See a photo of Steve, his bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

Q&A with Steve Krizman, Question 5:

Q: In your LinkedIn profile, you note that in your current job, you “direct a team that integrates storytelling, internal communications, marketing, public relations and multi-media relations.” Can you offer an example or two of how you integrate storytelling into this work?

A: I direct integrated communications for the Colorado region of Kaiser Permanente, a health insurer and health-care provider. Our mission includes improving the health of our entire community, so we support many healthy lifestyles programs along the Colorado Front Range. Recently, we helped Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper launch the first-ever citywide bike-sharing program. Participants can check out a bicycle at one of 50 stations around the city and check it back in when they reach their destination. Computers on the bikes provide riders information about calories burned and carbon offsets.

We are a major funder of the program because of its obvious impact on the health of individuals and of the community. When the mayor launched the program, the Kaiser Permanente Integrated Communications team was there to help tell the story, using various media and tailoring it for our different audiences. The stories included:

Share-a-story. We asked people via our Facebook fan page to tell us their fondest cycling memory. They could have written one sentence to get the free bike helmet we were offering, but the 53 who responded took the opportunity to tell a personally significant story — about their first bike, about the freedom they feel, about a bad accident. More proof that people gravitate to story.

Video stories. Integrated Communications team members interviewed bicycle riders at the launch ceremony and put together a short video that combined the information about the bike-share program with vignettes from participants. The video was posted on our Facebook fan page and also shared with our 6,000 staff and physicians on our intranet site. Also on the intranet site was a video clip made by one of our physicians, who rode to all 50 bicycle stations in one day.

Twitter stories — If you consider 140-character micro-blogs as stories (which I do): Several of us Tweeted during the speechifying, sharing the story of Denver’s launch of the first-ever city-wide bike sharing program (take that, Portland). I quoted the mayor in a few Tweets, which were duly re-Tweeted by the mayor’s communications people.

All this material remains at our disposal, to be used whenever we need a story to describe our commitment to community health. For example, we have photos, videos and people stories to insert into presentations to community groups and potential customers.