Get Some Value from Your Stories

Wednesday, May 4. 2005

I have lots of conversations with our nonprofit clients about "stories". They want to know how to get some impact from the program stories that originate in their field work. They have good reason to ask. When you hear a good story about a cause, an event, or a position - you get engaged. And engaging key audiences is a main goal of most issue-focused organizations. And what's more, most organizations have lots of good stories to tell.

In the past, the approaches to leveraging these stories online have not been very exciting. You might even have a "success stories” or "stories from the field" section on your web site today. How much impact are those areas of your site making? How much energy are they creating around your mission? Probably not a whole lot.

Today, we are starting to learn (yes, you would have thought we'd learned it by now), that a big part of what brings energy to things on the Web is their authenticity, their transparency. Users can tell the difference between a "story from the field" that has been run through the communication and legal department, and one that belongs to real a person.

So here's the takeaway: People don't want to hear stories from your organization, they want to hear the stories from your organizations' people. Or even better, from people just like them.

Does this mean you should stop issuing press releases? Of course not. Does it mean you should be less afraid of un-moderated storytelling? Absolutely.

Building from those principles, last week we helped the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (VVAF) launch www.VietnamViews.org. It's what we're calling a collaborative journal (coJo, to coin a phrase)- an online space that captures the stories of people that shared a common experience. The idea is to create a dynamic online history for soldiers, families, friends, or anyone who has been impacted by the war to share their stories. We're hoping the result will prevent the significance of these events in world history from fading away without deliberate retrospection.

We think its a refreshing and compelling way to use stories to advance your mission. What do you think?

Posted by Kurt Voelker at 13:42 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

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Here's a nice example of (online) personal storytelling, done to showcase the experiences of students in a graduate school of business. (Caveat - we worked on this). This uses text, photos, and video to create a vivid and personal experience.
See:
http://www.chicagogsb.edu/xp/

#1 chris wolz on 2005-05-06 16:39 (Reply)

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Influence covers innovations in communication, Internet technology and strategy to generate influence on important public policy issues. Chris Wolz manages this blog with the help of his colleagues at Forum One Communications, a web strategy/technology firm in the Washington DC area.