The Narrative Ecosystem
People + organizations involved in the study, production and use of strategic narrative texts in the storytelling boom.
Studying Stories
Narrative scholars
Narratologists
“How are these stories different from other stories?”
“How are these stories being used?”
“What is the impact of their use?”
Producing Stories
Communications professionals
Storytelling consultants
“How do we produce better stories?”
“How do we tell stories that make an impact?”
“How do we produce texts ethically?”
People
Academics + Scholars
Practitioners or Communicators
Educators + Trainers
Narratologist: Someone who studies narrative texts.
Narrative researcher: Someone who collects narrative texts (usually oral) and studies them, such as interviewing asylum seekers and analyzing the collected narrative texts.
Storytelling: Someone with expertise in the art of telling stories (for entertainment or professional public speaking).
Strategic Storytelling: Communications professionals who use storytelling as part of their communications strategy.
Teaching communicators to incorporate narrative into their communications strategy.
Teaching communicators or spokespeople to tell stories that are persuasive.
Training communicators to practice ethical storytelling.
Organizations
Universities
Nonprofit funders + think tanks
Nonprofits + social change organizations
Communications agencies
Tech companies
Providing education in narrative theory, narratology and communications.
Sponsoring research projects about — or intersecting with — narrative.
Funding and distributing research to inform more effective strategic storytelling by nonprofits.
Including strategic storytelling in their communications activities.
Employing narrative change as a social change strategy.
Publishing their internal storytelling practices and policies to share expertise among practitioners.
Producing narrative texts for companies and nonprofits, for a fee.
Selling tools to help companies collect, store and manage stories for strategic storytelling.
Narrative Texts
Organizational storytelling or corporate storytelling
Impact storytelling
Personal storytelling
Stories narrated by an organization or corporation. These stories are told as part of the organization’s communications work, as “strategic storytelling”, and can include news articles, social media posts and public speaking events.
Stories about real people, narrated by an organization, that describe the human impact of that organization’s work, for the benefit of that organization. Impact storytelling is a specific subsection of organizational storytelling; organizations that tell impact stories are typically nonprofits or social change organizations.
Stories about — and narrated by — real people, that connect their work to their life story.