Filippo Trevisan on Storytelling, Technology, and Power
A look at Story Tech: Power, Storytelling, and Social Change Advocacy, his new book with Michael Vaughan and Ariadne Vromen.
In a recent conversation about his new book, Story Tech: Power, Storytelling, and Social Change Advocacy (University of Michigan Press, 2025), Filippo Trevisan made it clear that storytelling isn’t just a messaging tool; it’s a strategic choice that can either replicate or redistribute power.
Trevisan, Associate Dean and Associate Professor at American University’s School of Communication, has spent years studying how people use digital tools to influence public discourse and policymaking. Story Tech, co-authored with Michael Vaughan (London School of Economics) and Ariadne Vromen (University of Glasgow), draws on extensive fieldwork in the United States and Australia to explore how storytelling functions inside today’s advocacy organizations and what happens when personal stories are treated as currency rather than conversation.
“Organizations generally want to do the right thing,” Trevisan explained. “But the problem is that they’re very often still working with a mindset and an understanding of communication that belongs to the broadcast age.” While social media has become a default channel for distribution, the interactive potential of digital storytelling remains underused. This tension between intention and practice was a core finding in the research behind Story Tech. Although many nonprofits are inspired by values of empowerment and equity in their storytelling work, building the digital infrastructure needed to support them effectively has proved more difficult. In interviews, staff often struggled to answer basic storytellers’ questions, like whether their story could remain anonymous or be taken down later. “Sometimes the staff would scramble and go to their supervisor and realize that there was no policy,” Trevisan said. “That was quite surprising.”
The book also uncovered a less visible trend: organizations increasingly use stories to shape internal decisions, not just public messaging. Some story banks were created specifically to inform policy teams or government relations departments. This creates a meaningful listening process, but contributors were rarely informed about these additional uses. “A lot of organizations didn’t update their contributors about what happened to their stories,” Trevisan said. “That kind of transactional approach creates risk, because people – quite rightly – expect feedback. They want to know what happened.”
As the conversation shifted to the current climate, Trevisan noted just how much had changed since the book’s initial research phase; politically, culturally, and technologically. Yes, despite those shifts, one thing has remained clear: crowdsourced and participatory storytelling are here to stay. “Organizations have really started to put their own money into it,” he said, reflecting on how U.S. progressive organizations in particular have begun investing in digital storytelling infrastructure, meaning not only story collection platforms but also the “hidden” technology needed to handle large story archives effectively such as databases and, increasingly, AI tools. “Before, whenever there was a storytelling crowdsourcing project like this, it was a one-off project. Organizations would do it as an ad hoc thing, then forget about it and maybe not look at those stories again.”
That mindset has now changed. In part, Trevisan suggested, because conservative organizations have long understood how emotionally resonant storytelling can be and have used it strategically to shape public narratives. “Progressives are aware of this gap,” he said. “They’ve been trying to catch up and they’ve made some strides.”
Even with progress, areas for improvement remain, particularly around trust and privacy. Many people who considered sharing their story ultimately opted out due to a lack of clarity about what would happen to their information. “One of the top concerns was certainly privacy, information security, and how personal stories are going to be handled,” Trevisan said. While many groups had internal protocols in place, they weren’t always communicated clearly to contributors. “I’m not so sure they were doing a good enough job of explaining that,” he added, “which potentially affected the range of stories they were getting.”
The research revealed that nearly a third of organizations didn’t include any privacy or usage information on their websites, which proved to be a major deterrent for some would-be storytellers, especially those from multiply marginalized backgrounds. “That was an automatic turnoff for some people,” Trevisan said. “But a few organizations were a lot more transparent. That’s the only way to put people at ease.”
To address these gaps, Story Tech introduces the idea of building “digital safe spaces for story sharing,” flexible environments where contributors are treated not just as sources, but as collaborators. That means clear consent processes, consistent follow-up, and digital story practices that reflect the dignity and agency of the people involved.
At its core, Story Tech is a call for advocacy organizations to reimagine storytelling as something more than a branding exercise. As Trevisan put it, “It’s about moving beyond transaction. It’s about creating relationships, ones that are reciprocal, that are transparent, and that actually value the person who is sharing.” The book spotlights several advocacy organizations that have done that, which serve as examples of how to integrate digital technologies and story banks into narrative advocacy in ways that are both strategic and, at the same time, also empowering for individuals and communities.
Story Tech: Power, Storytelling, and Social Change Advocacy is available for purchase here, and in a move that reflects the book’s message of inclusion and accessibility, it’s also offered as a free open-access download. That decision, made possible by the generosity of the publisher, underscores a core theme of the book: that democratizing storytelling starts with who gets access in the first place.