i’m kirk cheyfitz. I’ve spent decades WORKING WITH PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD TO pioneer NEW FORMS OF AUDIENCE RESEARCH, narrative strategy, storytelling, AND ADVANCED TOOLS FOR DOING THIS WORK. MY FIRST CLIENTS WERE MULTINATIONAL corporate brands. AFTER I SOLD MY AGENCY IN 2016, I WORKED exclusively for progressive causes and candidates committed TO MAKING PEOPLE’S LIVES BETTER.
My current work is developing, testing and perfecting new AI tools to perform audience research, identify and set communications strategy, and create persuasive stories. My colleagues and I also produce AI-animated short films and build chatbots, each equipped with a unique persona that is trained and instructed to perform specific communications tasks with specific audiences.
The tools are new and sophisticated. The goals vary from selling products to advancing ideas. The fundamental job remains the same: We engage people emotionally to make the truth sound true — an increasingly difficult task in this age of disinformation and disbelief.
I’ve been doing this work since the late 1990s — creating narrative strategy and helping tell the stories that persuade people to take action by engaging them at a deep, emotional level. I help to create victories, small and large, that drive progressive change. I also continue to write, publish, learn and teach about politics, journalism, narrative change-making, and the uses of storytelling (“narrative persuasion”) to create a better world.
You can contact me by email. And if (for some reason) a job-by-job review of my life sounds interesting, I’m on LinkedIn.
I am focused these days on advancing the practice of narrative work, particularly using AI — to build and codify an artistically rich and scientifically rigorous discipline that harnesses the persuasive power of narrative as fully as possible to achieve corporate goals and create positive social change.
My most recent article, Why The Brain Needs Stories, co-written with my colleague Liz Manne, lays out recent advances in neuroscience that explain how the brain uses stories to change our beliefs and behavior. Another recent article explores why and how collaboration among academic theorists and practical narrative workers is one path to building a discipline that wields narrative persuasion with precision and greater effectiveness.
My recent work for clients includes narrative strategy for a major research project commissioned by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to discover and test how storytelling can support dismantling structural racism in U.S. healthcare systems. Another was a strategic assignment for the Nuclear Threat Initiative to create a core narrative to increase activism for worldwide nuclear disarmament. This project advanced narrative strategy across the board by documenting how stories of the future are a key element of narrative persuasion for social change.
In 2020, I co-authored “The Storytellers’ Guide to Changing Our World.” Cultural organizer Erin Potts and I wrote it for Culture Surge, a national women-of-color-led coalition of storytellers, artists, organizers and researchers. We’ve now completed an update and expansion — The Storytellers’ Guide 2.0, — accompanied by the new “Field Companion,” a step-by-step description of how to create, produce, and distribute impact storytelling campaigns. The original guide was widely influential and played a foundational role in the creation of materials for the 2020 election cycle.
I co-wrote The Science of Winning with Stories with Gretchen Barton, a leader in innovative audience and behavioral research, and James Forr, a leading narrative researcher.
I headed up narrative for Story at Scale, a national narrative research project to advance gender justice, and for the Midwest Culture Lab, a national project of the Alliance for Youth Organizing to build civic participation and voting by young people, especially youth of color, particularly in the Midwest. These projects and others helped crystalize a core progressive narrative that has been gaining acceptance and building impact for many organizations across the range of issues.
I was a senior advisor to Tom Steyer and set the core story of his 2020 presidential campaign, focusing on ending the corporate stranglehold on our political system, obtaining recognition for the people’s economic and voting rights, and elevating climate disaster to its necessary place as a critical issue in the 2020 elections.
Stories about politics & political storytelling
