Stories for Advocacy toolkit
This toolkit:
- Asks questions to help you develop a Good Strategy to use stories in your advocacy.
- Gives you tips and templates to identify, capture and share Good Stories.
- Was requested by advocates who wanted to use stories for their advocacy. They co-created it online, then tested it in real life and now reflect on how it worked (or didn’t!).
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.
Review Group: "This is our toolkit."

Benson
Kenya

Natalia
Honduras

Brandon
Saint Lucia

Nicole
Kenya

Jisan
Bangladesh

Tendaishe
Zimbabwe

Kamal
Nepal
What is in this toolkit?
This is a toolkit to help you use stories for advocacy. An advocacy strategy without stories will struggle to change how people think and feel, but a story without a strategy is just a nice tale.
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.
Good Strategy
Why?
Why is using stories useful to your advocacy campaign?
Have you heard, or had doubts like these?
“Emotion is for getting money from the public, what decision makers want are hard facts and logical arguments.”
“My advocacy is targeted at my national government – stories are better for the internet, for international audiences.”
“Stories are about individuals, advocacy is about wider policy issues”
“Serious audiences would not take me seriously if I told them a story”
The Review Group had doubts too, but shared how they knew that stories were needed in their advocacy.



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:
QUESTIONS FOR YOU TO ANSWER (Example answers are from Nicole in Kenya)
Why are you doing this in the first place?
Overall objective: to change Kenyan government policy to favour youth-friendly services for girls
Why will this advocacy campaign achieve that objective?
Tactical objective: Get partners and others in Kenya’s SRHR movement to agree on a joint statement calling for a review of the guidelines for youth-friendly services
Why could a story help?
To make that joint statement happen, Nicole wants to strengthen the bonds between the movement and give them an example to aim for.
Good Strategy
Who?
Your advocacy campaign needs people to make change, and so your stories need an audience. Who?
- 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:
QUESTIONS FOR YOU TO ANSWER (Example answers are from Tendaishe in Zimbabwe)
Why are you doing this?
“My Objective: decriminalisation of termination of pregnancy in Zimbabwe, beginning with a parliamentary motion to review the existing Termination of pregnancy act of 1977.”
Who do you need to campaign *at* to achieve your objective?
“A small group of ‘persuadable politicians’ who sit on the Parliamentary Portfolio committees on Justice/Health/Gender committees. They will attend Community Dialogue Events soon.”
Who do you need to campaign *with* to influence that audience?
“To pressure the ‘persuadable politicians’ we also need ‘young women champions’: women who have not expressed a strong opinion on the issue yet, but who are motivated to attend those Community Dialogues. We also need them to later participate in public hearings if the motion is passed in parliament.”



Good Strategy
What?
The moral of a story is the lesson we learn from stories. Morals from stories have a powerful effect on our attitudes and behaviours.
(Note: this is different from the meaning of the word ‘morals’: “a personal value or ethical belief in what is right or wrong”)

Now you know your objective (‘Why?’) and audience (‘Who?’) you can decide what moral your story needs.
QUESTIONS FOR YOU TO ANSWER (example answers from Tendaishe in Zimbabwe)
What stops your audience supporting your objective?
“My ‘persuadable politicians’, do not think it is a big issue (because of lack of data) or that it is their responsibility to legislate”
What are the myths your story needs to challenge?
“The myth that ‘abortion is already available legally’ (in practice legal abortion is inaccessible for many)”
What could ‘the opposition’ attack your story with?
“Similar stories about child sex work have recently been attacked for being ‘falsified’ to ‘appeal to donors’ because they were anonymous.”
...so my morals (or messages) are:
1) “Unsafe abortions are ruining lives now because of ineffective policy, so it is an urgent matter for parliament to tackle”
2) “Legal abortions are out of reach for many Zimbabweans”
3) “Unwanted pregnancies have wider impacts on women’s lives”


Good Strategy
Where?
Where is the ‘battleground’ for your advocacy?
Where can you reach your audience physically?
Where do they get information they trust from?


Good Stories
Identify: What is a story?
What is a story? If you use facts and case studies in your advocacy, isn’t that enough?
[by Rescue:Freedom]

Good Stories
Identify: What is YOUR story?
How can you tell a good story? Many of the most famous (fictional) stories follow a similar pattern: “the Hero’s Journey”, which this video explains. You could use “the Hero’s Journey” to give you ideas of how to tell your (real) stories.


Good Stories
Capture: Your List
Use your ‘key messages’ (from ‘What?’) and your storyboard (from ‘Identify’) to create your story capturing to-do list – everything you need to remember to capture to tell a story that will help your strategy.
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.
Story Capturing List (Tendaishe example - Zimbabwe)
Tendaishe's morals (or key messages)...
1) “Unsafe abortions are ruining lives now because of ineffective policy, so it is an urgent matter for parliament to tackle”
2) “Legal abortions are out of reach for many Zimbabweans”
3) “Unwanted pregnancies have wider impacts on women’s lives”
...become Tendaishe's Story Capturing List
We are looking for a woman (ideally 2 or 3) who is willing to speak about her story, and is:
- Between 16-24 years old
- From a peri-urban area
- Had legal justification for abortion (because pregnancy was due to incest or violence, or health reasons)
- Had an abortion outside the legal process because they were not able to meet the three conditions (because they were told they were ineligible, or because they didn’t have time/money, or because of any other reason)

Good Stories
Capture: Interviews & Photos
Now you are with your ‘hero’, how do you interview and photograph them to make their story as strong as possible?
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.

Afterwards:
- Explain how and when they can see how their story will be used
- Take a photo of them.
Good Stories
Review and improve
You have shared a story, but how do you know if it was a good story that helped your advocacy? How do you know if it was worth it? Go back to your strategy and ask yourself the hard questions:
Why
- Did it contribute to achieving objectives?
- Now you look back on it, were they the right objectives?
Who
- How did your priority audience react?
- Did you reach other audiences you had not expected?
- Were they the right audiences?
What
- Did your story emphasise the morals/messages you wanted it to?
- What kind of effect did the morals have on your audience?
Where
- Were you able to get your story seen in the places you wanted to?
- Are there other places you should be taking your story to reach your audience?




Thank you for using this toolkit.
The Review Group and Dance4Life would appreciate your feedback on how it could be better, you can reach us on Facebook, Twitter, and email.
CONTENT Sho Konno, Susan Van Esch, Rachel Walker.
DESIGN BANANAS | creative goodness