Stories for advocacy

The ‘Review Group’ for this toolkit are all young advocates with Right Here Right Now, a global advocacy partnership in pursuit of young people’s Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) – free from stigma, discrimination and violence.

So, this toolkit helps you develop good stories with good strategy – and provides you with real examples of how young advocates put this toolkit into action, and their successes and failures along the way.

Have you heard, or had doubts like these?

The Review Group had doubts too, but shared how they knew that stories were needed in their advocacy.

“Last week I found one policy maker but could only get his attention for 10-15 seconds. I felt I needed to make something small but powerful.”

Jisan

“I’m trying to trigger emotion, strengthen our solidarity, and celebrate the achievements we’ve made so far.”

Nicole

“Sometimes, when we do advocacy we bring all of this data, statistics, reports, international recommendations, etc. but we forget we are not just numbers, but we are humans and what we share is similar experiences regarding any matter. For example, if you speak with a female decision maker, remind her how hard it is to get there just by being a woman and how gender gaps affect her as well and why its important for her to get involved on our agenda.”

Natalia

Why does your advocacy campaign specifically need a story?

Start with the overall objective for your advocacy, and then prioritise a specific objective that stories could help achieve, like Nicole from Kenya:

• 1) Say their name: Audiences are people, not categories.
  If you say your audience is ‘the public’, you are almost saying your audience is ‘everybody’.
  Even saying ‘decision makers’ is not very different from ‘everybody who sounds powerful’.
  Can you think of an individual who represents your priority audience, even if they are not a real person?
• 2) Picture them:
  Who are they to their family, friends, colleagues?
  How do they see themselves?
  What do they currently think about your issue, your campaign?
  If you followed them today, from waking up to going to sleep, how do they get their information?
• 3) Campaigning *at* them or *with* them?
  Have you picked this audience because you want to persuade them to make the change you need? Or do you want them to campaign with you to persuade a different audience?

A story meant for one audience can definitely reach others, but a story that tries to appeal to multiple audience from the beginning may not be clear to any of them.

Struggling to prioritise? Ask yourself who you are campaigning *at* and who you are campaigning *with*. Like Tendaishe from Zimbabwe did:

“I read this story in class. ‘Slow and steady wins the race’ was the moral.”

Jisan

Now you know your objective (‘Why?’) and audience (‘Who?’) you can decide what moral your story needs.

Where is the ‘battleground’ for your advocacy?

Where can you reach your audience physically?

“In Bangladesh we also say that Twitter is not that popular, but youth and even policymakers are active on Facebook – they share personal stories and even do “Live” (livestream video) from events”

Jisan

“Same in Honduras, Twitter is mostly used by government call centers, not people.”

Natalia

[by Rescue:Freedom]

“I liked the video because you could see the struggles she was going through in her expressions, before you succeed you go through the painful things… It’s important to have context when we do videos, to put a face to the story.”

Benson

Remember Tendaishe’s audiences (from ‘Who’) and her morals/messages (from ‘What?’) ? Now she’s going to turn that into a list for her to take with her when she looks for a story.

Interviews

Interviews need good listening and good questions.

Before:

• Ask other people what they find interesting about the story.
• Prepare open questions that could help tell the story you need.
• Prepare a location (private, quiet, and where they feel at home)
• YOU MUST have properly informed consent from anyone featured in the story. They must do it voluntarily, fully understand why and how their story might be shared, and can stop at anytime – more details in the resource on consent below.

During:

• Let them start talking about something general to warm up (for example: “Tell me about [your family]”)
• If you are recording audio or video, pause between questions, and let them repeat their answer if it is too long or they find a better way to express it.
• Allow there to be silence after an answer – they might talk more.

“The tip using the bottle is awesome, it was such an easy way to improvise in the field.”

Nicole

Afterwards:

• Explain how and when they can see how their story will be used
• Take a photo of them.