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.
Recently, I co-founded a new organization, The Persuasion Engine, to develop narrative-smart AI tools that can provide new elements to our civic infrastructure. One important goal is to replace the limited and deeply flawed methodologies of public opinion polling with real-time, one-on-one conversations about the outcomes people are seeking for themselves, their families, communities and nation. Such a civic infrastructure could improve our chances of achieving and maintaining a true democracy in which public policy could be based on the needs and dreams of the masses of people instead of the narrow and often dangerous goals of elites.
My work on civic infrastructure for participatory democracy grows out of a long-term focus on engaging 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 constructive action on their own behalf 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 democracy, 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, you can find it 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 positive social change and to repair and unite the fractured views of reality that currently prevent any constructive civic conversation in the United States and around the world. Insight into these ideas can be found in a recent article, “Disconnected by Design,” co-written with Brian Komar.
Another 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 storytelling
