, so with that, we're going to have our first little pause. I'll hand it to Sia. All right. Thank you so much in. So throughout this session, and I know many of you may have used these in your own organizations. We invite you to do a look away, which is our 2020 20. So every 20 minutes, look 20 feet away from your screen for 20 seconds. And you're going to do this three times. So let's do this. together to give ourselves a bit of a break.

Hopefully, we didn't go too quickly with r 20. And you are back with us. Alright, so now that we've kind of gone through the basic elements of story, I wanted to try it out together. So let's take one of the stories that resonated with you all from our little checking in the chat and see if we can pull out the conflict characters imagery, foreshadowing underlying assumptions. I'm going to try to pick one that hopefully everyone is generally familiar with, how do we feel? Actually, what how do we feel what the Little Mermaid can be a good example. Okay, great. Let's go with that. So a little mermaid and feel free to participate in the chat as well. What's the central conflict in the Little Mermaid? I think we have a few different elements, right? We have her wanting to be human. That's one conflict. We have the conflict of course between her and her father in that. Yeah, girl who wants to experience the other side. We also of course have the conflict between her and Ursula. I'm trying to think I spent a while since I watched I think those are the main ones patriarchy definitely. I really think her and her soul should team up and take over but you know, um, but yeah, so we can see those kind of central conflicts there. And then as far as characters, we named a lot of them. There's of course also Eric the prince that she falls in love with. There are like Sebastian, her friendly crab and the other people on our ship. Of course her father you also have the characters of like the souls that Ursula has trapped for eternity, if I recall correctly. And then imagery, I wonder what images stick with folks from Little Mermaid. Feel free to pop it up in the chat or come off mute briefly if you'd like.

Images of the souls being trapped.

I was gonna say that's in my head. Now that I said it. The vivid sea life. I also have the image of like, you know, combing her hair with a fork. Under the Sea, her team images of a room of collections. Ursula growing enormous. And you can kind of see the power of imagery in this story too. Because I think the last time I watched it, I was a child. And I really like I have these images in my head still today. I'm alright foreshadowing actually haven't thought a lot about foreshadowing in The Little Mermaid. Um, I suppose one good example of foreshadowing is the beginning song of her, you know, talking about yearning to live in the human world. I'm sure there are other examples. Use of darker music for sure. You know, also Sebastian kind of warning her that things and things on the land are not as good as they seem. I'm sure there's a lot of foreshadowing as well, just with her interactions with Ursula, but I don't remember well enough. But then what about underlying assumptions here? What do we need to believe, to believe that the story is true? And in this case, it's not the Little Mermaid is actually true, and it happened but what do we need to be on? Say, her the mermaid side or Ursula side or her father's side? Yeah, Ariel is good. Ursula is bad humans are evil. I mean, that hard to believe. Daddy Knows Best. Yeah. True. Love prevails. That is a big theme. Crabs are friends. I believe it. It's better to be married to a prince than to live independently. Also, I think right like you can fall in love with someone without them speaking a word. That's a big underlying assumption. Prince Charming Yeah. Yeah. So you see how if you didn't believe those things, if you don't believe those things, you might have trouble like relating to the Little Mermaid. You might have trouble enjoying it. Certainly I think a lot of us might have different experiences watching it as adults than we maybe did as children. You know, having stronger feminist opinions presumably now than before. Good is pretty Yeah, so good is white. So we can see a lot of ways where our underlying assumptions really affect how much we are affected by the story and how much we are moved by the story. So that's really something to keep front center and we'll get into that a little bit more later. Alright, let's move into some core concepts. So this is kind of just the background of what story based strategy is based on. And of course, this roundtable is designed as kind of a general one a one level intro to these ideas, but we will have half day narrative workshops coming up in the next couple months. They'll go deeper and all of these core concepts. We want to think about why humans are such narrative animals and how it kind of affects how we think about things. So if you want to know the next slide, you know, what do we see when we look up at the night sky? Right, we see these separate stars, some are brighter than others. And we've somehow been able to make meaning out of that we've been able to tell stories by literally connecting the dots. So if you go to the next slide, you see, we see these stars and we turn it into the Big Dipper, right? And we tell the stories about how the Big Dipper came to be and what the meaning behind it is. And you'll see this across cultures. This pattern is a constellation across completely different people and civilizations. And of course, there isn't actually a big dipper in the sky, but it's the way that we make meaning out of the random things around us out of the things that don't necessarily have a story attached to them. But we will create one where there's the opportunity to so it really is a great demonstration of how humans are narrative animals. And we will create stories where there are none. And so that's where our power comes in as organizations especially, you know, organizations that are working to advance social justice in some way. We need to be telling our own stories, because otherwise our opposition will step in other people will step in and tell different stories that maybe are damaging.

Our minds are really hard wired to scan for these patterns, we connect dots and make meaning. It's how we process information and retain memories. Just like with the little mermaid example. You can see that like this is something that I watched when I was like eight years old, maybe and it still sticks with me if you tell a story that's powerful enough, if you get people when they're young enough, that can really shape their whole worldview. So we need to be very deliberate. And make sure that we are telling the stories that we want out in the world. All right, so also keep in mind that we all see the world through narrative lenses, especially as adults, we already have pretty clear filters that we see the world through. We bring our own assumptions. biases, experiences, that shape how we receive different messages. So it's really important when you're designing your story for your audience, that you have a deep understanding of where your audience is coming from, what lenses they're using, and what stories they're inclined to think are true. So it's often not really about what facts they may or may not know. It's really about what they do know and what knowledge they're bringing to your narrative when they see it. And so a big part of this is framing. Framing is what we strategically decide to leave in and out of a particular story. So you can think of you know if like Little Mermaid might be completely different story if we didn't include Ursula right. It might be a completely different story if we didn't include any of the sea creatures so framing is really important not even just in terms of characters, but in terms of what what conflicts are we centering what conflicts are we leaving out? You know, we don't learn that much about Eric and his history. Would that change how we view the love story if we knew more about where he came from? I'm in a good example of this is even just visually, if you want to go to the next slide. We can think about framing a location affecting how you see it right here we have the Taj Mahal and on the left, we're just standing right at the base of the lawn looking straight at the Taj Mahal. It looks perfect. You know, no trash to be seen. No. No thing left on manicured it's gorgeous. It has this imposing presence. But if you zoom out and you go, you know a mile or two from the Taj Mahal you actually see that all around that beautiful, perfectly landscaped tourist site and historical site is a lot of garbage and uncared for land, and a lot of poverty. And so it's like Where, where are we? What parts are we seeing are important by what we are including our story. So some more examples of this. Framing is really also about how we describe actions and motives. So of course, the famous the infamous example from Hurricane Katrina that has then reverberated through time looting versus finding right so here are some some photo captions from reporting around Hurricane Katrina on the left, we see a young man walks through chest deep floodwater after looting a grocery store in New Orleans. And then on the right, we have two white people. And the caption instead is to residents way through chest deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store. So the way that the media of course is framing these actions affects how the person who's reading it receives them. Another example of this is what we call places. So

next slide. Please. If we look at the the Trump child separation policy, of course, we had folks on Fox News like Laura Ingraham, downplaying what was happening there by calling the tent cities and detention centers, summer camps. And then on the other side of that we have AOC, calling the migrant detention centers, concentration camps. And so the words we're choosing to use are very important and how we are seeing the story, what values we are bringing to it, and again, what assumptions we're making with Laura Ingraham. You know, her assumptions, I'm sure are that these children belong there. They shouldn't even be treated as well as they are, which is why there's summer camps with AOC it's that this is completely immoral and torturous and wrong. And so concentration camps make sense as a comparison um, Freeman is also how we name things. So again, unfortunately, very common example that we've seen the last several years and several centuries is the way that newspapers report deaths and killings of black people. And so here we see again, 13 year old with replica weapons shot by police in East Baltimore. And then we have refinery 29, which specifically was trying to use more responsible language and says a police officer killed 12 year old Tamir Rice for playing with a toy gun. So we can see the different underlying assumptions and values and we like choices that were made when writing these headlines. Okay, we're gonna take another little pause, give our eyes a break and then we will get into the last piece of the presentation all right

Let's Pause for our 20 20 20. Every 20 minutes, look 20 feet away from your screen for 20 seconds.

so let's get through the rest. Of this content. So the tool that I'm going to have you all focus on mostly today is called cornerstones. And this is really the foundation of story based strategy. So it's always the first tool that we teach. And it's really thinking of your goal of your either campaign or narrative and how it relates to the audience's that you're trying to reach. So we think of it in terms of defining the goal, and then basically moving counterclockwise around this chart that you see here. So we go from goal to target to constituency to audience. And you really want to make sure you're being as specific as possible and defined in each of these categories. Actually, if you want to skip to slides, I'll go into what each of that yeah, there we go. So the goal is, what are we trying to achieve? What is the specific change we're trying to make? That's probably the easiest thing for folks to automatically know based on the work you've been doing. But the audience part gets a little bit trickier because we think about it in terms of Target and Target is who are the decision makers or institutions that can make this desired change happen? So this can often be like elected officials, school boards, corporations, what whoever we're targeting to actually make the decision but we don't want to necessarily confuse the target with the audience where you're trying to reach and I'll get into that, um, the third group is for the second group is constituency and constituency is basically who's our base of support. What specific groups do we share interests with? Or represent so this could be like your donors, your members, the people that you organize? But really, the people kind of think of it as almost the choir that you're, you've been preaching to the folks that you already have, but they're not necessarily going to be the same folks that you were ultimately trying to persuade in this in this context. Now, the third group is the most important for us in crafting a narrative and that's really thinking about who your audience is. And I want to be really specific about the difference between audience target and constituency. So your audience is very specific to your goal, you're going to have a lot of different audiences for different campaigns. And that's by design. So your audience should be who are the people or groups that have influence over your target. So in this case, you know, let's say that we are trying to pass a bill in Congress, right. So our target would be members of Congress that we need to move to our side. Your audience is going to be who are the people that can reach those members. So you know, that could be their donors. That could be their constituents. That could be, you know, an influential special interest. But you really want to just think about the audience as the kind of lever you have to pull to get the change that you want to see. And we really want to drill down and be specific about the audience. You never want your audience to be the general public. Even if you're trying to do a kind of a cultural narrative change. It shouldn't be so broad as the general public, you want to think about who are the groups within the public that would most resonate with your message that would help spread your message best, and that who maybe you can bring into your constituency that isn't already there. So just really drill down into specifics. And I'll I'll walk us through an example as well. So these differences start to make a little more sense. So the example I'm going to use is a campaign that a fellow I was mentoring worked on and it basically is an environmental justice campaign in New Jersey. In New Jersey, they have a lot of trash incinerators.

Can you target an audience ever be the same? I think it can. So for example, if you know, let's go back to the Congress example. If you have personal relationships with members of Congress, then I could also imagine that they would be your audience, you know, you can go and lobby them directly. And then you'd want to craft your narrative to them or, you know, same thing if like, you're lobbying a group of corporations, but you know, all of the, you know, you know, all of their lobbyists or their executives, you can go directly to them. But a lot of times coming from, you know, a smaller organization or nonprofit perspective, we're not going to necessarily have that direct line of communication. So that's why we have the separate ones. Um, so in this example, it was focused on getting incinerators out of the renewable energy portfolio in New Jersey. The ultimate campaign goal might have been to just stop the use of incinerators in general because they're terrible for the environment and they cause a lot of harm to community health. But specifically in New Jersey, incinerators are concerned renewable energy as if they're green, when really they're burning trash and spewing that into the atmosphere. And so the goal was very targeted around that if we want to go to the next slide. You'll see that we kind of drill down into that. And then the target in that case was New Jersey State Legislature, legislators. So very specifically, those are the people who had the power over this specific policy change. And you can imagine that maybe when you're first working on this campaign, you might think, New Jersey, elected officials, you might kind of keep it more general, but when you look deeper, it was specifically the state legislature that had the power to act here. So we wanted to be specific about that. As far as constituency. Again, these are the groups you're kind of representing and working with. So in this case, it was New Jersey communities impacted by incineration. It was other environmental and racial justice organizations that work on similar issues. And then in this case, our audience using the target of New Jersey state legislators. We thought that they were going to be most persuaded by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, these other government groups that kind of had the expertise that they didn't as legislators and then also conservation and sustainability groups. You'll see that you know, we already had environmental and racial justice organizations in our constituency, but we didn't necessarily have that same relationship with environmental organizations. That weren't as concerned about environmental justice for racial justice. And then similarly, New Jersey communities who are not directly impacted by incineration. Folks that you know, maybe are in the wealthier, whiter suburbs that don't get this pollution in their neighborhoods. How can we get them activated on this issue, so that we're not just persuading the legislators that represent, you know, these couple of communities but we're getting the legislators that represent all sorts of communities across New Jersey. That's kind of an example of how it can work. And now for your individual writing and reflection. I'm gonna ask you all to think about cornerstones for your campaigns. Remember, you know, we just barely learned this tool. I don't expect anything to be perfect. It's just kind of a chance to experiment a little bit and try out this new tool. In fact, if you sign up for our half day narrative trainings, we'll go a lot deeper into all of this and sharpen your cornerstones. But for now, you know, take 15 minutes and think about who is your goal, or sorry, what is your goal, who is your target, who's your constituency, and what groups might make up your audience? And remember, just try to be as specific as possible, and what you're trying to achieve and who you're trying to target your narrative to? And then if you have time, you know, if think really deeply about your audience, not just who it is, but who are they like, what are your job, what are their jobs, what are their hopes, their dreams, their biases, what things maybe do you need to think about when you're crafting your narrative to them? What kind of media they consume, what cultural elements resonate, what stories that they grew up with as children and teenagers, that maybe you can pull some values or images or anything from when you're crafting your narrative. So we'll give folks some time to do that. And then we'll get into some small groups to talk about it. Are there any questions real quick about that or about the content? Before we move into the journaling portion?

Great, okay, now, that was a lot of content to throw at you. So yeah, go ahead and take 15 minutes. We'll come back at five after the hour. And then go a little bit deeper.

In his constituency about your current constituency, or who you'd like to be part of your constituency, I would say it's your current constituency. And depending on how relevant it is to your particular campaign goal, I would generally put people that you want to be part of your constituency in your audience.

Same question, can your constituency and audience be the same? So already talked about how audience and target could potentially be the same constituency and audience I think could also be the same. Basically, if you are, you know, let's say you're trying to target a CEO or head of a corporation, and your constituency is workers at that corporation. You might also want those workers to be persuaded to like put pressure on their boss. So then they could be in both categories. It's really just thinking about the function of each one. And I think there's a lot of different scenarios where any of them really could overlap. But you want to make sure that you're putting those people in the categories deliberately rather than kind of assuming that the person you want to target is also your audience or that your constituency is also your audience. Okay, I'm gonna stop talking so y'all can focus. But if you put more questions in the chat, I can respond individually on

Okay, everyone, start making your way back. Please.

So we'll definitely take a moment and do the 2020 20 just to give ourselves a bit of a break.

so next, we are going to be in our focused conversation room, and I'm going to read through the instructions really quickly for those who do not have access. We've also dropped the instructions in the chat. For 25 minutes, we will have focused conversation basically six minutes per person, and with five minutes then you will build your toolbox for a total of 30 minutes for this next session. Each person will have five minutes to discuss reflections on their draft cornerstones and deeper thinking about the audience's they want to reach start by introducing yourself including your name pronouns on whatever accessibility needs you may have when describing your goals and audiences be as specific as possible. We are thinking through these new tools together. If you aren't sure, feel free to ask others for their perspective. And ideas. After everyone has shared us any leftover time to brainstorm together about how to use these tools to sharpen your narratives, and again, if you do have any questions, please do not hesitate to drop them into the chat. So right now we'll begin to move you all into your conversation rooms enjoy. So feel free to let us know if you need any help when you're in there, and we can pop in

All right, I think we are all back.

If anyone needs to take a quick 2020 20 If you didn't already, please do so and give your eyes a little bit of a break. Before we get into our discussion.

Okay

What did what were people chatting about what what do we harvest what sort of themes or ideas popped up? We'll sort of put it out. If anyone would like to turn on their mic and share and we can also do a little bit of call out on some random teams. If if that is useful for everyone as well.

But before I call randomly then does anyone want to share

I'll share my group I had baleen, Keisha and Casey and found a lot of value in that conversation and walked away with the message of just not giving up especially on your audience. Your target audience you may have to go around above sideways however you need to do to really connect with folks that you may not already have in your network. So yeah, that's my takeaway is you know, keep keep reaching out and don't let you know a slow response to kind of prevent you from still engaging with folks.

Thank you anyone else? Oh, thank you. Amani, please. Hi,

my name is Lanie. Our group I'm just reflecting on it. I realized that we were all talking about like different ways to shape our like monetary landscape. And you know, there was a one person in philanthropy and other in banking, and I been working on like this Fiat advocacy within the city of Oakland. So it was just nice to see the like, even though we're in like three different industries. We're all like our common now it is just in a way like changing our relationship with with money. And and making, making it work for the people

Thank you anyone else?

I'll share that I I thoroughly enjoyed the breakout room. I didn't quite hear the question I had to step away. For the 2020 20 but but I just wanted to share that I enjoyed kind of learning from our group. We had some great conversation around the constituency and the in the audience and so it was very helpful just to get the insight between the two as I think sometimes, you know, I get confused and get stuck on on those two. So

thank you. Yeah, the question was just sharing anything that you you gleaned or learned or, you know, that was interesting from your group. So that was perfect. That was exactly the answer. Thank you

Yeah, also if anyone has any questions about the material or things that came up in your group, feel free to ask those as well.

I'd like to share from our group even though I'm the actually the second person from our group. But what was so interesting about our group for me was that one one person in the group, so brandy just shared, she was in, I think, sort of complicated situation where her constituency and her audience it's very easy to model the two. She's speaking to both and that I'm so sorry, I forgot the name of the other person and I can't see you. There's a yes Josephina. This is in a situation where it felt really, really clear for her. Watch what her goal is what her target is. Who she's what she's got to achieve. And so that clarified all of those for those other categories for her. So, I think in our conversation, that that process of clarification was really interesting and good.

I think one interesting thing about the cornerstones too, is there's going to be a cornerstone that you come up with at the beginning and you might need to come back to it and change a few things as you know, your campaign or project progresses. So it's always a tool that we want to think about and see as evolving.

Anyone from porcupines silkworm, or Raven want to share

I can go from from silkworms. So I was in the group with REO. Nicole and Christiana. And I think a couple things came out that were helpful, I think one not overlooking the value of youth partnerships and youth voice and narrative change. That was really helpful. And then we all kind of a few of us. Were a little bit caught up on the how do you parse out when your audience and I may be mixing up the terms when you really are trying to reach the general public? So for me, for example, my issue is increasing access to small dollar mortgages, which requires some changes at FHA. Right. So when we're talking we know that the housing crisis is nationwide and so I forgot who was in the group, but somebody pointed out just being able to parse out even though you you are going to be talking to different groups of people, creating messaging that is at least parsed out and a little bit more targeted based on where you are. So that was helpful.

Thank you.

I'll just say something from the porcupine group. That's what I was in. But Taylor and Angela, and so one of the things that came up, which we unfortunately didn't get to fully discuss was sort of balancing that, you know, when you're trying to reach out to funders versus your constituents or your the people you want to, you know, help with an Angeles example, she's trying to with voting rights. So, you know, how do you fundraise in a way that's think you know, not, you want to represent those communities accurately and, you know, bounce up and unfortunately, we didn't have time to finish that discussions, but it just was something that came up

that's great.

That's a really important point. And, you know, something that we we talked, talk about and work through a lot through some of these sessions. And I just not just in the narrative, framing and strategy workshops that we're going to be hosting in the next few weeks within, but also through our cohort that we do. That's about, like, I think it's going to be about seven sessions, but it's spread out so you have time in between each session. That's going to be in June, and we really kind of like dig into that exact point of like, how do you think about your audiences and how do you segment them and do it from a place that's values based because that's really the piece that sometimes gets muddled or overlooked or, you know, we sometimes will focus more on the donors and what ends up coming from focusing on donors or focusing on sort of like, our white dominant culture aspects versus centering those that are really most impacted by the work that we're doing. And so, spending the time to kind of dig into that deeper and reshape how you're thinking about your organization, how you're segmenting the messages that you're putting out in the world, and then spending a little bit of time testing those messages with your constituents and with your community members. Yeah, and community centric fundraising is it's a great resource. Thank you for sharing that. Because it is so important to be and this goes back to what sia was talking about with the design, justice principles as well, that really thinking about the stories that we're telling and who's being centered in those stories, who's being focused on whose lived experiences are the ones that we're prioritizing, as we're sharing out with our greater communities in whichever way shape or form so I think the last was just Raven, if anyone would like to share from Raven.

I can share like right at the end, we were talking about how how do we envision using this approach practically sort of in our day to day and we weren't able to finish the conversation but, you know, sort of the we all seem to agree that the idea of really clarifying who we're speaking to is really important. And we all seem to find a lot of overlap between our target and our constituencies and our audiences as well. But you know, recognizing like others in other groups have said that, even within a given campaign or an effort, making sure that you're customizing and tailoring the content of the messages that you're sharing to the the unique audiences that you're trying to reach even if you're trying to reach multiple people in order to achieve the same larger goal.

Right. Thank you, Kristen. Any last thoughts or questions? Before we move into our final stuff here? Right, let's do our final look away. Do a little stretching if you need or want to, I always appreciate the moving my body a little bit. We've been sitting a long time

Okay, back to you Ian.

Great well, I want to thank everybody for being so open to this material. It seems like it really landed with a lot of people the way you were talking in your report backs when you feel like the the different categories are making sense even if they're a little bit. You know, a different way of thinking than maybe you're used to about who your audiences are. So I wanted to share the Center for story based strategies toolkit. It has more of the tools here than we got to in this session. It'll, but it has a little rundown of the elements of the story and the cornerstones which we talked about, and then it goes into our other tools. Like battle of the story points of intervention and drama triangles, several of which we'll actually get into in the half day narrative training workshops if folks are interested in those, but please feel free to use the link on the slide here. And Val just put in the chat to get the free toolkit and learn a little more about the work that the Center for Study based strategy does. Thank you.

So as we mentioned, we have a couple extending out this work and going even more deeply into it with Ian and Sia and a little bit myself mostly me just you know, coordinating in the background. But we'll have some half day trainings coming up and you can take them individually or you can take them together. And if you look on our website under Events, you'll be able to either do part one and two together or for teams, you'll see it sort of written out that way, or if you only want one of them. And these ones are all kind of the discounted prices for those who came to today's session. So there's a little bit of that as well. And of course we always have a sliding scale available. If you want to email myself or sia then we're always happy to work it out to make all of these sessions as accessible to everyone as possible. So please keep that in mind is also in Don't be shy. And then our last Oh, no, no. Did it again. So good. I haven't messed it up once today. Okay. So please, please, please take the survey. We have a couple minutes so we purposely leave a few minutes at the end. So that we can hopefully have you all take our survey while it's still fresh in your minds and before you need to go back to the other work and the rest of your day. So please do take a moment to fill out the survey

and finally, closing activity as you are departing today. We thank you so much for spending time with us. Please share into the chat in your next storytelling opportunity.

Thank you all for joining us today. We appreciated your thoughtfulness and your intention. And it's just really nice to hear what everyone's been thinking about and we hope to see you at our next roundtable or in one of our trainings.