A story follows someone through a sequence of events in which something is at stake and something changes. Storytelling is the craft of choosing and arranging that material: where to begin, which details to keep, when to slow down and what to leave the audience to work out. A list of things that happened in order isn’t yet a story. It becomes one when each event seems to cause or complicate the next, and the reader starts wanting to know what happens.
The word covers a lot of ground in organisations. It can mean a fundraising appeal built around one person, a customer case study, a founder’s account of why a company exists or a report that carries its data through one family’s experience. It’s also used loosely for key messages and positioning, which can support a story without being one. Narrative is a close relative: it often refers to the larger account an organisation or movement tells about itself, while a story is one particular telling within it.
Why it matters for content
Stories carry what abstractions struggle to. A report might say that a new referral process cut waiting times by six weeks; a story that follows one person through those six weeks lets readers understand what the number meant. Particulars help people remember, imagine circumstances unlike their own and see how one thing led to another. Psychologists describe the absorption a good story produces as transportation, and transported readers tend to argue back less. That makes storytelling persuasive, and it’s also why a single vivid case can mislead when it stands in for a pattern it doesn’t represent. Pairing a story with evidence about how typical it is lets each do its own work.
Many of the stories organisations tell belong to someone else. A case study or an appeal depends on a person agreeing to share part of their life, and that agreement covers particular uses rather than every future format. The choices made in the telling matter too: whether the person is the protagonist or a backdrop for the organisation’s good work, which moments of difficulty are shown and whether they’d recognise themselves in the result. Stories also age. Circumstances change, people withdraw consent and an account that was accurate three years ago can misrepresent someone now, so a story collection needs owners and review dates like any other content.
How AI changes the picture
In seconds, a model can write a moving account of someone who never existed. For fiction and clearly labelled illustration, that’s a creative tool. For content that presents stories as testimony, such as case studies, appeals, reviews and patient experiences, an invented person is a fabrication however plausible the details. Much of a told story’s value rests on its having happened to someone who agreed to tell it, and neither the first-hand experience nor the permission can be generated.
With stories that did happen, AI tools can do a great deal. They can read hundreds of interview transcripts, feedback forms or support conversations and surface recurring experiences and striking moments a team would struggle to spot, with references back to the source. They can propose several structures for the same material, point out where a draft starts too early or retell an account from another point of view so a writer can compare. They can adapt a long story into a newsletter excerpt, a script for a short video or an audio version. Each adaptation needs checking against the original and against what the teller agreed to, because compression is where meaning tends to slip. Left to their defaults, models drift towards familiar arcs, tidy redemption and an uplifting final line, so they work best as collaborators whose suggestions get questioned.
When an AI assistant summarises a page, the story is usually the first thing to go: the summary keeps the claim and drops the person. Stating the point plainly alongside a story helps it survive summary, and the story becomes one of the reasons to visit the page rather than read about it. Stories can also become something readers explore. The USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony lets visitors put questions to recorded Holocaust survivors and matches each one to an answer the survivor gave. Its strength is that it retrieves testimony rather than inventing it, which is the standard any conversational version of a true story needs to meet.
Questions people ask
- What’s the difference between a story and a narrative?
They overlap, and people often use them interchangeably. Where a distinction is made, a story is a particular account of events, while a narrative is the broader way events are framed and connected: the account a campaign or organisation keeps returning to. Many stories can serve one narrative, and a narrative can persist without any single story being told in full.
- Does all content need a story?
Plenty of content works better without one. Someone renewing a licence or checking opening times wants the answer, and wrapping it in narrative slows them down. Stories earn their place where understanding, empathy or memory matters: explaining why a service exists, showing what a change means for people or making an argument stick. A sentence or two of story is sometimes enough, without a full arc.
- Can we use AI to write case studies?
It can help draft one from a real interview, with the subject checking the result before publication. Inventing customers or beneficiaries is a different matter. A composite or illustrative character needs labelling as such, and even then readers may feel misled if the format looks like testimony.
- Who should be the hero of an organisation’s story?
Usually not the organisation. Marketing frameworks such as StoryBrand cast the customer as hero and the brand as guide, and many charities have moved away from narratives in which donors rescue passive recipients. A more revealing test is whose experience the story is about, and whether that person would recognise how they’ve been portrayed.
Learn more
- Ira Glass on Storytelling – the This American Life host’s much-shared Current TV interview on building a story from anecdotes and moments of reflection, and on the long gap between a beginner’s taste and their ability.
- Who Owns the Story? Ethical Approaches to Humanitarian Narratives – Poppy Bullen, a content producer at the International Rescue Committee, on consent, power and expiry dates for stories in content libraries, and on moving from client-centred to client-led storytelling.
- Let’s ditch the dangerous idea that life is a story – the philosopher Galen Strawson argues against the widely held view that everyone understands their life as a narrative, a useful counterweight to the assumption that story is how all people make sense of things.