Three Principles of Successful Storytelling

Three principles of effective storytelling to move masses forward to your aim can be summarized as Emotional Hook, Crisitunity and Agency

Storytelling is not about selling your idea or product, it is vital about making people believe in you personally and gain their support for your actions. So this is an amateur description of storytelling, I encourage you to get a professional description of Storytelling from Nick Allardice who is Vice President at Change.org. In this article, I'ld like to share with you the storytelling presentation of Nick he has given at OpenSAP course Enabling Entrepreneurs to Shape a Better World

Principles of Successful Storytelling

In his presentation, Nick states the three principles of a successful storytelling to move the masses.
These main principles are; Emotional Hook, Crisitunity and Agency

Emotional Hook for Storytelling

As Nick tells as about the importance of emotional hook for an effective storytelling, he groups emotions into two broad categories. Emotions that facilitate action that the storyteller should use and emotions that inhibit action which the storyteller should avoid.

Action is facilitated by emotions like urgency, hope, YCMAD (you can make a difference), solidarity, and anger.

Action is inhibited by emotions such as inertia, fear, self-doubt, isolation, and apathy.

Crisitunity

Crisitunity is the use of Crisis and Opportunity motivators in Storytelling to make the crowds take action

In your story, mention crisis about something terrible is about to happen but not to depress them, we need to mobilize people to take action.

So use opportunity to match the crisis. Opportunity means we are on brink of something great for finding a solution to a problem.

As Nick continues he explains these principle with samples from Elon Musk's talk at Tesla Powerwall launch event and Laxmi's story.

Agency

The third common feature of great stories which are successful to mobilize people is agency.
Build an agency in the audience with the help of digital age and tools it provides Agency principle moves the people who believe in you and support you away from being passive consumers of your idea. Invite your audience to have a role in completing the story in an highly connected online world.

There are two ways for this namely Theory of Change and Story of us:

Theory of Change: A cause-and-effect sequence that begins with an action the audience can do and ends with the resolution of the crisis.

Story of us: communicates the values and experiences that a community, organization, campaign or movement shares and what capacity or resources that community of �us� has to accomplish its goals

Niki again supports his ideas with two samples for theory of change and story of us.

If you are interested with what I shared with you about storytelling and principles about a successful storytelling, please listen to the original presentation from Nick he has given at OpenSAP course to his audience.

For who are interested on this storytelling presentation, you can download storytelling presentation here.