It's me again! I exist, and I'm fascinating!
What we can learn about the ROIs of storytelling from old love letters and my own organization
When I was in my twenties, I moved to a small Bulgarian town on the Black Sea on a teaching Fulbright. I spent the first several months wavering feverishly between euphoria and anxiety. Euphoria, because I was in a beautiful new place, learning a fascinating new language, meeting wonderful new people, and gorging on the freshest tomatoes and cucumbers I’d ever tasted. Anxiety, because I was trying to sustain a long-distance relationship.
My fellowship was for a year—at the time, an eternity! I worried that my then-boyfriend would forget me. I worried that rather than making his heart grow fonder, distance would make it grow fickle. I worried that I was alone in worrying about our relationship, and then of course I worried that all my worrying made me come off as needy.
So I decided to do what any over-anxious person with a penchant for writing would do in this situation. I wrote him emails. Lots of them. At least daily! I wrote vignettes of funny or interesting things that had happened that day, and if nothing funny or interesting had happened, I made something up. I wrote reflections about democracy and the lingering influence of Soviet communism, which I meant to sound effortlessly insightful but which probably came off as labored and stale and immature. I wrote—and I cringe even now to think of it—longform poetry.
I meant for this daily onslaught of emails to do three things:
Remind my boyfriend, relentlessly, of my existence.
Make myself seem adventurous, insightful, and fascinating, with the subtext that he’d never again find someone as interesting, insightful, and fascinating as myself, so he’d better not try.
Let him know that I was having a great time and wasn’t needy.
He wrote me a handful of sentence fragments a couple times a week. And halfway through my fellowship, the inevitable happened: we broke up.
In hindsight, my big mistake was believing that we were meant to be together forever. But apart from the follies of youth, my letter-writing campaign was flawed in three significant ways:
I wrote so frequently that, instead of spotlighting my delightful existence, I became white noise. In fact, I’m pretty confident that my boyfriend archived most of my letters without reading them.
I didn’t have enough insights and amusing anecdotes to populate daily emails—who does?— so most of them were pretty vapid.
I never paused to assess whether my emails were achieving the purposes I had set for them. They weren’t, and I was wasting a lot of time typing them in my dim Soviet block apartment when I could have been gallivanting by the sea.
Today, as a professional storyteller, I’m surprised at how often organizations make similar mistakes in their storytelling approaches. Recently, a client fretted that writing their monthly blog had become a painstaking chore for the whole team. Sometimes, they had a fresh and relevant insight to offer. Then, the writing came easily and audience reception was positive. But at other times, it felt like they had to bend over backwards to crank out something that was… just okay.
“Sometimes, it just feels like busywork,” she said. “I mean, how important is it for us to write a blog piece every month? What’s the return on investment?”
It’s a great question, and one that doesn’t get asked enough.
Most organizations that I work with feel an instinctual pressure to generate a constant stream of storytelling. Funnily, that instinct is backed by the same reasoning that I had in the back of my mind as a twenty-something writing emails to her long distance boyfriend. Namely, orgs want to remind people that they exist, and make them think that they are insightful and amazing, and can do what nobody else can. They also want to accomplish this without coming off as too eagerly grasping for business or donations—i.e. needy.
In acting from this instinct, however, these organizations risk falling into the same pitfalls that I did. They generate stories at a pace that outstrips their capacity to provide something of interest and value, which increases the likelihood that their blogs, podcasts, and social media posts fade into white noise. They never stop to assess whether the stories they tell through these various communication channels are achieving their intended purpose. And because they have no sense of ROI, they often begin to resent the burden of generating regular communications.
Organizations should always start story strategy with a sense of desired ROI. First, we have to define our goals and capacity for storytelling. Then, we have to identify how we can most efficiently use that capacity to achieve those goals. Otherwise, we’ll just start spewing stories with neither direction nor constraint, a strategy that’s usually inefficient or ineffectual or both.
for example…
This week, I thought I’d lift up the hood and show how I think about storytelling strategy at my own org, Little Tiger Strategic Storytelling… which happens to be one year old this week!
Defining goals and capacity
Here’s an example of a Story Audience & Impact Chart that I fleshed out with examples from Little Tiger. This chart is one of the first tools that I use at the beginning of an client engagement, because it helps organizations set the direction and constraints of their storytelling efforts. Specifically, it defines:
our target storytelling audiences—who we want our various communications to reach
the purposes of our storytelling—why we want to tell stories to those audiences
our storytelling channels and platforms—how we will deliver storytelling to those audiences
our intended storytelling impact—what we want audiences to think, know, or feel after engaging with our storytelling
A couple things to note. Storytelling whys can vary greatly. That’s okay, as long as they are all clearly laid out. For example, I mix organizational whys (generating new business) with personal whys (building individual brand/ reputation. Also, all of an organizational’s storytelling hows shouldn’t serve all their whos and whys. After all, it’s hard to storytell effectively for multiple audiences and purposes! For example, the Little Tiger website is specifically designed to storytell for prospective partners.
Using capacity most efficiently
An organization is in a really good place for storytelling if they have two or three phenomenal impact stories, mind-blowing insights, or fresh takes to share a year. But that doesn’t mean they can only generate two or three stellar communications pieces a year. In fact, they shouldn’t!
Rather, they should think about how to milk those two or three impact stories, insights, or fresh takes for all they’re worth. In other words, how can organizations leverage their storytelling capacity most efficiently? Repackage and repurpose!
For example, here’s an article I published in last week’s The Chronicle of Philanthropy, “Vague and Generic Narratives are Holding Back Nonprofits.” It pulls from three Substack articles I’d previously written:
Not only can repackaging and repurposing the same stories lead to wider audience reach with less effort, but it also helps reinforce an organizational narrative. In this case, all four pieces of communications reinforces the story that Little Tiger helps social sector orgs tell more distinct and deliberate stories.
(In the meta-spirit of repurposing efficiently, check out that last link above for a great example of repurposing the same content for a blog, social, media, and a newsletter.)
long story short…
The bottom line is that storytelling should always be purposeful, and if it’s not, it’s wasting organizational time and energy. But we have to be careful not to use purpose as an excuse for sporadic storytelling or radio silence. A regular cadence is important in training our audiences to expect and plan for engagement.
I’ll end this week’s newsletter with an open call for questions. If you have a niggling storytelling question, send it to hello@ltstrategicstories.com. It’ll be fun to address questions in some future newsletter!
