In part one of this series on storytelling for membership organisations, we looked at the cultural history of stories and in part two we focused on the importance neuro-biology.
The topic for this, the final instalment, is more practical – I want to focus on structure.
This begins with the people. Every good story has a protagonist (or the antagonist if they’re evil). This is the person around whom the story revolves. The audience or reader has to care about what happens to them. This will often be because they see glimmers of themselves in that character. Maybe an ambition or a fear or a desire.
Next, stories have an inciting moment where something happens that awakens a desire in that protagonist. It’s the “What if…” moment.
What if…three brothers die in war, inciting a General to find the last, a soldier named Private Ryan. What if…a slum dweller from Mumbai is accused of cheating on Who Wants To Be a Millionnaire.
Your third structural ingredient is a struggle. Stories are about trouble because they help us navigate real-life trouble.
Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction is one of my favourite works on storytelling. It makes the following point, which it’s worth pausing on:
“Conflict is the fundamental element of fiction…In life, conflict often carries negative connotations, yet in fiction – be it comic or tragic, dramatic conflict is fundamental because in literature only trouble is interesting. This is not so in life.”
We immerse ourselves in troublesome stories from the moment we learn to speak, if not earlier.
Finally, you’ll need a character arc or journey. This is simply a change in what the protagonist wants. Often they’ll have thought it was one thing and the inciting incident and the struggle will change something about them. Often, it’s a reappraisal of their own goals and desires.
The pay-off
Storytelling in your member and prospect communications will work for you for two reasons – one, storytelling has always been the way humans most effectively exchange ideas and – two – people are influenced to make decisions by their emotions, not by cold facts.
This is particularly good news for membership organisations because your audience is particularly motivated by the impulse to join a tribe of like-minded individuals with similar interests and aspirations.
I bet you’ll find you probably don’t have to look further than your own members for resonant stories that will inspire your potential joiners. They are probably a lot like each other in one way or another. That might mean they are good at problem-solving, or full of compassion and ambition, or open to admitting when everything isn’t right. Whatever those characteristics, you should strive to show, not tell, them to your audience.
Homework!
Why not start this week? Rewrite your ‘About Us’ page on your website, or think about LinkedIn, or your PowerPoint presentations and other marketing materials. Replace the passages that read like your CV and tell a proper story with an inciting moment that led to a problem solved via a journey.
It should be about your members as much as you. Give your audience a clue about what drives them and about what brought them to where they are in life.
I’ll finish with some advice from the greatest short story writer, Anton Checkov, because it encapsulates better than any other quote how storytelling brings information to life – and how we should strive to “show not tell”.
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining,” Checkov wrote. “Show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
Cloud9 Insight provide membership-specific Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions, delivered by an experienced team of Microsoft-certified consultants.
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