Want to tell better stories? The answer is not story telling, but story finding.
Matt Locke
Director
Storythings
@lockematt
Anjali Ramachandran
Director
Storythings
@anjaliramachandran
If there’s one book we’ve recommended more than any other at Storythings in the past year, it’s probably Filterworld by Kyle Chayka. Chayka’s thesis is that the pervasiveness of algorithmic feeds are flattening culture around the world, both online and offline.
Chayka describes this as a flattening of culture:
“By flatness, I mean homogenization but also reduction into simplicity: the least ambiguous, least disruptive, and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture are promoted the most. Flatness is the lowest common denominator, an averageness that has never been the marker of humanity’s proudest cultural creations”
Does this sound familiar? Does it sometimes feel like your stories and campaigns look the same as everything else?
There is a way to break out of Filterworld, and the answer is not about story telling, but story finding. Your organisation is bursting with rich, human, memorable stories, about the people who are the engine of your work, and the impact you have on the communities you serve. These are the stories that will escape Filterworld, the stories your audiences will remember and share. People don’t share campaigns, they share stories, and you already have thousands of them. The challenge is how to find them.
So what are the things that really great story finders do that most other people don’t?
1 - Start with a question you don’t know the answer to
This sounds really obvious, but think about it - how many times have you started developing a story campaign where you already know the answer? A lot of non-profit and foundation comms storytelling starts with the end goal - demonstrating your expertise in an issue, or highlighting a policy issue - but this often means the story is just a means to an end, and it comes across as flat and lifeless.
If you start from a question, and go on a journey to discover something you don’t know, you’ll end up with a way more exciting and engaging story, and you’ll take your audience on that journey with you. This is how great journalists and documentary makers work - they start with a question, and fall down rabbit holes until they find the answer. Talk to novelists, and they will often say they don’t always know what their characters will do in a situation until they write it out - the process of telling the story is finding out something that you didn’t know when you started.
This might feel harder to do in a comms setting, but there are always ways of turning what might seem a very strict brief into an open question. For example - I was talking to a client recently who is now working for a charity that helps communities restore orchards. As we were talking, I asked her a question that had been bugging me: ‘So, how many trees make an orchard?’ It turns out the answer is five, but in answering it, our conversation went down many fascinating avenues, including their work building orchards in prisons, and restoring lost hidden orchards in central London. By starting with a silly question, we found dozens of potential stories.
2 - Find the unusual experts
When you start with a question you don’t know, you have to seek out people who can help you find the answer. Sometimes, they will be experts - people at the top of their fields who spend their days being ‘thought leaders’ on their subject. But the really interesting stories often come from people who are experts in ways that even they might not realise.
Many years ago, I saw Ira Glass talk about a This American Life episode from 2002, when he and two colleagues were embedded on a US warship during the Gulf War. They were tightly controlled by their US Navy hosts, and were struggling to find a story. Then they noticed a 20 year old sailor, Crevon Scott, restocking a vending machine on the warship, so they started asking her about her work:
Alex Blumberg: What are the big sellers?
Crevon Scott: Right now, it's Snickers and Starburst. Snickers goes real fast.
Alex Blumberg: What's the least favorite candy on board?
Crevon Scott: Bonkers, the fruit chews. We got boxes of those, and still have them. Sometimes if we don't have anything else, we'll just put all rows of Bonkers, and they'll still stay in here.
Alex Blumberg: So people hate Bonkers?
Crevon Scott: Yeah.
Alex Blumberg: Nobody likes them.
This started a journey that revealed the stories of the 5,000 workers it takes to support the 50-60 pilots on board the ship. Once you realise that everyone is an unusual expert in something, you can unlock their stories with simple questions like “What are the big sellers?”
3 - Build a sustainable story finding workflow
When we talk to clients who have tried and abandoned their own podcast or editorial series, it’s never because they didn’t have great stories to tell - it’s because they didn’t develop and maintain a sustainable story finding workflow. This is similar to a typical campaign workflow, but with a couple of important differences.
Firstly, with an ongoing content format, you will have multiple story ideas in all stages of the workflow at the same time. This is a more agile process than the waterfall of a one-off campaign. If you are producing a regular format - like a weekly newsletter or monthly podcast - you always need to have at least 2 or 3 story ideas in every stage of the workflow.
This is because there will inevitably be delays with some of the stories - you might struggle to identify or get engagement from a key contributor, or a story idea might be dependent on an event that won’t happen for a few months. If you have multiple stories in progress at the same time, you can quickly switch your team’s focus to make sure you’ve got a consistent flow of stories at all times. This might sound like a lot of work, but it’s easy to set up simple processes to manage stories as they flow through a pipeline like this, and make sure your team is focused on keeping momentum or routing around problems.
Secondly, there is a really simple hack to make a good story finding workflow easier - produce your content in seasons. A season is a group of episodes of a content format that then has a break before the format returns for another season. This is obviously how a lot of TV and podcast formats work, but is less common in newsletters and social video series. The advantage of a season is that you can develop and produce story ideas in parallel up to the point of delivery, then handle the delivery, engagement and archive stages after all production has finished.
At Storythings, we have the great advantage of working equally across the non profit, foundation, and B2B sectors. We can see that both sectors face the same challenges forced on them by our ‘Filterworld’ culture. They need to reach target audiences who are already overwhelmed with content; they rely on platforms that force you to focus on algorithms not people; and they tell stories using dull brand voices that all end up sounding the same.
When they come to us for help, our advice for breaking out of Filterworld is simple. To tell great stories, you need to find great stories. That is a particular skill you need to bring into your organisation. The good thing is, it’s a hell of a lot of fun to learn.
