Telling your story
- Step 1: Choosing Your Stories
- Step 2: The Beginning is Important: Framing Your Story
- Step 3: Describe the Specific Problem and Goals
- Step 4: Describe the Solution and Solution Implementation
- Step 5: Describe the Outcome
You can adopt a strategy to help your reader categorize each story in the way you intend. Stories that tell how WAP succeeds will showcase some elements of the central plot: the organization’s own formula for effectiveness in providing superior service and jobs. Each will show that WAP intervenes and succeeds using methods that integrate accepted best practices and innovative approaches to providing services and reaching recipients.
Some approaches to highlight:
- Thinking strategically to bring new opportunities and more economic security and stability to the local community through services and job creation by new approaches, technologically advanced services, and community engagement.
- Mobilizing and coordinating a variety of resources for people or neighborhoods through integrating services such as weatherization and Healthy Homes.
- Delivering accessible and well-managed high quality services, including serving people whose aspirations are like most Americans’ aspirations and who are willing to make sacrifices to improve their economic opportunities and their children’s futures.
- Providing positive results not only for individuals and families, but also for the community at large.
Create your narrative in 5 easy steps:
- Choose stories that illustrate frames and focus on the values and goals of the WAP. Be sure they reflect shared basic values, such as supporting working families, supporting the economy, opening new opportunities, and saving energy;
- Begin with a widely-shared framework, a broadly shared concern;
- Continue with a description of the problem itself, in this case energy efficiency and jobs for low income Americans;
- Lay out how WAP and your organization provide a solution; and
- End with a description of the outcome highlighting successes, and, if appropriate, future expectations.
Using this five-step approach will strategically frame your story so it is more likely to connect with the audience in ways that will help them understand what America should be doing to address economic insecurity, energy efficiency, and job training in this country.
