Story Tech: Power, Storytelling and Social Change Advocacy by Filippo Trevisan, Michael Vaughan and Ariadne Vromen examines storytelling for advocacy in the digital age. According to Juliana Reimberg, the book is a well-researched, powerful exploration of how digital tools are reshaping advocacy, from enabling greater access and reach to introducing biases and other ethical concerns.

Story Tech: Power, Storytelling and Social Change Advocacy. Filippo Trevisan, Michael Vaughan and Ariadne Vromen. Liverpool University Press. 2025.

Claire Anderson lives with a muscular dystrophy, a condition that affects her mobility and strength. She was diagnosed at 14 years old, and she uses a wheelchair. In a video recorded from her house, for Every Australian Counts, she shares the daily challenges of living with a degenerative condition, such as cooking for herself and needing to fundraise to make her front door accessible. Claire is one example among millions of the power of a story in advocacy campaigns. She featured as part of a two-year campaign for the National Disability Insurance Scheme, which was introduced in Australia in 2013.

This case study is one of many explored in Story Tech: Power, Storytelling and Social Change Advocacy, published in February 2025 by Filippo Trevisan, Michael Vaughan and Ariadne Vromen. In this open-access book, the authors unveil the strategies behind storytelling for advocacy campaigns, discussing how new technologies are being incorporated by organisations, the tensions between these new features and the challenges associated with the power and control of these narratives. Dr Filippo Trevisan is an Associate Professor of Public Communication at American University, Washington, DC; Dr Michel Vaughan is a Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science; and Professor Ariadne Vromen is Head of the Division of Political and International Studies at the University of Glasgow.

Previous research, in the field of communication and collective action, has already systematised existing tools for digital storytelling and illustrated how storytelling has been mobilised in contemporary advocacy campaigns to create large-scale action networks. In this publication, the authors expand ideas from their previous work, exploring not only storytelling in advocacy, but also how new technological infrastructure is changing the way organisations collect, store, analyse and disseminate stories.

Empathy through storytelling

The authors reflect on how storytelling has always been a powerful tool in court cases and legislative changes, gaining more traction among politicians in the mid-2000s to shape their “perceived authenticity’”. But in the digital age, with the expansion of resources to share stories, storytelling has often been seen as a more persuasive instrument than scientific and data-driven evidence, independent of whether it is based on facts (Chapter one). Stories are anchored in contexts and meanings that can raise empathy and connections, attracting even people who were not initially interested in an issue to support it and sometimes advocate for it. When discussing Claire’s story in Chapter five, the authors point out how her private experience became a public act of advocacy because her narrative encourages others to think about what they would do if they were in her shoes and could not prepare their meals or lock the front door on their own.

At the same time, the authors critically discuss how selecting and editing stories strategically for a wider audience is key for mass persuasion campaigns. Analysing the case of the Marriage Equality Campaign in Australia (Chapter six), the authors used the metaphor of a “double-edged sword”: while datafied storytelling was a route to empower voices and promote self-expression, the campaign’s curation left part of the LGBTQ+ community invisible, such as queer parents and trans people. To address such gaps, the book discusses how crowdsourced stories encourage people to share their personal experiences, expanding the voices collected. But, at the same time, the filtering process of these storytelling campaigns can mute voices and reproduce inequalities (Chapters four, six and eight).

In this analysis lies the main contribution of the book. The authors underline how the current technological landscape has expanded the tools available for citizens to easily share personal aspects of their lives, as discussed by other researchers. And it moves a step further, shedding light on the software infrastructure incorporated by advocacy organisations to create a datafication of storytelling and the emergence of a “Story Tech”.

New tools for collecting stories

Through interviews with story bank managers, engineers, and executives at software firms, nonprofit technology consultants, and the review of story banking manuals, Trevisan, Vaughan and Vromen explore how advocacy organisations have been incorporating new tools offered by the market to collect and manage these stories (Chapter three). For instance, the authors discuss how market-solution digital story banks use the “big data logic” to organise and filter stories, increasing the speed at which information is processed. These software infrastructures also enable the storage of visual and audio content, which is an important advantage in comparison to traditional free tools for record-keeping, such as Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets.

The authors emphasise how this emerging infrastructure is fostering (mainly US) advocacy organisations to develop their “in-house storytelling” (Chapter two), having permanent staff members working on creating their own story database, which can be a useful tool in the long term to help them respond faster to the political shifts. Thus, even though crowdsourcing is often linked with a specific event and uses the expertise of outside communication agencies, the book shows that technology stimulates the development of “story banks” in advocacy organisations. This demonstrates the power of stories and how organisations have been incorporating technological infrastructure to constantly and actively collect this data (Chapter three).

Unconscious bias and other risks

When describing the advance of “Story Tech”, the authors also point out the risks associated with the automation of information and the reliance on algorithms developed by external software companies to help organisations search, filter and select stories (Chapter three). They mention how some stories might be privileged by the algorithms, and the risk that unconscious biases limit the stories incorporated in advocacy campaigns.

In this discussion, a research gap that could be explored is the ethics around the datafication of stories, and which data protection framework is linked with this new “Story Tech” infrastructure. For instance, some of the questions that emerged while reading the book were: do storytellers know how their story will be used and for how long it will be stored? Who has access to these stories, and how can they use them? Trevisan, Vaughan and Vromen do not explicitly answering these questions, though they offer a hint at an analytical approach in Chapter four when they indicate that storytellers want to have opportunities to provide inputs in the advocacy storytelling process.

Story Tech: Power, Storytelling and Social Change Advocacy is an engaging and accessible read for anyone interested in advocacy and how stories can be used to pursue political change. Its analysis is anchored in solid academic research, but the writing can be easily understood by a lay audience. This book is a powerful open-access tool for advocacy campaigners, storytellers and organisations who want to comprehend how storytelling has been used in social change advocacy and what new technologies are offering to actors working in this area. Anyone who wants to understand the relevance of storytelling in the current political order and how this strategy has been used to shape the public debate by progressives and conservatives will enjoy reading it.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image: Samsung Memory on Unsplash.

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