Butterfly Lab Narrative Design Toolkit
This step-by-step toolkit will help you get started in thinking about narrative, articulating your narrative strategy, and designing and implementing your narrative projects, whether a messaging campaign, video, art installation, street theatre, deep canvassing, direct action, or mass mobilization project.
Designed for for storytellers, dream weavers, community builders, and those looking to uplift pro social justice narratives, the tools within this toolkit will allow you to analyze the narrative terrain, sharpen your narratives, identify and reach your audience. While based on the immigration movement, these tools can be applied to many more topics or issues.
Storytellers, dream weavers, and community builders, this narrative strategy toolkit was designed for you!
This updated guide will help you get started in thinking about narrative, articulating your narrative strategy, and designing and implementing your narrative projects. Whether you are executing messaging campaigns, social media campaigns, videos, art installations, street theater, deep canvassing, direct actions, or more, these field-tested tools will help!
The tools here will allow you to analyze the narrative terrain, sharpen your narratives, identify and reach your audiences, and choose the most effective forms and platforms to reach those audiences. Although the examples are from the pro-immigrant movement, these tools can be applied to many more topics or issues.
We recommend moving through the process and resources as outlined in the toolkit. For easy download, you can also access the stand-alone worksheets included in the toolkit below:
- The Narrative Design Star
- Narrative Pyramid Tool: helps you shape, refine, and align your narrative strategy
- Audience Worksheet: helps you get as specific as possible about your audiences
- Goals Worksheet: helps you clarify both your narrative and project goals
- Form Worksheet: helps you brainstorm what form your narrative project will take
- Design Star Strategy Alignment Worksheet (Revised): helps you ensure that all of the elements in your narrative project are aligned
- Narrative Hypothesis & Impact Measurement (New)
- Narrative Hypothesis Worksheet: helps you rationalize and predict the impact you hope your narrative project will have
- Step-by-Step Narrative Project Design Guide (Revised): brings all your design elements together, engage a last round of revisions and iterations, and finalize your project details
- Narrative System and Ecosystem (Revised)
- Narrative System Worksheet: helps you align narratives across an ecosystem