Creating alternative narratives is a journey of continuous iteration. It revolves around reflection, crafting, testing, refining, and adaptation. Narrative creation is an opportunity to ponder your purpose and core values, to develop shared visions that connect and inspire, and to better understand the people that you are trying to reach and mobilize. Remember that you do not have to build a new narrative from square one. Alternative narratives are already out there as a foundation upon which to build, refine, and amplify your message.
Choose what’s right for YOU
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to creating alternative narratives. Narrative creation involves inner reflection, playful creativity, community building, and smart strategizing. Where to strike the balance is highly dependent on who you are and what you are planning to do.
Whether you are a movement activist, creative collective, campaign strategist, or policy-maker/shaper, your approach to narrative creation will be distinct. The Narrative Spices: An invitational guide for flavorful human rights provides a good starting point, offering “ingredients”, reflective prompts, and practical tools to design your own context-specific approach.
Positive visioning
Narratives can inspire by envisioning futures that are worth fighting for. As outlined by hope-based comms in five shifts to better narratives, “people need to believe that there is an alternative to today’s problems.” In an attempt to stress the urgency of our current problems, social change advocates tend to visualize how the world would look like if we fail to act. But how will the world look like if we do act? How will our solutions work? And how can people become part of it? Tapping into radical imagination can help create such shared visions that are grounded in collective values and hope.
Values move and mobilize
Framing your issue around values can mobilize supporters and change the way people think about a certain issue. Even if people are not directly affected by the issue, they can be motivated to take action if they believe that their core values are at stake. This was for example used in the Australian This Mother’s Day video or the Bring Them Home campaign that connect narratives on migration to the importance and love for the family. Which values will resonate with your intended audience is highly dependent on your context and the groups of people that you want to move and mobilize. Some civil society actors ground their narratives into traditional values and culturally specific moral concepts. This is especially helpful in contexts with harmful narratives that brand civil society as “imperialistic” and “foreign agents”. If you aim to influence specific policy-makers , it can be useful to appeal to values that their supporters widely hold. Contrarily, if your goal is to mobilize wide support for your campaign or movement, and you live in contexts that are highly polarized, you might want to avoid values that are typically used by one political spectrum. Instead, you could try to connect “conservative” and “liberal” values within your narrative, as suggested in this article by the Common Cause Foundation.