The power of storytelling
I got a great email from the National MS Society the other day:
Here’s a close up of the text, if the full email is hard to read:
It drew me in from the very first sentence the the story it told about Channing. It was a perfect example of a best practice. A real story, not one littered with facts and tidbits throughout it to try to educate the users. Even though I have no connect to MS, beyond donating money to a bike ride my brother did for the organization, I formed a connection with the subject of the email. Later, a colleague of mine articulated why it worked so well - the opening line is something we can all relate to: being in the doctors office and hearing that something is wrong.
It reminded me of the lessons from one of the keynote sessions at the American Marketing Association Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education, Storytelling as Best Practice.
We’ve got a problem: It’s not that we don’t have good stories to tell. It’s that when we tell our stories we burden them with so much jargon and statistics that they don’t work anymore and become unrecognizable.
The point here is that most non-profits litter their stories with so much educational information that the actual STORY got lost. What the National MS Society did here was separate the education from the narrative. It still had facts and figures…but only gave them to you after they had already sucked you in.
Another great thing about this email is that the message is really evergreen - although it was used as an end-of-year email in this case it could really be used year-round. In tough economic times when organizations are trying to cut their budgets in any way possible, implementing an aggressive email strategy with evergreen messages like this is certainly something to be considered.
I actually think there was one missed opportunity here for the National MS Society - I wanted to know MORE about Channing. If she had been writing a blog about her life on their website, I would have gone there in an instant. Email doesn’t allow for a lot of room to tell a story and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with continuing it on the website for users who become particularly engaged. Of course, included on the blog/website/whatever it is would be consistent calls-to-action to give money to help people like Channing. If I’m engaged with a real person, the odds of my opening my wallet instantly increase.
Well done National MS Society! I look forward to adopting your strategy in my own work 
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December 19th, 2008
It is interesting how my thoughts have been moving in this direction for a while but you helped solidify it. I sent this link to key people at our university to begin thinking about the stories we want to tell and how they can convey our mission in a way that marketing speak can not. This is a big component of the social marketing zeitgeist and I am finally beginning to see how we might shape it to our personality. Thanks for your insight and getting the dialogue going.
December 20th, 2008
That MS Society email is a great example of a story well told. Unfortunately, too few organizations know how to personalize their causes so well. Storytelling by committee — which is where the facts, stats and bloat usually comes in — rarely works. The power of story is the power of a singular voice, strengthened by judicious editing.
We have that opportunity in higher ed, if we can just avoid the temptation to achieve consensus for our stories. Even so, we’ll have a tougher time tugging the heart strings than the MS Society and other non-profits whose missions address issues more immediate and life-threatening than ours.
One reason groups like World Vision have been so successful is their ability to tell — and show — a powerful story about lives changed.
Still, it isn’t impossible. We should strive to tell stories well. That’s what we strive to do in our department.
December 20th, 2008
Have you read Made to Stick? (If not, here’s my review.) I like the way that book stresses storytelling … it’s something we all seem to realize but no one seems to stress. In times of budget cuts, I feel like the besieged state colleges (like mine) really could find a lot more currency with students telling their success stories than all the facts and figures, as staggering as they are. Cheers!
January 5th, 2009
spot on great example. Communications/marketing/branding/advertising usually gets neutered in the storytelling phase.