?? Rethinking Development Cooperation Communications: Storytelling Is Only Good When It Stays on the Issues

Storytelling can only achieve its full potential when it continuously returns to the issues that worry the target audience, not just picking them up and then go on about what the organization wants to say.

Development cooperation decision-makers remain obsessed with storytelling as the silver bullet to improve their lagging communications. They believe that the key to better communication is to talk more impactfully about their impact. But this fixation leads to the same fundamental mistake, talking endlessly about themselves and how well they are doing.

The reality of medial impact is the opposite. What captivates people is their own problems, or those of the people they care about. This is a basic principle of communication and marketing that is surprisingly absent in development cooperation storytelling.

Think about storytelling itself. We all know from childhood that not all storytellers are the same. Imagine two grandfathers. One tells stories in a way that captivates you for hours, while the other barely starts before everyone tunes out, because his stories are flat and uninspiring. The difference isn’t just in what they say, but how they say it. Storytelling is an art, and art cannot be entirely reduced to formulas. What makes a story gripping is not just the events but the way the storyteller brings the audience along, making them feel part of the journey.

A key element of engaging storytelling is dramatization and connection—painting a picture of possible harm. Adventure stories often revolve around a looming danger, a personal struggle, or a crisis that escalates to a dramatic climax. Even if the outcome is ultimately positive, harm is always present, shaping the journey and keeping the audience emotionally invested. The best storytellers revisit and reshape this tension continuously, making the listener feel the stakes at every moment.

Consider any business that wants to sell something. It sells a solution to a problem. Imagine walking into a mattress store and telling a good salesperson that you need a new mattress because of back pain. The skilled salesperson doesn’t immediately start listing mattress features. Instead, they engage with you about your problem: How bad is the pain? What kind of discomfort are you experiencing? They validate your experience and show they care. Even when they introduce a mattress as a solution, they don’t just talk about its attributes for ten minutes straight. They circle back to your problem: Does this feel better? Is this addressing your pain? A good salesperson never leaves the station completely; they keep coming back to the issue that matters most to you.

Development cooperation communications doesn’t do this well. The stories acknowledge the problem once, then launch into endless talk about how they solved it in the past. The problem disappears from the conversation, replaced by self-congratulatory, explanatory narratives. But effective storytelling isn’t about telling your own success story—it’s about continuously reconnecting with the audience’s problem. (Which is not the so-called beneficiary but those people who you're telling the story. The target group.)

The most powerful angles of storytelling are harm and fear. Think about how people react to potential danger. When reading medication leaflets, if you see a warning that says one in a million users experienced complications, your brain immediately fixates on that possibility. You suddenly reconsider taking the drug—even though the risk is statistically insignificant. People don't process data well and are wired to focus on harm, especially harm that might affect them or those they care about.

This psychological tendency is underutilized in development cooperation communications. The work of development cooperation is inherently about addressing harm—personal injuries, hunger, poverty, and social injustices. But instead of staying connected to these realities, storytelling often shifts too quickly into the 'how we solved it' phase. There is nothing wrong with reminding audiences about the actual problem. You don’t have to over-dramatize it, but you should keep coming back to it.

However, as Kurt Gray points out on Guy Kawasaki's Remarkable People podcast, while fear and harm are powerful drivers of storytelling, focusing too much on them can risk driving division. If development cooperation wants to tell stories that unite rather than polarize, it should shift its focus to vulnerability. Instead of fixating on how data-driven, scientific, or technically flawless an intervention is, storytelling should highlight the human side—the good people working to address the vulnerabilities of others. Rather than portraying themselves as perfect implementers of rather flawless solutions, development cooperation actors should emphasize the empathy and dedication of those involved, showing that they care about the struggles of real people.

If development cooperation storytelling wants to be more impactful, it needs to stop running away with its own narratives and start grounding them in the problems that matter to people. Stay with the problem, return to it often, acknowledge its depth, the vulnerabilities, and above all, highlight the humanity of those working to address it. That’s what makes storytelling resonate.