Storytelling For The Web November 8, 2013

We take action on our emotions and personal experiences.

To convert basic consumption of your message into action you must create a space for feeling and emotion within your reader.

Utilize different channels and “voices” to segment and target varied audience needs.

Purpose &

Impact Time & Space

Be Your Audience

Help your audience envision and feel their positive impact. ◦ Communicate, connect and relate to the human senses

Inform and entertain ◦ “De-activate the conscious reader, active the emotional human”.

Your goal is to drive action ◦ Generate an emotional response in your reader that is strong enough to

sustain them to the "enter your credit card number" field.

◦ Ask yourself honestly, “Is my piece capable of that”? If yes, great, if not, don't publish - refine.

Write in active voice ◦ Passive voice is weak and requires additional words to convey similar

meaning.

Compose in “Spoken Word” ◦ Imagine your written content is verbalized. ◦ Writing for spoken word creates a conversational tone and may reduce the

overall length of your content.

Use white space ◦ Write in 1-3 short-sentence paragraphs. It's easier on the reader (than

block paragraph) and forces you to be succinct/concise. ◦ Bullet points are your friends.

Eliminate redundancies - Time & Space are precious - be conservative with both. 1) Mention your event date or organization age once? Great, no need to

mention it again!

2) Multiple examples/sentences highlighting the same/similar things - Don't overstate it, make your point and get out.

3) Rhetorical-mess – aka “The Captain Obvious”

Skip "We need your help" or "How can you help”? You and the reader know you have a need, that's why you're both there!!!

Copy edit more! Rinse. Repeat. Cut until there’s nothing left to cut!

Don't just cut words, cut syllables. Replace high count syllable words with low count syllable words.

Speak to your Audience’s needs and wants in THEIR VOICE. ◦ Just like getting a Valentine’s present for him/her - get what s/he wants not

what you want.

Hyperlinks ◦ If you must publish more to satisfy your own needs, refer to your website, blog,

social, etc. for lengthier or more in-depth content about your project.

Be creative "Inside the Box” ◦ Idea: Start your narrative in written form, then finish the narrative in a

pictograph or in a video. ◦ In other words use platforms in seemingly unintended ways. Same story or

narrative delivered in a multi-medium format.

Develop a “Go-To” collaborative with creative writers and storytellers outside your traditional spheres of influence.

Purpose & Impact

Time & Space

Be Your Audience

Ask for Social Shares not just money ◦ Many times, when we do not give monetarily we are more likely to

share.

◦ Easily fulfills our desire to help - provides instant gratification for our actions when we see the tweet post or the number ticker bump up a notch.

◦ Write: "If you can't donate please be gracious and share".

Questions & Answers