The Labour of Storytelling: Impact Stories And What They Leave Out

Imagine yourself at the bustling market of Xipamanine in Maputo, Mozambique. There are improvised stalls sprawling on all sides, the sounds of haggling, laughing, shouting. There are mostly women, with tired eyes but powerful voices, drawing you in as they think about how they will feed their families tonight. The market, a place of trade for some and survival for others — but most of all a place of struggle where the future of work is being decided according to the story you choose to tell. Or, at least, that’s what I have learned.

Why storytelling

I have been telling stories for many years, across women’s organisations, social enterprises, and refugee support groups. Throughout this time, I would always hear about the “power of storytelling”.

If you have ever worked for a local NGO or a multilateral institution, you’ve also probably found yourself, at a certain point, trapped in a workshop where a consultant persuasively explains the limits of data and critical thinking, and proceeds to convince you that stories are where the real power struggle is, especially now that storytelling is being hailed as the solution for a nonprofit funding crisis.

I love telling stories. But when I started working in the labour movement, this thing I love, that I had largely considered a creative exercise, suddenly became a very political one.

In 2020, while trying to find my way as a freelancer in Portugal, a series of coincidences led me to join a global alliance created in South Africa to organise some of the world’s most marginalised workers: street vendors. I did not know anything about the informal economy and had never been in an informal market outside Europe. But I knew how to write and edit videos, and so, being the digital media-savvy young professional I was, I rushed to tell stories.

At first, as a committed social activist, I focused on what seemed most revolutionary to me: the process of organising the excluded workers of the world. We needed to understand the individual journeys of the people who made our global alliance what it was. But I was constantly reminded we were part of the labour movement, therefore the focus should be on the collective. After all, the organisation was created along the lines of trade unionism: democratic yet hierarchical, bureaucratic yet firmly membership-based. For such a movement, impact is not measured by individual achievements, but rather on how we advance our rights through organising, advocating, negotiating.

There is an underlying process of curation that leads us to produce a very specific kind of story, one that tends to fit the dominant power structure much more than challenge it.

As such, I interviewed trade union leaders and wrote stories on the process of building organisations from the ground up, about equipping workers with collective bargaining skills, and about women’s leadership in traditional male-dominated contexts. Unfortunately, it soon became clear our audience, from policy makers to allied organisations to news media, was not resonating with these stories as much as I would have liked. Street vendors’ rights are a rather niche topic and, although our members appreciated the stories, we did not seem to be able to break free from our echo chamber, especially when competing with other content that celebrated individual entrepreneurship over collective solidarity. We needed something more — for advocacy, for partnerships, for resource mobilisation. We needed impact stories.

Impact stories (and what they leave out)

Impact stories are evidence-based narratives that focus on how the lives of individuals involved in a project have changed and explain why that is significant for broader social change purposes. In recent years, it has grown as a communication and reporting tool for organisations. For example, a recent report by software company Benevity states that 44% of the nonprofits it surveyed had increased requests for impact stories since 2025.

It makes sense that impact stories have become so prominent. As strategic philanthropy has evolved over the years and encouraged social organisations to be more rigorous about the impact we report and how we communicate about it, impact stories have been identified as a useful tool for understanding how the outcomes of our work translate in individual lives. This is especially true in a social media age saturated with content curated by algorithms, where we are constantly competing for attention. Because impact stories focus on the protagonist and their actions, I have generally found them to be a more empowering approach, contrary to previous communication models that tended to present the people affected as mostly passive victims blessed by charities. And yes, I also agree with communication consultants the world over when they say that people tend to respond better to stories than hard data.

But how do impact stories fit in the labour movement?

I started thinking about this when I produced my first impact story. I was in Mozambique, interviewing a woman street vendor leader. On camera, as we were sitting in front of her house in the outskirts of Maputo, she focused on her trajectory from a street vendor to a trade union leader, how negotiating with authorities helped secure better livelihoods for her and her comrades, including putting her child through university. Off camera, the story was much more complex. It told of power struggles, difficulties in organising fellow vendors, a never-ending process of engaging and re-engaging public officers and, of course, the understanding that many of these changes had been accomplished by the collective work of union members over several years. The result was a much more layered narrative that couldn’t fit into a five-minute video. As I edited and re-edited the footage, I kept thinking: what should I leave out?

Impact stories need protagonists, and protagonists need an arc. But movement-building in democratic organisations is a much slower process that requires the contribution of many, many people; it does not have a beginning, middle and end. We might love the story of a single mum who rose to lead a movement and changed the lives of thousands. We might not find it as tantalising to hear about a worker who signed up for a union, never rose in the ranks, yet was always the one responsible for taking minutes. Or about someone who stood firm during hours of endless discussions to approve a constitution fostering women’s equal participation. Or, perhaps even, the worker who hardly makes it to meetings at all but is always the first to pick up the megaphone and rally others to protest.

All these people contribute to the movement and are part of an ongoing collective struggle and democratic process. However, if we are looking for protagonists, we’ll probably sideline them in the final cut. By doing that, maybe without even noticing, we will shift the meaning of “impact” itself. There is an underlying process of curation that leads us to produce a very specific kind of story, one that tends to fit the dominant power structure much more than challenge it.

Curating impact

Impact stories are produced with specific audiences in mind — that’s why they are strategic. We cannot deny that one of the most common target audiences are donors, whether they are government agencies or philanthropic organisations. Another is policy-makers, the people you need on your side to actually make a difference. What both these audiences generally have in common is they are not as interested in challenging power structures as they are in refining what already exists. In other words, their understanding of “impact” is based on narratives of reformation rather than revolution.

Narratives of reformation do not aim at transforming the social order, but rather at protecting the most vulnerable from its negative effects (e.g. an impoverished market vendor who is able to grow her business and break the poverty cycle). This is markedly different from the narratives of revolution that have historically sustained the labour movement, since these “treat social injury as the effect of dominant economic and political structures that subordinate, impoverish and disenfranchise” individuals and communities (Chouliaraki, 2024, p.23).

We need to start communicating impact on our own terms. That means focusing on achievements that cannot be measured in metrics and shifting our focus to what constitutes the very fabric of movement building.

Advocating for reform instead of revolution is not new for the labour movement. Many trade unions and worker organisations are pragmatic in how they operate. Street vendors are a perfect example of how obtaining licenses to sell or being enrolled in social protection systems can already be transformative for workers, and these are not exactly the kind of achievements that might directly topple the capitalist system.

But the stories that narratives of reformation tend to favour go beyond leaving capitalism and dominant power structures unchallenged — they are often actively promoting them. Scholars of communication for development identified how the field has gradually absorbed what Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello called “the new spirit of capitalism”, where a vocabulary of charisma, individual initiative and empowerment allows capitalism to justify itself as a common good, even when it borrows the language of its critics. These are stories that celebrate individual changemakers and heroic leaders, with a persistent optimistic focus on “entrepreneurial leadership values of drive, vision, and action orientation, which are emphasised over dialogue, consensus, and collective action” (Noske-Turner, 2023, p. 2952).

A challenging context for the labour movement

That might explain why such narratives of reformation are simply not as mobilising, for the vast majority of people, as those of revolution. And that’s a problem because the labour movement really needs new members. Trade unionism has decreased sharply in the last two decades (ILO, 2019). Many workers today, including the 60% who are employed in the informal economy, are not even recognised as such by trade unions. Other kinds of worker organisations have been created to respond to this need for representation. However, not all of them have integrated well into the labour movement, nor have they been able to confront dominant power structures (Ness, 2023), with some even blurring the lines between NGOs and trade unions (Zulfiqar & Khan, 2020). Furthermore, because many of them organise workers with very low incomes, surviving only with membership fees is often not enough. Fundraising and strategic philanthropy have, therefore, become more entwined with labour rights in the last decade, leading to mixed results (Frantz & Fernandes, 2018).

All of this has an impact on how we communicate about the labour movement, especially from the perspective of informal economy workers, as I have found in my own work. Gradually, we run the risk of the main audience of worker organisations, especially ones in the Global South,  shifting from the members they want to mobilise and the authority they want to challenge, to donors they want to build relationships with and policy-makers they want to persuade. Pragmatism comes at a cost, especially when certain types of individual stories become the main tool we use to communicate systemic change.

When a historic democratic movement built on collective power over decades, is weakened and becomes dependent on external funding — and thus obliged to package itself in stories that perpetuate dominant power structures instead of challenging them — how can you rescue any revolutionary potential when you communicate about it?

The stories we need

We cannot underestimate the power of stories for the labour movement. But if we keep following the same script, we risk undermining its potential for systemic change. In an increasingly precarious labour market, where workers are encouraged to see themselves as isolated units that value autonomy over solidarity, we need to start communicating impact on our own terms. That means focusing on achievements that cannot be measured in metrics and shifting our focus to what constitutes the very fabric of movement building. That will not happen if the stories we choose to tell continue to favour individual exceptionalism over collective work, and entrepreneurial drive over dialogue. As writer and researcher Sujatha Fernandes wrote, “if we want different kinds of tropes, subjectivities, storylines and narratives, we need new kinds of organising that is going to open the spaces for those” (Fernandes, 2017, p. 170).

That means we need to rethink the stories we tell.

Professor Lilie Chouliaraki, who has analysed how solidarity has evolved in humanitarian communication, argues that to break free from the narcissism of clicktivism, we need stories that simultaneously encourage our empathy and our judgement. It is not enough to engage with stories of suffering, like the pain and humiliation of a street vendor after being beaten up and chased by the police: we also need stories with a strong moral framework that invites audiences to reflect on why we should act upon such suffering. This “agonistic solidarity”, she writes, should be “explicit about the social values that inspire its call to action and problematises human vulnerability as a question of global injustice, collective responsibility and social change” (Chouliaraki, 2013, p. 196).

If narrative work is going to be taken seriously as a tool to foster systemic change, then it has to be part of organising itself…

What can this look like in practice?

I believe it can look as co-creating stories with the workers themselves, building on the values of the labour movement. Stories that can simultaneously denounce the unequal structures that keep millions of workers in a perpetual underclass, and also show how collective action can challenge these very structures. Stories that show the importance of organising and solidarity, where we can see the protagonist is not a sole changemaker but part of a much larger movement where every single worker has a role to play. Where we show that the future of work cannot be one of freelancers, contractors and entrepreneurs, each one competing for their own success at the expense of another. It should be one of workers standing their ground, together, against the persistent exploitation they suffer, because that is the only way we can see progress for labour rights.

But the stories cannot stand alone — how we create them is equally important. One storytelling workshop does not equip anyone to “tell their own story”. It needs continuous, long-term engagement, drafts that don’t go anywhere, collective experimentation and reflection. It needs proper investment of time and resources. If narrative work is going to be taken seriously as a tool to foster systemic change, then it has to be part of organising itself — it cannot become yet another stream of income for consultants, another excuse to subcontract or to impose this “new spirit of development”.

I now firmly believe the format of impact stories is not the problem. Rather, it is what seemingly counts as “impact” in the narratives we are subtly encouraged to produce when we are asked to deliver reformation instead of revolution.

So, if you ever find yourself in Xipamanine, celebrate the street vendor turned entrepreneur and how that lifted a family out of poverty. But I hope you’ll focus more on the group of vendors in the corner, discussing how they can organise a protest to stop the ongoing police harassment they are facing — and that you’ll learn their names, their faces, and why their struggle matters to all of us.

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