Ive seen all kinds of brand guides, from hilariously terrible to awe-inspiring. When done well, a brand guide helps to create consistency in internal and external communications and saves people tons of time asking and answering questions.
Since humans are fascinating, there are probably good stories happening all over your business or organization. It’s just a matter of collecting them.
Story collecting works best as a team effort. No matter how great you are at storytelling, chances are you are not involved of every facet of your organization and every client or customer interaction. The more perspectives you include, the deeper and broader your storytelling will be. Here are some tips for facilitating storytelling with your team.
As a member of the last generation to be born without the Internet, I definitely used to be better at reading. I’d routinely rocket through a few books a week in high school and college, so imagine my surprise when I received a free subscription to The Atlantic (for donating to WBEZ, because I am a clich??), and found reading a long-form articlechallenging. I realized it’s been awhile since I read anything that required me to commit to it.
And it felt amazing.
Our brains love stories, and luckily, the Internet is full of them. Hardly a day goes by that one of my friends doesn’t post something heartwarming and awe-inspiring from Upworthy or some other positive news site.
Most of us only read stories about violence in Chicago, but for some young people, they see it happening in their neighborhoods. We’re working with our friends at KOCO to reframe those narratives.
All the things within our own culture weve learned to accept as true weave together to formulate narratives and beliefs that guide and frame a lot of our values, attitudes and actions. They become stories we choose to believe. They become narratives that shape the fabric of the meaning of our lives.
Weve seen it all: the good, the bad and the achingly terrible. Writing anything, especially your own copy is one of the hardest things to do for most people. Its the thing that blows our timelines all the time and the thing that seems to scoot down the to-do list again and again. Weve changed how we work a little to get ahead of this, but we see the same issues pop up all the time.
