3 Ways to Become a Great Storyteller
If you attended the 2017 American Marketing Association Nonprofit Marketing Conference, you would have learned that you already are a storyteller. Yes, you! I had the opportunity to take the worthwhile trip to DC to do some networking, gain perspective on current non-profit market trends and most importantly, rep Wethos.
I learned that the ability to tell stories is within us all, as a “natural” means of communication. This made me wonder, how can we tell our stories of social impact effectively to engage a community on brand?
3 experts whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the AMANP conference share their insights to this big question below. Let’s start with how great storytelling can create a great movement:
1. Great storytelling can create a an even greater movement.
Expert storyteller and Girl Rising’s Chief Creative Officer, Martha Adams, shed light on how the narrative film “Girl Rising” scaled to a huge global campaign and how it’s making meaningful impact for girl’s education and empowerment. The film told the stories of 9 young girls who transform their circumstances in developing countries such as Cambodia, Haiti, Nepal, Afghanistan, Peru, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, and Sierra Leone, after getting access to an elementary and college education.
Martha says the intention with telling the girls’ stories was clear early on: inspire. And once this story was backed with global statistics, they were able to truly communicate the ripple effect of educating girls and creating a better world. Telling the story in this way was critical for people to be inspired and make a change (people took their inspiration to action in their own communities).
“Were trying to tell our own story but also trying to be apart of something bigger. We’re trying to make the world a better place.”
People were able to take their great inspiration from the girls’ stories and share the call to action in their own communities. Martha attributes the success of Girl Rising, beyond it’s story, to the deliberate ways they presented the film to its viewers. Girl Rising was held to the same standard as a big Hollywood movie by using the same high quality cameras and production that a larger audience expects from a feature film. You can have a great story but failing to show it effectively will make the story lose it’s impact, especially when targeting a wide audience.
2. Let your audience be the hero of the story your telling.
Alex Rodriguez of United Way Healthcare in NYC reminds us that we don’t just have consumers of our story, but an audience. Under the storytelling culture, the audience defines your brand. What better way to invite them in by providing them with a story where they are the heroes?
Alex knows once your organization can define who they are, what they own, and what their customers need, that they are better able to inform their audience with stories they can identify with. Your audience can either imagine themselves in the story or working with that person.
Do some digging: What are the struggles of your audience? What are their strengths? What do they need to increase their knowledge?
You can provide immersive experiences to your audience when working to create a culture of sharing and telling experiences. Alex says to invite your audience to play with your story and to play with them because “it’s not bad if you don’t own your brand.” Just don’t forget to evolve with your audience and keep people in the loop!
3. Tell fewer stories and tell them really well.
Make-A-Wish Foundation had to rethink their storytelling. This included who they were telling stories about and how many stories they were pushing. John Vranas, Chief Strategy Officer of Make-A-Wish discussed a new storytelling strategy for an impactful mission — share fewer stories and share better stories. It sounds like a difficult strategy to implement when we live in a world that wants content and lots of it. John agrees it won’t be easy for content marketers and writers to understand, but from their experience taking the reigns of their YouTube account, they have been able to realign the content with their mission by telling fewer stories.
It seems not putting out frequent new stories but spending more time on the details of fewer stories will give more space for those stories to breathe and be impactful.
Make-A-Wish’s lasting impact is to create an experience of achieving the impossible. They want to tell the stories of not only the recipients, but also the wish granters. John says that now the volunteers are the storytellers; they’re the ones creating the experience (a nod to Alex’s tip). It’s worth taking the time to rethink who you’re telling stories about and why.
