This course is about telling the story of what your Circle does: what a story is, why it matters, and how to tell one that people will remember and pass on.

The stories this course is about have one job: to get the people who see them to do something, whether that is coming to the next meetup, joining a Circle, or starting one. They come from your Circle and the people it works with, told with their involvement and in their own words. Most will be short videos, which are the main subject of this course. However, the same approach works in photos, a thread, or a blog post. You can make art or share your own take on a topic, too, but that is not what this course is for.

Stories are how humans have always passed on what they know. For most of our history, nothing was written down, and what a community knew survived only if it could be memorised and retold.

In the simplest possible structure, a story has four parts:

  • a character
  • a challenge
  • a choice
  • an outcome

There are obviously way more combinations and possibilities. However, a story with at least those four parts works because each part pulls you into the next. Once you empathise with the character, you want to know the challenge, then the choice, then the outcome. By the end, you have felt what happened with them, which is why you can tell it again in your own words without having to memorise anything.

Collective memory still works that way: a fact has to be memorised; a story does not. For example, the Building the Parallel Society course told the story of one greengrocer in Czechoslovakia who stopped putting the regime's sign in his window. People who took the course do not remember the statistics on dissent under communism, but they do remember the shop window.

A story told this way does four things:

  • It is understood directly, because the share of children out of school means nothing to most people, while a girl who stopped going because her family couldn't pay the fees is something they visualise straight away.
  • It is remembered, so a year later, people can still tell you about it, long after specific details have been forgotten.
  • It lets people reach the conclusion themselves, and since nobody told them what to think, they are more likely to act on it.
  • It moves people emotionally, and a sense of urgency, hope, or finding out that they are not alone motivates people to act.

Stories also bring together the people who share them:

  • A person in Lagos and a person in Berlin will almost certainly never meet, but if they tell the same stories about their own struggles, they are on the same side.
  • The anti-globalisation activists of the 2000s never agreed on a programme, yet telling one story about their struggle made them one movement. Years later, the activists who no longer felt part of it had stopped telling that story, or told it with the turning point gone.

What this means for a Circle is that fixing a problem is only part of winning an issue. The road gets repaired, or the bill gets paid, and the people are better off, but the movement only grows from it when there is a story that others can see themselves in and pass on.

The person whom the story follows can be anyone you decide: the steward, those affected by the problem, or someone else in the Circle. What turns it into a story is that at some point, that person chooses to do something about the problem they face. Once the story shows that choice and the challenge that comes with it, other Circles and activists can tell it as part of what the movement is doing. The loop only closes when someone is inspired to join the movement and keep building.

What we are seeing from Circles today is mostly reports. These are useful for tracking the movement’s progress, but a report does not have the same function as a story. This course exists to help you all turn those reports into stories.

The course has seven sections:

  • The story behind the issue: how a story differs from a report, and what to find out before you film your story
  • Choosing the format: five formats that work online, and telling the story without video
  • Interviews and consent: how to ask questions, and how to get explicit consent
  • Filming on a phone: safety, holding the phone, the shots you need, light and sound
  • Editing: planning the edit, length, plain words, captions, music, what to leave out, and tying the story back to Logos
  • The ending and the ask: leaving the problem open, telling people what to do next, and posting
  • Carrying the story on: getting it retold and making the next one better

Sections 1 to 6 are each a short reading and a quiz of five questions with a pass mark of four correct answers, and Section 7 is a reading only. Passing a quiz opens the next section.