What is public narrative and how to use it in fundraising?

You most probably have heard of storytelling before and are even using it in your narrative to convince donors to support your cause. But have you ever heard of public narrative?

Public narrative is a leadership-development practice developed by Marshall Ganz, a former longtime United Farm Workers organizer and now Harvard professor. It’s an exercise of leadership aimed towards motivating others to join you in action on behalf of a shared purpose.

This article provides a summary of what I learnt in a free online lecture on public narrative given by its creator and available here and gives insights on how this can be a powerful tool to add to your fundraising toolbox.

1- Public narrative, a leadership art

a. Definitions

The first question you may ask yourself is: what is the difference between public narrative and storytelling? The definition of storytelling is “the activity of telling or writing stories” with the aim to communicate. Public narrative is a leadership art with the aim of building grassroots power and motivating actions. Public narrative will activate people by incorporating their stories as well as your own and connecting those stories to clear policy and campaign goals. Public narrative is thus a process and not a script, with a different end goal than storytelling. Leaders thus draw on narrative to inspire action.

b. Leadership through hands, head and heart

To understand public narrative, it is important to consider how we perceive leadership. When we try to accomplish something, we usually get stuck trying to have the perfect plan, but it’s not how the world works. The domain of leadership is uncertainty and we often found ourselves wondering:

Do I have the skills I need? (hands = skills)
Can I use my resources in new ways to achieve my purpose? (head = strategy)
How do I get the courage, hopefulness and how do I inspire the courage and hopefulness to others to actually take the risks involved in dealing with serious challenges? (heart = emotional)

We usually see leadership through hands and head; but not through heart. And this is where Marshall Ganz proposes a new definition of leadership: “Accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose under conditions of uncertainty”.

Leadership thus becomes an interaction of three elements: self (accepting responsibility), others (enabling others) and actions (to achieve shared purpose).

c. Organizing as a form of leadership

Organizing is a particular form of leadership and that’s where we can best understand the strong link between non-profit organizations and the importance of public narrative.

As non-profit leaders, you ask yourselves:

Who are my people?
Who is my community?
What are the problems they face and the change they need ?
How can I work with them to enable them to turn their resources into the power they need to achieve that change?

It’s not a marketing trick but a way of bringing people together so they can stand together; learn, decide, act and win together. That’s what organizing is about and that’s also the core mission of non-profit organizations.

To enable people to turn their resources into the power they need to achieve the change, they need to move from resources to the goal through shared story, shared relationship, shared structure, shared strategy and shared action.

2- Public narrative a story of self, story of us and story of now

Three questions inform the basis of public narrative:

Why me? A story of self communicates who I am – my values, my experience, why I do what I do.
Who are you? A story of us communicates who we are – our shared values, our shared experience, and why we do what we do.
Do I need to do this now? A story of now transforms the present into a moment of challenge, hope and choice.

a. The importance of motivation

We see the world through emotions and values. Our values will lead to emotions when confronted to some situations, and emotions will generate actions. Motivation is equally important as a strategy, but what moves us to act? Why do others care about a particular topic?

Marshall Ganz explains there are action motivators and action inhibitors:

action motivators: urgency, importance, anger, solidarity, self-worth. These are tensions that become a resource for courage and action.
action inhibitors: inertia, apathy, fear, isolation, self-doubt.

The art here is “showing possibilities to prove we are not prisoners of probability”. I.e. how to counter the fear by creating access to hopefulness? Emotions and how to counteract inhibitors are thus key.

b. How to tell a story of self, a story of us, a story of now?

All stories have three elements: a character, a plot and a moral.

A story gets interesting once there is a problem. Why? Because stories have experiential emotional content: we identify with the protagonist and the moral the story touches the heart, not to the head.

This is where the power of narrative lies. It’s that capacity to communicate hope, to create empathy; to enhance a sense of self-worth, to find values that sustain us and communicate those.

Public narrative is about sharing moments to share emotional content:

The story of self is reflecting on moments through which you learnt what you care for and where you get your hope, what are your values and where they come from. Why are you called to do what you are called to do?
The story of us is about how to use shared experience to bring alive values in those whom you hope to call to collective action. In each personal story, there is something other people can relate to, such as a sense of isolation or rejection for instance.
The story of now is how to use narrative to make real an urgent challenge that requires hopeful actions now. We share a goal, opportunities to act and a strategic direction.

An effective story communicates hope, creates empathy and identifies values that connect us.

3- How do I use public narrative for fundraising purposes?

Fundraising is above all about relationships, it’s how do we gather people to make them care about a cause and how to make them want to act and support this cause. It’s a story of self – the story of the organization, its founders and all the people involved in it -; a story of us – how the challenge we are trying to change can also impact other people in the community -; and a story of now – why is it important to act now and we what can we do together.

With that in mind, we can have a whole different approach to drafting content, creating fundraising material, preparing a campaign or addressing our donors. We slowly move away from data and facts to get closer to emotions. We stop telling people to do something, but we show them, we make them experience by sharing moments from our hearts and not from our heads.

Let’s give it a try and see how integrating public narrative in fundraising will influence our relationships with our community. We may very well be surprised by the impact it creates at different levels.

Do you need expertise and support for your organization? Let’s talk about it!

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