Storytelling
Introduction and Purpose
Storytelling and narrative persuasion use engaging, relatable stories to influence attitudes, values and behaviours. Stories create emotional connections that help people make sense of abstract issues. Narratives are memorable, immersive, and can bypass resistance by drawing people into the experience of characters and events.
In organisational contexts, stories can make biodiversity issues more personal and meaningful, allowing scientific information and examples to be communicated in ways that resonate with employees' everyday lives (Dahlstrom, 2014). Stories can also highlight role models, show achievable actions, and demonstrate the real-world benefits of particular kinds of behaviour.
Storytelling can help employees connect their work, values and daily actions to tangible, positive outcomes for biodiversity. By using narrative, organisations can make environmental goals personal and emotionally resonant, fostering a sense of shared purpose and agency. Examples include:
- Sharing success stories of local biodiversity projects supported by the organisation, such as pollinator gardens, tree planting schemes, or wildlife-friendly landscaping around office sites.
- Showcasing employees’ own experiences, for instance planting trees, maintaining green spaces or observing increased wildlife activity near the workplace, to inspire and motivate peers.
- Inviting community or NGO partners to tell stories about how collaborative biodiversity interventions have improved local ecosystems, habitats or livelihoods.
- Framing biodiversity challenges as collective journeys in which employees play an active role, highlighting how small, consistent actions contribute to a wider organisational and ecological narrative.
Key Features
Timeframe:
- Storytelling initiatives can take from one to six months to develop and implement, depending on the organisation’s size, communication capacity and the number of stories to be collected and shared. They may then continue as an ongoing process, with new stories added over time to sustain engagement and reflection.
Materials Required:
- Platforms for sharing stories such as digital newsletters, intranet pages, team meetings, or short videos, to reach staff across different roles and locations.
- Communication support from writers, facilitators or trained staff champions, who can help frame and edit stories in engaging and accessible ways.
- Visual resources including photographs, videos, or infographics to make biodiversity stories vivid, relatable and emotionally compelling.
- An internal repository or digital archive of biodiversity stories and examples – including examples from within the organisation and from trusted external partners.
- Participant information sheets and consent forms when collecting or publishing personal stories, ensuring that contributors understand how their material will be used and that confidentiality and ethical standards are maintained.
Skills Required:
- Storytelling and communication to craft narratives that resonate with employees’ values, experiences and workplace culture.
- Facilitation to encourage staff to share their own biodiversity experiences in ways that feel safe, inclusive and voluntary.
- Creativity to present stories across multiple formats such as written features, spoken presentations, visual displays or digital media.
- Leadership to demonstrate openness and authenticity by sharing personal experiences with biodiversity and modelling the value of reflection.
- Empathy to create stories that engage emotion and imagination, while maintaining respect and avoiding manipulation or moral pressure.
Potential Impact:
- Stronger awareness, understanding and engagement with biodiversity across the organisation.
- Closer connection between employees’ daily decisions and the organisation’s broader biodiversity mission and values.
- Normalisation of biodiversity-supportive behaviours through stories that make positive actions visible and attainable.
- Development of a workplace culture where biodiversity and care for the environment are seen as integral to organisational identity.
- Improved organisational reputation as a sustainability leader that communicates with authenticity and emotional intelligence.
- Sustained behaviour change supported by narratives that are memorable, meaningful and reinforced over time.
Case Study
Instructions
To implement Storytelling within an organisation, use the following steps as a guide:
- Craft authentic and relatable stories that connect directly to employees’ experiences and workplace context. Narratives should feel genuine and grounded in real actions or observations rather than abstract messages.
- Include meaningful characters and outcomes such as staff, managers, community partners or even representations of wildlife, to illustrate how biodiversity actions create tangible change.
- Show both challenges and successes to enhance credibility and reflection. Acknowledging obstacles makes stories more realistic and demonstrates that progress in biodiversity often involves learning and adaptation.
- Deliver stories through multiple communication channels including intranet pages, newsletters, staff meetings, videos, presentations or live talks, to reach diverse audiences across the organisation.
- Encourage employees to share their own biodiversity stories through creative formats such as short articles, interviews or short clips, helping to build a collective sense of ownership and pride in environmental action.
- Incorporate visuals such as photos, videos, or infographics to make stories more engaging, accessible and emotionally resonant, strengthening their impact across different communication formats.
Rationale:
Storytelling engages emotion, memory and imagination, making it a powerful way to communicate the importance of biodiversity in everyday work. By framing biodiversity through personal and collective experiences, stories help employees connect their own values and actions to wider environmental goals. They transform abstract sustainability targets into relatable human narratives that encourage reflection, empathy and participation.
Benefits:
- Builds empathy by helping employees connect personally with biodiversity goals and the living systems they affect.
- Enhances recall, as people tend to remember stories more easily than facts or statistics.
- Lowers defensiveness because narratives feel like shared experiences rather than instructions, allowing ideas to be received openly.
- Enables biodiversity to be framed in ways that align with employees’ identities, motivations, and workplace culture.
- Encourages diffusion of biodiversity-supportive norms, as employees inspired by stories are more likely to retell them and spark conversations across teams.
Links to Resources
The International Storytelling Centre has helpful resources on how this strategy can be used to tackle social and environmental problems
Levstek et al. (2024) outline the positive impact of immersive Storytelling using Augmented Reality
Dahlstrom’s (2014) paper on how Storytelling can increase engagement is freely available here
