Strategic storytelling emerged as a popular practice in organizational communication in the mid-2000s when Web 2.0 made stories easy to distribute and self-publish. Stories solved a communications problem — attention — but they created a new problem: meaning.

Narrative communications looks like:

• Personal Storytelling: telling stories about a person’s life that includes events relating to the activities of an organization. The objective of this storytelling is to demonstrate the impact of an organization’s work, or the importance of the issues the organization is working to impact.

• Narrative Change: telling stories about a person’s life that includes events relating to a social issue that the organization is working to impact. The objective of this storytelling is to change public opinion on the social issue, usually to support policy change.

The media landscape changed. Previously, it was difficult to publish or distribute stories at scale — but digital media and Web 2.0 changed that.

Narrative change is mostly practiced by change organizations: nonprofits, social justice and social change organizations.

Narrative communications is similar to Advertising. Video advertisements are small stories about a product or organization; strategic storytelling tells small stories about a person that relates to a product, organization or social issue. As a result, many people working in strategic storytelling came from the advertising sector.

Tension: Interest in narrative in communications has grown with the use of storytelling in communications, however the terminology is used differently. In general, “narrative” in communications is referencing public opinion — which is not the meaning used of narrative in academia. Learn more.