Bird in hand worth two in bush – why storytelling makes sense for community developers
By Gordon Walek
Published: December 19, 2011
Related story: Words have power
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Gordon Walek
For the last several years, LISC/Chicago has used storytelling as its primary communications tool.
We hire freelance writers and photographers (often refugees from the newspaper business) to get familiar with our neighborhoods and to write stories — in newspaper style — that explain some aspect of what we’re doing there. Then we post them on websites, such as www.newcommunities.org or www.lisc-chicago.org.
Sounds simple for a communications strategy, and it is. Recommend it to everyone.
Forget the elevator speeches, the “messaging,” the endless media outreach — none of which necessarily yields a “product.” Money down the drain.
Not so with a story.
At the end of the day you’ll have a visceral, detailed, interesting account of something that will, in a large or small way, describe what you do and why.
Journalism has been described as the “first rough draft of history,” and that’s one way to think of the storytelling that we and other neighborhood-based nonprofits are doing. Except that in the case of our neighborhoods — typically on the periphery of mainstream media interest — those stories may be the only draft of history. All the more reason to do them.
Expensive?
But wait! All those scribes (what we call our freelance writers) and photographers are expensive!
True. In Chicago we’ve been blessed with grants that allowed us to do many, many stories. But we could have easily squandered that money on hollow press releases or image consultants who used our own watches to tell us what time it was. We didn’t.
And just because you don’t have a huge communications budget doesn’t mean you can’t tell stories, too.
Start small. One a month. At the end of the year, you’ll have 12 stories to slice, dice, re-purpose and selectively distribute to elected officials, funders, neighborhood organizations/staff, and other interested parties on your mailing list.
Imagine if each of the 30 LISC program sites around the country did the same, resulting in 30 stories a month, or 160 stories a year that offered a varied, textured account of community development in different parts of America. Then think about how those pieces could be packaged at the national level to shed light on the complicated, effective work that’s going on in so many places.
And while we’re at it, consider the possibilities if one could fund a Works Progress Administration-type program that hired local unemployed writers to venture forth and kick the tires in their neighborhoods, chronicling how people and institutions are struggling to retain the strength and vibrancy of their communities in difficult times.
All possible through storytelling.
This speech by Andy Goodman at Housing California’s spring conference back in 2006 is as useful now as it was back then. Check it out…..
Gordon Walek is the communications manager at LISC/Chicago.
Posted in Thinking Out Loud