Story Telling: It Starts Here

CENTER FOR MEDIA & DEMOCRACY

Annual Nonprofit Luncheon - Stories for Community Building - September 2007
Presented by: Lauren-Glenn Davitian.

Story Telling Workshop, October 2007.

The Power of Narrative - We are the Primates Who Tell Stories

Evolution - We are the primates who tell stories (Stephen Jay Gould)

Story of the Evolution of Language from NY Times Article on Williams Syndrome
Grooming to Gossip - Advantageous way to find out who is with you and against you...
Verbal and nonverbal behaviour part of an ongoing conversation that engages the individual in the social experience and protects them from "outsiders".
Jane Goodall talks about the sophistication of the primates she observes. Spoken Language proved to be a major adaptive change.

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Other examples of how stories and narrative are physically and culturally embedded in us:

Human Development - "Tell me a Story"

Personal Identity - We are the sum of our stories: Birthstory, Parents Met, You Met Partners, 9/11: Where were you?
What we know about people is primarily made up of the stories we know about them.

Cultural Identity - We constantly clarify who is with us and who is against us through our "narratives" these exist in word (stories) and action (rituals) and building (architecture), music and icons--or brands.

Political Identity (subsest of Cultural)- To be an American is to be guided by 4 fundamental stories (which effect political decisions about resources): Mob at the Gate/ The Triumphant Individual/ Benevolent Community/ Rot at the Top. See Robert Reisch

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Memory - We remember in the form of stories and metaphor. We think in terms of metaphor. We describe experience in terms of weather, color, temperature, motion, liquids, vision, places, war. Neural goups in our brain create mental models which can demonstrate (through conceptual maps) how emotions and information are associated in the context of story.

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Marketers are very interested in the core metaphors that guide our common thinking. Metaphors can surface unconscious thought and can tell marketers what people really believe about their brand. The challenge of the marketer is to associate your experiences with their brand. A brand is a unit of social consumption. A brand does not exist independently of the customer. The customer creates the meaning of the brand.

In this example, Core Metaphors are associated with the "ideal company": They have our best interests at heart, resource (provides info/ saves me time), Nurturing (interested, benevolent parent, care, safety), Support (team work, for mutual benefit).(Source: Harvard Business School, Mind of the Market Lab). We observed this in our own customer conversations. (Which we conducted via interviews. 8 one on ones are as valuable if not more than 8 focus groups!)

Anatomy of (Re)Branding: The Center for the New American Dream

http://www.newdream.org/
free range thinking (November 2005) describes the efforts of the Center for the New American Dream to allign its brand with its base of supporters. The original logo for the Center for a New American Dream (shown here) usually appeared with the tagline, “Helping people
consume responsibly to protect the environment, improve the quality of life, and promote social justice.” In theory, a symbol that suggests “shining a light” or “illuminating the way” coupled with a tagline explicitly listing the organization’s objectives should add up to a clear, positive message. In practice, though, it didn’t.

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“People perceived us as that group that was going to make them give something up,” says Taylor. She recalls with a chuckle how friends would come to her with confessions ranging from eating at McDonalds to driving an SUV, but her laughter fades as she also remembers how businesses avoided serious dealings with the Center because “we were the group that wags its finger.”

In 2004, Bemporad Baranowski Marketing Group (BBMG) was retained to give the new dreamers a new brand. “We saw an organization with incredible programs and fabulous values,” says Raphael Bemporad, “but we also saw a huge disconnect between their values and the language they were using to communicate who they were and why it mattered.” As an example, Bemporad reads from a brochure the
Center had been distributing. In the first three paragraphs, the words suffer, debt, struggle, exhausted, pressured, hungry, and bankruptcy appear.

BBMG began its rebranding process with a “listening tour” that included the organization’s staff, trustees, stakeholders, and
over 1,000 online members. From this research, Bemporad discovered that the Center’s branding solutionr evolved around a single
word: more. “People told us that the Center was helping Americans get more of what matters in their lives: more fairness in the marketplace, more exposure to nature, and more fun every day,” says Bemporad. In its communications, however,the Center kept asking Americans to resist the “more is better” mantra. Bemporad recognized that for any rebranding effort to succeed, the advocates of less had to find a way to embrace more. Applying his agencies “Five Laws of Branding” (see box), Bemporad determined that “more” was the word the Center had to own, and that the tagline “more of what matters” allowed the Center to rightfully own it. In developing a new logo that would visually represent this brand (see cover), BBMG stripped the organization’s name down to its three most inspiring words, emphasizing the visionary “dream” while deleting the staid and static “center.”

The use of green and blue in the logo further articulated the brand. “Some people see the words ‘I can dream’ or ‘I dream’ in it,” says Taylor. Either way, these words reinforce a shift in emphasis from an institution trying to effect change to individuals who are intimately involved in that change. The organization applied the new logo and tagline to all its communications and made other changes to stay
true to its new brand—perhaps none more emblematic than the renaming of its newsletter from “Enough!” to “In Balance.”
Having finally embraced “more,” New American Dream is getting more done. Since 2003, the number of online activists responding to the organization’s alerts and spreading its message has increased from 28,000 to 83,000. In the last year, over 200 articles have been written about the organization, and Betsy Taylor now finds herself appearing on the Voice of America and other outlets that had previously shown no interest in her organization’s work. Impact on manufacturers such as Ford who cited the development of hybrid vehicles as influenced by the Center.

As they have developed brands and communications materials for clients ranging from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to the International AIDS Society, Raphael Bemporad and Mitch Baranowski have identified five laws of branding that guide every project they undertake: Law of the Wo rd: Own a word in the mind of your audience that differentiates your organizationfrom all others. It must be simple, clear, and owned by nobody else in your field.

Laws of Branding:

Law of Focus: Focus your brand on your organization’s unique value proposition i.e., the unique service or approach that defines all you do and sets you apart.
Law of Leadership: Successful organizations are perceived as being the leaders at what they do. How can your organization be the first to develop a unique approach or service?
Law of Authenticity: Authenticity is the proof behind the promise inherent in your brand. Ensuring that you “walk your talk” in everything you do helps maintain your brand’s integrity.
Law of Consistency: A brand cannot get into the mind of your audience unless it is communicated clearly and consistently over time. Stay “on message”.

From “Brand- driven Communications for Nonprofit Orga n i z a t i o n s".

See Branding for Social Good, by BBMG Parnters
www.bbmg.com/pdfs/branding_for_social_good.pdf

EMOTIONAL SIGNIFICANCE

If a thought has emotional singificance we are more likely to recall it. 95% of our thought, emotion and learning occurs without our awareness. 5% is conscious. What we REALLY think is embeddd in the unconscious. Focus groups can't get at that part of our thought process (because during focus groups we describe what we think we think).

Stories speak to directly to this part of our brain.

Story Structure

What makes a good story? How is it different from a sequence of events? Good stories are time tested structure, telling details, emotion, truth and meaning.

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Structure: Protagonist (world in balance), Exciting Incident, Barriers to Overcome, Writhing Action, Resolution, Meaning

Qualities: Concise but colorful (vivid details), speaks to your audience (6th grade level), not predictable (something happens that you did not expect), engages emotions (people have to care), moment of truth (fundamental lesson about how we treat ourselves and each other).Examples: Wizard of Oz, Environmental Defense Fund, Coke Commercial and Fletcher Free Library by Robert Resnik
See also Seth Godin

Organizations are Made up of Stories: What are Yours?

Know your lore, it is the sum of culture and values. Collect stories from the folks you serve.
Kinds of Stories:
The Nature of Our Challenge: Someone living witha problem and what it means to them

Creation Story
Emblematic Success Story
Performance Stories - Tell about PEOPLE and what they did
World Improvement
Where are we Going? Future 10-15 year view.

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Know your Audience

We have the story which appeals to us for so many reason as a preferred way to communicate/ rcv information. But what if we more do we need to consider?

Why is our story important to our audience? It depends. As we have learned over the past year, we serve a varied audiences. Well illustrated in the story Malcolm Gladwell tells about Howard Moskowitz, a psychophysicist and food industry constulant who uncovered a key secret to what eaters like. Running huge focus groups to find customers' truest tastes, Gladwell's hero draws a radical conclusion, an epiphany that has defined food marketing ever since. There is not one Pepsi, there are several Pepsis!There is no one tomato sauce! There are at least 3.

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Points to 2 key pieces of information: From universals to the world of variability.There is no ideal food and there is no ideal customer. We need to look at our audience with an eye to horizontal segmentation.

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(Most people may think that they want hearty dark coffee but only 27% of them really drink it this way.)

Malcolm Gladwell talks about this in another Ted Talk
http:www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/20

Blink!
http:www.gladwell.com/blink/

Design for your Users

We all think differently. Key is to figure out what is important to our customers and lead them on the path to do what we would like them to do. What is the pathway for each of these people to our services? What is the "narrative" that you follow to lead people through your web site, your video program, your live show, your information architecture?

Senior Citizen who wants their driveway shoveled. What does she care about? Safety. What is our core message for her?
How does she find out about the service? How does she close the deal and get the shoveler to her house? Is this hard for her to do?
What about the Burlington neighbor who wants more information about zoning rewrites? How do we make this easy to find.
What is our objective? Is it to further civic agency or hinder? Points of pain? Where does the narrative fall down??????

By finding out more about the people we serve we a/ build goodwill, b/ build a stronger constituency of people who support your cause , c/ build a valuable database, and d/ improve your communications to them because you can tell your story with the metaphors that resonate with your core audiences in their common love of stories but varied style of learning and action.

Seek first to understand: you will be able to tell your story so that it lodges in the recesses of the mind and primes you for action.

This piece, from the Environmental Defense Fund ties much of what we have discussed here, together idisk.mac.com/crowan-Public/Video/TXU_good.mov

Sources: See: VT Nonprofit Tools for more details: