Narrative Design™ puts story fourth, after objective, audience and emotion

Narrative Design™ is HUMAN's process for making stories that do a job. It runs in a fixed order: name the objective, choose the audience, decide what that audience needs to feel, write the story, and agree how we will know it worked. Story comes fourth on purpose.

Clients often arrive with an idea for a film. Sometimes it is a good idea. We still set it aside for a while, because an idea chosen before the objective tends to serve the people in the room rather than the people the work is meant to move.

What is Narrative Design™?

Narrative Design™ is the objectives-based storytelling method we use across our agency, documentary and civic work. Our About page describes it as a way to build "visual experiences that align purpose with impact, art with strategy, and emotion with action." In practice it comes down to five decisions, made in order:

1. Objectives. What has to change, for whom, and by when?
2. Audience. Who has to see this for that change to happen, and what do they already believe?
3. Emotion. What does that audience need to feel in order to act?
4. Story. Which people, scenes, words and form will produce that feeling honestly?
5. Metrics. What evidence, agreed in advance, will tell us whether it worked?

Readers of our earlier essay "Story Is the Strategy" will remember that it opened with a different question: what world are we inviting people into? The two fit together. That question is the objective stated as a picture. Narrative Design™ then asks us to say, in plain terms, who must walk into that world and what would make them take the step.

Why start with objectives rather than ideas?

Because objectives tell you which ideas to throw away. For LET ME IN, made with Alicia Keys and the We Are Here movement in 2016, the brief set four objectives: make the refugee crisis feel personal and urgent to American audiences, tie the film to World Refugee Day with concrete ways to help, use Keys's platform to reach a mainstream audience, and create a moment that would earn coverage.

You can trace each objective to a choice in the finished film. The first points to its central inversion, in which a Los Angeles family flees violence by crossing the border into Mexico. The second set the date: the film premiered on TIDAL on June 20, 2016, World Refugee Day, alongside Keys's song "Hallelujah", with We Are Here partnering with CARE, Oxfam and War Child.

Audience, emotion, then story

Most organizations have more than one audience, and those audiences rarely need to feel the same thing. When The Nature Conservancy asked us for a brand anthem around its 2030 goals, the brief named donors, policymakers, partners and the public, and set a separate goal of unifying TNC's own global teams. So Together We Find a Way was delivered with cutdowns, a policy version and an internal toolkit as well as the anthem itself. Each deliverable answers to an audience.

Emotion is the step most often skipped, and the one that most often goes wrong. For the World Bank's Partnership for Economic Inclusion, the feeling we set out to avoid was pity. The objectives were written as "dignity over pity", with inclusion framed as investment rather than charity. So an anthem film carried the scale of the program, and a companion observational film in Zambia followed Fitness, a mother, entrepreneur and savings-group member, with her daughter Venus. The emotion we designed for was respect.

Story is the fourth decision. By the time we reach it, the first three have already ruled out most of the films we could have made.

That is why the story step can feel almost obvious when it arrives. For The Exonerated Five, made with the Harris-Walz campaign and released on the night of the September 10, 2024 presidential debate, the objectives were to center lived experience and to make something people would share because of what it said. The audience was voters worn down by a noisy campaign. The emotion was moral clarity, without spectacle. The story followed: five men speaking directly to camera, no music, no graphics, and no candidate named.

How do you measure whether a story worked?

You agree on the evidence before you shoot, and you build the means of collecting it into the release. This is the hardest step, and the field admits it. A 2022 Inside Philanthropy article on "Funding Narrative Change", a report commissioned by the Convergence Partnership, described top-down narrative strategies as difficult to measure, and the report's authors found that most funders expect a narrative shift to take between 10 and 20 years. Doc Society's Impact Field Guide, updated in 2026 after earlier editions in 2014 and 2019, is the most useful public framework we know for planning impact in film.

Our clearest worked example is LIVING, a patient documentary for Bristol Myers Squibb. According to BMS's entry to the 8th Shorty Impact Awards, where the film was a Documentary Short finalist, it premiered internally to more than 30,000 employees during the company's Global Patient Week and earned a 4.2 out of 5 rating. A standing-room-only SXSW screening followed. The campaign's landing page drew 6,082 unique visitors, about 7% of unique visits, along with more than 500 RSVP clicks and over 400 trailer views at a 32% completion rate. Separately, LIVING won the Grand Prize for Best Overall Video at Ragan's 2023 Video, Visual & Virtual Awards.

We will be candid: LIVING is the exception in our archive. Most of our case studies describe impact in qualitative terms, from screenings to feedback to use in policy and fundraising conversations. Step five is where we have the most to improve, and naming the evidence at the start is how we intend to do it.

Questions people ask

How do you build a storytelling strategy?

Start with the change you need, then name the audience who can make it happen and what they need to feel. Only then choose the story, the people and the form. Finish by agreeing in advance what evidence will show whether it worked.

What does a storytelling agency do?

A storytelling agency turns an organization's goals into stories that move specific audiences, and then makes and distributes them. At HUMAN that covers campaign strategy, messaging, documentary and brand films, short-form social content, visual identity and interactive work. The method ties each piece to an objective.

Is Narrative Design™ only for films?

No. The same five decisions shape toolkits, microsites, photography and social assets. For The Nature Conservancy and the World Bank, the work included internal and partner toolkits alongside the films, because staff and regional offices were among the audiences who needed to carry the story.

If your organization has an objective that needs a story, apply to work with HUMAN__agency™.