Butterfly Lab Narrative Design Toolkit
Storytellers, dream weavers, and community builders, this narrative strategy toolkit was designed for you!
This guide will help you get started in thinking about narrative, articulating your narrative strategy, and designing and implementing your narrative projects. By narrative project, we mean any activity that advances narrative goals, including messaging campaigns, social media campaigns, videos, art installations, street theater, deep canvassing, direct actions, mass mobilizations, and more. 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 immigration movement, we believe 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:
- 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)
- Narrative System and Ecosystem (an introduction to two important narrative strategy concepts)
- Step-by-Step Narrative Project Design Guide (brings all your design elements together, engage a last round of revisions and iterations, and finalize your project details)
Also available:
Full Report on Phase 1 of the Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategy, including this toolkit