Being able to talk about your story and personal experiences is an important skill in campaigning. Evidence and facts make campaign messages credible. It’s your lived experiences and stories that bring them to life.
Storytelling spans the course of human history, it’s how we connect with one another. That’s because our brains don’t just listen to stories, they experience them. When you hear a fact, it’s mostly the language-processing areas of the brain that you’re using. When you hear a story, your brain activates areas involved in decision-making, memory formation, emotional processing, and even movement. Storytelling enhances memory, deepens emotional connections, and even influences decision-making.
Think about your experiences in life, everything that makes you who you are… when did you last sit down and write it on a page? How do you decide what to include and what to leave out, and how do you tell your story so that people will connect with it and remember you? With help from experts, we’ve developed this guide and top tips to help you write your story and feel confident sharing it.
Use words like ‘I’ and ‘my’ to make sure your personal voice comes through.
Set the scene by using what you remember like dates, times, places, even the weather to help bring the story to life. Describe how it felt; if you were waiting for an appointment, what was the waiting room like or if you were waiting for a diagnosis, how did it feel waiting for the news?
List your experiences in a timeline first to help you create the structure of your story. You might want to start with a strong image or feeling and return to it at the end.
Save yourself having to edit your story too many times by using dates, e.g. instead of saying last year, say May 2024.
Start with the long version of your story then think about how you might shorten it. If your story is a page long, how might you shorten it for a blog, an email article or just a few quotes?
Remember, stories activate areas in the brain that might feel like your reliving an experience. Sometimes it can bring up some difficult emotions and other times it might feel helpful to put feelings to paper and experience them as just memories. Take your time writing your story, take a break if you need one, and be kind to yourself.
Send us your story and we’ll give you feedback and help you get ready to tell your story. Your story will evolve and change over time so don’t let it gather dust on the shelf, we’re here to help you add to it whenever you need to.
We receive regular requests for stories from across the organisation, so we’ll keep a record of your story to share if it meets the criteria we’re looking for. Don’t worry though, we will always ask for your consent before sharing externally, whether it’s in full or a paragraph, sentence or quote.
