Samantha Wilson on Leveraging Storytelling to Connect Organisations to Consumers

Samantha Wilson is the Founder of Witchcraft: a social impact production company that funds nonprofit organisations and social justice activists.

A studying Doctor of Philosophy in Transformative Social Change, Wilson’s passion was ignited by a documentary on animal agriculture. Following a visit to New Delhi, India to study Fair Trade practices, she quit her job as a restaurant manager and launched a sustainable clothing brand, before joining award-winning marketing agency, Candorem.

Sharing her insights on social impact, she earned certification in the publishing industry. Uncovering the inequities of traditional publishing, she founded Witchcraft as a unique and innovative model: flipping book royalties to favor social impact causes.

In addition to her doctoral studies, Samantha holds a Master’s degree in Applied Positive Psychology. She also earned her undergraduate degree in Human Performance in addition to becoming a Certified Nursing Assistant and completing the ACE Personal Training Certificate, while gaining qualifications in coaching, neuro-linguistic programming, and hypnotherapy.

Samantha discusses her wealth of expertise in communicating transformational purpose led movements, and how social entrepreneurs can utilise storytelling to maximise outcomes and catalyse social change.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work in social entrepreneurship and social justice?

[Samantha Wilson] - My silly little story starts in small town Wisconsin in the United States. It was 2010 and I was living in an apartment situated right between a brewery and a cheese factory. I was enjoying a rare day off from my then job as a receptionist in a hair studio when I decided to spend the day vegging out watching Netflix.

For some reason I was really drawn to the documentary Food Inc. I figured that was the perfect documentary to watch on a relaxing day off.

Little did I know that that was the last day I would ever eat meat. Food Inc. documents the horrors of the animal industry and exposes how absolutely devastating is it as an industry. I’d started my day as a typical Wisconsin small town girl and ended up as a vegan. Now, it's been 15 years since I last tasted a farm animal.

Until that point, I had never been radicalised; I found that pathway through veganism. I continued along that pathway and learned about the climate and the intersection of fashion and veganism. From there, I decided to quit my job as a restaurant manager and I bought a ticket to New Delhi.

I studied the fashion industry at a beautiful, ethical cut and sew factory while sleeping in an ashram. Now, looking back, I can’t help but think, “wow, that is such a typical 20-something-year-old white girl thing to do.” I am still so appreciative of the experience and I was able to take the things I’d learnt to speaking events.

After spending some time in marketing and entrepreneurship, I found an opportunity to embrace this radicalised side of myself through Witchcraft. Not actual witchcraft, but helping other people tell their stories and craft their narratives. It’s a female founded and female led business, and everybody that works with me is also female. Witchcraft just felt fitting.

This is where my social entrepreneurship journey as a leader and producer started. Our business objectives are supported through my dissertation work as a PhD student in social entrepreneurship through transformative social change. This work is what eventually led me here, with me getting to speak to you about all things social justice.

As a social impact production company, how does Witchcraft promote social change and what impact is it creating?

Witchcraft exists to address the funding issues that many nonprofits face both here in the United States and throughout the world. As an impact production company, our productions provide awareness, visibility, and funding to non-profits on the front lines of social change. Our campaigns amplify and protect their stories from media silence and censorship.

What's unique about Witchcraft besides our name is we're focused on bridging gaps by studying the relationship between charitable giving and consumer behaviour. We are then innovating solutions that are mutually beneficial for both organisations and consumers. In this case, the consumers are the people being asked for donations.

We create a space where people’s purchases provide funding for critical organisations. Every time you buy a book, the royalties go towards the organisation rather than towards us as a company. Now we're launching this platform allowing people to support in multiple ways, not just through purchasing, but through helping to shape our narratives and stories.

We’re launching a community - or a coven, if you will - where people can take a seat at the production table alongside us and vote on the stories they want to see produced and how those stories are told. Of course, there's more than stories.

There are activities, events, workshops, tools, and more that community members have access to, aiding in supporting their mental and emotional wellbeing as change makers in the world.

This work can be hard, and we have to facilitate it through everyday activism because this isn't everybody's job. Not everybody works solely in the social impact field, but everybody has a responsibility for doing this work.

We try to make that accessible by democratising the production process, which ensures the amplification of diverse stories and perspectives. It also provides a safe space for members to be among like-minded thinkers who want activism to be engaging, joy inducing, and to fit into their lifestyles instead feeling like a burden. We often feel overwhelmed by the idea and taboos of activism in our current sociopolitical climate.

How can social enterprises meaningfully engage, support, or lead transformative social change movements and activism?

There are many ways to answer that question because there are many forms of social enterprises. It's important to make that distinction in order to properly explore how they can lead transformative social change movements or engage with activism.

There's peer-to-peer sharing economy enterprises, which enable resource sharing among individuals to maximise efficiency and reduce waste. There are circular economy enterprises which focus more on reducing waste and creating products or systems that reuse, recycle, or upcycle materials.

There are community development enterprises working to enhance local economies and the communities by reinvesting their profits. There's one-to-one models like Tom Allen's [Impact Boom], for example.

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There are socially responsible retail enterprises, where sustainable chain enterprises or tech for good enterprises can each meaningfully engage with and lead activism by providing transparency in their work, and telling stories that depict the necessity of their work. I think there's a huge disconnect between what enterprises are doing and how it's interpreted by the public.

We have to recognise non-profits are social enterprises too. They have a different status, but they are a social enterprise. I have found in my personal experience with founding executive directors, they don't really consider themselves entrepreneurs.

I think that’s really interesting, but it's also telling; telling of the landscape of charity-forward organisations as an industry. They are social enterprises because they engage in revenue generating activities that fund a program or progress related to a specific social issue.

Then there are places like Witchcraft, a hybrid organisation. While we are not, many hybrid organisations are comprised of a non-profit organisation that operates a for-profit arm, which then provides revenue to allow the organisation to serve its mission. I know you’ve had interviews with many of these founders on this podcast before.

I didn't share this before, but the Impact Boom podcast was one of my foundational introductions to social entrepreneurship, along with a couple of books. 2010 was when I started being interested in social entrepreneurship and there weren’t the amount of resources that there are now. I want to give this podcast some credit for how it's shaped social entrepreneurship.

There are so many different kinds of social enterprises, but they're successful because they recognise money drives the way we experience life. So, money got us here, right?

Elections being funded by billionaires, especially here in the US, capitalism driving the climate crisis, et cetera. The list goes on and on, but social enterprises also recognise money can help guide us out of this mess too. Business for good might be one of our best pathways forward into a world serving each and every person living in this habitat together.

We have to recognise consumers in this process too. Which is why we're seeing such a shift towards conscious consumerism. People using their dollars to vote for the kind of world they want. Even Mother Teresa said it takes a check book to change the world.

Social entrepreneurs are tasked with balancing impact and profit as alternative institutions. Each type of social enterprise serves in a different area of the impact funnel. Some of them are focused on awareness, some on education, and others on direct action.

As a collective, we need to understand where our ideas fit into this funnel, and where we're supporting each other and the audience we serve along the impact journey.

I think the goal for all of us is tangible, measurable change. We can all lead transformative social change through movements by focusing on our place in that funnel and moving the movements forward.

What advice would you give to a social entrepreneur looking to leverage storytelling to communicate impact with their audiences?

I have a lot of insights on this subject because I've made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot of lessons. The starting point is really to know as much as you can as a social entrepreneur. You need to know about the audience you want to engage, so you can speak to them in a way that will land.

There's often a disconnect between the stories underfunded non-profits are telling and how their audiences are receiving them, which are not translating to donation dollars or support.

There's a saying marketers use when they're developing campaigns with their teams. When you speak to everybody, you're speaking to nobody, which means that when you don't tailor your message to a specific audience, your words will not connect with anyone.

Storytelling is no different than marketing in this way and your audience needs to recognise you're talking to them. I also recommend studying the basics of storytelling across all its forms so that you know the best way to distribute your message.

Is it a book, podcast, documentary, or a social media campaign? Study the three-act structure versus the seven-act structure of storytelling. Study The Hero’s Journey by Joseph Campbell and then study critiques to his work.

Follow scholars and writers like Maureen Murdock and Sarah Nicholson, who specifically gave a beautiful feminist approach to the hero's journey through her critiques.

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If there are stories you're looking to tell that are more campaign-centred, then study various historical campaigns created and delivered by activist groups like Black Lives Matter or Greenpeace.

When it comes to editing your message, something I think is really important is engaging in ethical editing. This could be for any kind of storytelling, medium, and even social media posts.

Let's say you're a social entrepreneur who wants to launch a social impact driven publishing house. You have to make sure you have guidelines to follow. This is something that doesn't exist in traditional publishing, which is why it's needed.

There's really no surprise when you learn that publishing as an industry is predominantly white and cis-gendered, and it is driven by commercial data without representation or meaning. Having guidelines for ethical editing, especially in fiction storytelling, would include checking for narratives that reinforce stereotypes.

Consider the 'bury your gays' narrative, where an LGBTQIAS+ supporting character is killed off to advance the story of the heroic hetero character. Narratives like these reinforce the idea people in these marginalised communities exist to support the purpose of a character who comes from a place of privilege. That's not something we want to put out into the world.

This is one of the reasons we're opening our decision-making process to our readers and supporters, because it ensures we're considering the experiences and perspectives of these diverse communities.

I definitely recommend studying the work of people like bell hooks to go deeper into diverse storytelling, and to explore resources related to different storytelling for social impact approaches. Study narrative shaping, culture strategy, and pop culture for social change strategies. There's no shortage of research on storytelling, especially storytelling for social change. Lean on the work of the people who have come before you.

Where do you see key opportunities for social impact organisations to enhance their models and amplify the impact they're creating?

Three things come to mind. The first is know your audience and understand what they're going through right now. The current sociopolitical climate (and the actual climate) is crazy. I'm thinking of this in a time when we're having these fires in Los Angeles that many of my colleagues are affected by and the floods down where I am.

The world is literally on fire at the moment. Understanding what your audience is going through is important, especially as a social impact organisation that relies upon donations.

If you are continuing to tap into the same people and flooding them with messages of guilt, overwhelm, and overburden because you are desperate to continue your funding, they feel and are affected by that. We're doing research on this phenomenon and the decline of charitable giving. The energy we're forming our stories, words, and social media posts with are affecting the people receiving them.

Your audience, even as a nonprofit, does not exist just to serve you. You still have to serve them back. It has to be mutually beneficial and they have to understand why your work is important, how it affects them, and what transformation you’re offering them.

You also need to research the evolving landscape of consumer behaviour. It is changing. Charitable giving is decreasing. Conscious consumerism is rising. Look for opportunities to get into that space and how you can provide a mutually beneficial exchange with your stakeholders.

Study how to leverage media and/or The Media for driving social change. I think that’s important. I started Witchcraft because I had a hunch about charitable giving, and I wanted to test out this potential solution for bringing awareness, visibility, and funding to grassroots non-profits on the front lines of social change.

We produced a non-fiction book about a former chef with a history of drug and alcohol abuse who started a dog rescue for paralysed, differently abled, sick, homeless dogs in Thailand. The idea was to produce this piece of media as tool for generating the awareness and making deep emotional connections with the supporters, and then, of course, to use the royalties of the book to provide funding to the organisation The Man That Rescues Dogs.

We did a case study and found that 97% of people who purchased the book had not donated to the organisation the same year the book was released. Meanwhile, 90 percent of people purchasing had not donated in the past three or more years, if ever.

This, along with some qualitative measurements, showed us people want to support grassroots organisations, social enterprises, and social movements, but they want to do it in a way that's mutually beneficial.

They want to exchange money for inspiration, money for entertainment, for uplifting education, and emotionally engaging experiences. It’s why t-shirts with your logo slapped on it doesn't work. It's not emotionally engaging.

I think that information is useful to both non-profits and emerging social enterprises that have a for-profit arm. You need to know the mental state of your supporters and your potential supporters. They're just as strained, overwhelmed, and overburdened as what the people in the social impact space are feeling.

It's not siloed, their attention is being demanded across every critical issue and every message is being thrown at them at once. Everyone is basically telling them that they are the only people that can be heroes. They are responsible for funding your mission. They're being told this across every sector and social issue, and that’s so paralysing.

We have to find ways to talk to each other differently and to come to mutually beneficial ways to tell our stories and ways to engage with each other so that we can move the needle forward. We need to support each other in this mental health crisis.

Living crisis to crisis like this strains your mental health and that's what we're all going through right now. We have to find ways to meet each other where we are. How do we do that? That's our work as social enterprises and entrepreneurs. That's where key opportunities lie, in figuring out what your audience is feeling and how you can inspire them to help you.

What inspiring projects or initiatives would you like to share creating a social change?

There is a group of older women activists that call themselves The Raging Grannies. They are so amazing; they use humour, satire, wit, and song for social good. Their approach to social change is incredible because it's uplifting and feels really good, but don't let that fool you.

These women in their 70s, 80s, and 90s are protesting. They are marching. They are being arrested still. Caroline, who works with me at Witchcraft, and I went on a journey to visit one of these Raging Grannies groups.

We met with Granny Ruth, who was 93 years old, now 94, and she had a filing cabinet just of her arrest records. All of the times she'd been taken into custody because of her dedication to activism. It's so brilliant what they do. I'm staking my claim on writing their book, but I think everybody should write a book about them because they're so incredible.

It’s amazing as well that there is no governing body. They don't have an official structure with a president and vice president. They don't pay dues. They just happen to pop up organically in different cities across the world and sing for social good.

It's absolutely amazing. There are YouTube videos everywhere of their songs. They are brilliant and I promise you, they are going to leave you feeling so hopeful about the world.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our audience?

For storytellers in the social impact space, anything by adrienne maree brown, especially Pleasure Activism, which is a whole new way to think about and look at activism, and anything by bell hooks.

For storytellers or people that want to learn about storytelling, a book I'm reading right now is the Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall. It's a fascinating read on how the human mind is wired for story.

For social entrepreneurs, there's two books that helped me on my journey of discovering the nuances of social entrepreneurship. One is Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs To Know by David Bornstein and Susan Davis.

The other is by Ian MacMillan and James Thompson called the Social Entrepreneurs Playbook. For nonprofit leaders, consider learning about mutual aid through the work of Dean Spade and dive into the book Uncharitable by Dan Pallotta, which has recently been made into a documentary as well.

That book is actually partly why I chose the name Witchcraft as witchcraft has very deep roots in charity, which the book goes into. It’s quite fascinating.