“Wait! I thought you were a radio station?”
What we can learn about cohesive story arcs from public media, community organizing, and a household conglomerate
In a couple weeks, I’ll be running a half-half-half-half-half marathon. This has been a source of some anxiety, though not because of the training and athleticism involved. The race, which is a fundraiser for the youth writing and publishing organization 826 Boston, boils down to an achievable 0.826 miles.1
The anxiety stems from my team name: Soybean and the Jackalopes. Soybean is my pet rabbit, who—when I was education director at 826 some years ago—spent many afternoons hiding under my desk to escape the aggressive adoration of the afterschool program students. The Jackalopes are a nod to the whimsical 826 Boston storefront, which poses as a cryptozoology research center. When I originally formed the team with two former colleagues, this name evoked a shared story; we were all Soybean devotees and former or current 826 employees. But the team has ballooned to a whopping eleven runners, many of whom have never met Soybean, don’t know of his fervent distaste for small children, and perhaps don’t even believe in cryptoids. Hence my anxiety: we should change the name to be representative of the larger team! But to what!? What is our shared story!?
I realize that the name of my half-half-half-half-half marathon team is a low stakes conundrum. Yet it reflects a real problem across the social sector. In my work as an organizational storyteller, I constantly see organizations who struggle to tell a story that connects all their disparate units, whether that’s team members, programs, or lines of work.
for example…
Back when I worked at GBH, Boston’s public media station, I went to D.C. for a conference and stayed a few days afterward to do the old social sector dance: going door-to-door to proselytize our education work to foundations, the Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, etc.
At least, I was trying to proselytize. But I’d barely start enthusing about GBH’s place-based environmental science curriculum, our teen civics pilot program, or our Molly of Denali family board games, when my host would interrupt with one of three things:
“Wait! I didn’t know you all did curriculum. I thought you were TV and radio?”
“Wait! I didn’t know you all did stuff for older kids. I thought you focused on preschool and elementary?”
“Wait! I thought that was PBS. You mean you all produce that stuff?”
So, rather than spending my allotted hour dazzling each host with the impact of our current work and the brilliance of our new ideas, I spent the hour explaining who we were and what we did. GBH essentially had four arms of work: local radio and television reporting, production of national general audience shows like Frontline and Masterpiece, production of national children’s shows like Arthur and Molly, and production of learning activities and classroom resources. And of the myriad foggy ways to describe the relationship between GBH and PBS, the clearest was that GBH produced content for PBS to distribute.
In retrospect, it isn’t surprising that my hosts were so confused. The GBH story was—and still is—confusing on multiple fronts. Internally, we often blamed our messy storytelling on the layers of branding and co-branding we had to navigate (each show or program brand, the GBH brand, the PBS brand, the NPR brand, etc).
Juggling multiple brands is a very real challenge. But it doesn’t have to be synonymous with story confusion. Certainly, the for-profit sector is full of companies that juggle multiple brands to their advantage. P&G manages over 60 individual brands, like Pampers, Tide, and Gillette. Marriott’s brand portfolio ranges from The Ritz-Carlton to Courtyard hotels. But each company tells a story that clearly connects all those brands. P&G “makes every day more than ordinary” with their products, which “are trusted in millions of living rooms, kitchens, laundry rooms, and bathrooms–and have been passed down from generation to generation.” Marriott’s “30 brands and 8,000+ properties across 139 countries and territories give people more ways to connect, experience and expand their world.”
GBH’s bigger challenge was that, while each brand told its own story, these stories didn’t cohere together into one overarching organizational story. Frontline’s investigative journalism “question[ed], explain[ed], and change[d] our world.” Masterpiece brought “the best in drama to American public television audiences.” PBS LearningMedia enhanced “educator practice and equitable student learning through educational resources.” GBH 89.7 promised listeners “the news and stories… that matter to you.” GBH needed, but didn’t have, a story that connected its work across journalism, entertainment, and education; local and national scope; and preschool and adult audiences. A tall order!
here’s a framework that can help…
For the past several years, I’ve coached social sector leaders in crafting their public narratives, using a framework documented by Marshall Ganz, a Harvard professor who specializes in community organizing. Ganz’s public narrative framework consists of three stories, woven together:
a story of self, or the story that helps people “get” what you/your leadership is about
a story of us, or the story that helps people “get” what they share as a collective; and
a story of now, or the story that helps people “get” the urgency and stakes of the mission
Ganz—who organized with civil rights activists during the 1964 Freedom Summer, Cesar Chavez and the California farm workers union, and Camp Obama leading up to the 2008 Presidential election—teaches public narrative as a fundamental organizing strategy because it uses story to connect individuals to the collective.
Public narrative is meant to create connections among people. But what if that same framework could be used to create connections among programs, projects, and initiatives? Last week, I worked with leaders at a company to craft their public narratives for a new global initiative. As I listened to the leaders from different departments, offices, and countries discuss their disparate streams of work, I became excited by the possibility of adapting Ganz’s framework to help organizations craft a cohesive story about what they do.
An organization’s public narrative would go something like this:
a story of one, or the story that helps people “get” what a discrete team, program, or initiative is about;
a story of us, or the story that helps people “get” what these programs, services, and initiatives share as a collective; and
a story of now, or the story that helps people “get” the urgency and stakes of the mission
While for-profit companies may not have a need for that story of now, they’ve certainly mastered the first two stories. Let’s get back to P&G and its 60-plus brands. Tide promises consumers not only cleaner laundry but saved time. Febreze promises them the ability to “breathe happy,” even if their house is crowded with babies, teenagers, dogs, or all three. Gillette promises them “the best shave in the world” from the comfort of their own bathroom. Each brand tells a compelling story of one that supports the collective story of us, which is that P&G makes trusted products for the home that help make “every day more than ordinary.”
long story short…
Sometimes when a social sector organization struggles with telling a coherent story about their work, it’s a matter of mission creep. We know this happens! But sometimes, they simply need to start thinking about their organizational storytelling as a sum of parts.
So, the first question we should ask ourselves is: Is our org doing too many things that we shouldn’t be doing, given our story and mission?
If the answer is yes, we should apologize to our stretched-thin staff and revisit our strategic plan. If the answer is no, we should then ask ourselves: Is our mission and story as it is currently written insufficient to capture the breadth of activities that we are and should be doing?
If the answer is yes, then we need to ask ourselves a third question: What is the story of us?
For those mathletes that calculated that half-half-half-half-half of twenty-six miles is actually 0.813 miles, not 0.826 miles, good for you!