The New Prosperity Initiative (NPi) is a Boston-based media organization “that pairs storytelling with new media to publicize the efforts of people and organizations doing socially innovative work to end poverty and build prosperity. NPi stories take the shape of interviews, photo essays, videos, and podcasts and are distributed both in print and online.”

At the same time that NPi is chronicling those working toward social change, its founders, Jeanne Dasaro and Alexis Schroeder, are maintaining a blog that chronicles the story of their entrepreneurship and how they are attempting to launch, grow, and raise funds for the venture.

In a recent entry, Schroeder wrote: “Every now and then someone asks me where I think NPi is in terms of its long-term development. The short answer is: We don’t have money yet, but we do have a strong business plan and some pretty fantastic partners. … One question I’ve been asking myself lately (the answer to which I think we need to communicate better) is, “Why invest in NPi?”

NPi’s answer to that question is one that reflects deep social concern, but it’s a question that every entrepreneur must answer.

Last year, my best friend hatched an idea for a Web-based application that will be truly revolutionary. It’s not quite as much about social change on a global level as NPi is, but it’s something that can truly do wonders for people’s personal and career growth. She asked me to partner with her. For almost a year, we’ve been slowly developing the idea and seeking a way to finance it.

We recently applied for venture capital support that is more than just money. If we’re chosen, we will get intensive expert guidance and personnel to bring our venture to fruition.

Interestingly, part of the application process asked for stories of how our idea would work and what it would look like in action. I had a lot of fun developing those stories.

And I wouldn’t be surprised to see those stories play a key role in our success. If you want people to invest in your idea, you must be able to present a storied vision that enables investors to picture how it will work and why it’s a great idea.

I love the circularity of NPi’s discussion of storytelling: Storytelling is at the core of the venture’s purpose. The founders must show why storytelling is so important (see quote below). And at the same time, they tell their own story of launching the venture

From Schroeder’s blog entry:

So why invest in a media organization that tells stories? Because millions of people in America and across the globe are missing more than a few of these key pieces of the puzzle necessary for living a prosperous life. … Everyone deserves a fair shot at living a healthful, prosperous life. In cities and towns all across the country, in major international cities and rural villages, people are doing incredible work to make sure everyone gets one. These are stories that must be told.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Flokka, the tagline of which is “Where women in business blog,” encourages women to share their stories. Aliza Pilar Sherman, in an article reprinted from Her Business magazine, tells women readers of having lunch with other women at conference and sharing stories of business woes with another woman at her table:

As we each told our very painful and private professional stories, we instantly shared a bond. … Looking back, I realise that the very act of telling my story over lunch one day to another woman was a turning point for me. Telling my story was a tremendous relief. Almost equally as important was hearing [her] story and getting a reassuring feeling that I was not the only woman going through a difficult and emotional time with her business.

Sherman notes that “stories heal” and “women learn most readily when they hear the stories of other people’s experiences.”

Sherman describes how hearing the stories of others facilitates change:

Even if we … ask for help, we often get defensive when we realise that the advice suggests we need to change something about ourselves or change our situation. We might not feel comfortable changing, at least not at someone else’s request. Yet if we hear a story of someone else’s experience of change, we tend to listen. If we listen closely and hear the message in the story, we learn. Sometimes, we are motivated to action by hearing someone else’s story. Other times, we are simply motivated to tell our own stories, an act that can be just as powerful. When we tell our own stories, we often do it because we think we are helping others, but more often than not, we end up helping ourselves.

Sherman suggests some story prompts for when a group of women entrepreneurs are gathered together to share experiences:

• Why did you start your business?
• What about your business keeps you up at night and how do you deal with it?
• What has been your proudest moment in business?
• When was the last time your business made you cry and why?
• What is the best business advice anyone has ever given you?
• What drives you crazy about your business and what can you do about it?

I was reminded of the list of questions I used to submit to business-owners speaking to the entrepreneurial seminar I used to teach. Here are some additional prompts for telling entrepreneurial stories:

• Your entrepreneurial aspirations as a child or young person.

At what point did you know you wanted your own business?

Did you have any businesses as a kid (lemonade stand, paper route,

etc.)

• Your educational background.

To what extent did your education relate to entrepreneurship?

How well well did your education prepare you for entrepreneurship?

• Career background, if any, before starting your business.

What jobs, if any, did you have before starting your business?

How did you like them?

What did you learn from them that you have applied to your own business?

How difficult did you find it to transition from working for someone else to working for yourself?

• Other businesses, if any, you started before your current business.

How did they fare? Successful or not?

What did you learn from them?

• Starting your business.

How did you develop the idea for your business?

Why THIS business?

What were the most challenging aspects of starting your business?

Finances? Personnel? Partnerships? Marketing? Customers?

• Keeping the business going

What do you like most about being an entrepreneur?

What are the biggest headaches?

How has your business evolved since you started it?

How did you know when you had achieved success?

How long did it take for you to feel successful?

• The future

How do you see your business changing, expanding in the future?

Do you want to always have this business?

What happens when you retire?

Are you considering starting other businesses?

• Family life

Are you married?

Have children?

How do you balance family life with your business?

Does your family participate in your business?

• Advice for other who want to be entrepreneurs

Biggest myths about entrepreneurship.

Advice you wish you’d had when you started out.

What characteristics does a successful entrepreneur need to have?

If you could give would-be entrepreneurs just one piece of advice, what would it be?

Further description of Flokka:

flokka is a place for women in business to create a blog, or link an existing blog; so that together we can share our business ideas, dreams and journeys and support and encourage each other as we grow our businesses and ourselves.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

A venture capitalist named Josh recently told a long but interesting story of Francis Bates (read more on page 1014 of this PDF download), who invented the flags that come on mailboxes to indicate that there’s mail in the box. The story is an analogy for a company that Josh’s company has invested in, Gnip. I definitely do not understand what Gnip does simply by visiting its Web site. But Josh’s story, equating Gnip to the mailbox flag does help a little.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

The Forté Foundation is a consortium of major corporations and top business schools that has become a powerful change agent in educating and directing talented women toward leadership roles in business. Forte’s mission is to substantially increase the number of women business leaders by increasing the flow of women into key educational gateways and business networks. One way Forte does that is through “Real Women, Real Stories” on its Web site.

Story categories include:

• experiences, goals, and advice from female MBA candidates who have demonstrated significant leadership potential and won Forte Foundation Scholarships.
• women discussing the choices they made and how business knowledge enhanced their academic background while positioning them for success in a variety of industries.
• leading businesswomen sharing their experience and insights on how women are changing the face of business, for the better.
• inspiring stories about women who followed their ambition and found personal and professional success.
• stories of high-ranking women at the companies that comprise Forté’s corporate sponsors.
• stories of today’s most influential women as voted by Forté Foundation and PINK Magazine.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I get very frustrated when Web sites either have no About Us page or have About Us pages that really reveal nothing. A classic case in point of a tell-nothing About Us page is Twitter’s. Now, I know what Twitter is, what it does. But I’d like the perspective of the folks who run it. How did it start? Where did the idea come from? What it Twitter’s story?

At the blog Buzz Canuck, Sean Moffitt writes:

“Search high and low and if you scan 100 websites, you’d be challenged to find one good story about the company or brand it supports. Even the good ones in my recent search, can hide themselves behind the trivial stuff. A good story should be there smack dab on the front page attracting you like a mosquito to the nightlight.”

The blog of Caterina, co-founder of Flickr (whose About page, by the way, is a fun bulleted list), turned me onto the story of Plum (“Plum is a free online service that lets you collect and share all of the cool, interesting, and important stuff in your digital life. We started Plum because we think that collecting and sharing on the web is really fun and useful — but much too difficult to do.”)

Curiously, the Plum story isn’t on its About Us page but is in its blog (by Hans Peter):

Plum was born because making it easier for people to capture their knowledge and share it with their communities could help make the world a better, more connected place.

For me, a personal story illustrates this. In 1999, my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and my siblings and I (at the time living in Anchorage, San Francisco, New York, and Oslo) sought information and insight. We used the web for research and email to share our findings with each other. Our research led us to become informed and armed with questions and even some suggestions as we discussed his condition and care with the doctors and our parents. I firmly believe that the information and knowledge we shared helped both extend my dad’s life and maximize the quality of his last days with us.

Two years later, a good friend emailed me. Her boyfriend’s dad had been diagnosed with the same cancer, and she remembered that we had done tons of research and wondered if I would share it with her. I pulled out my tweezers and went through my old email, but sadly was only able to recover a small amount of the information we had gathered. I would gladly have shared the collected information and resources we had pulled together with anyone who had an interest in the subject. But other than hand-crafting a personal web site to collect the links, the emails, and the additional notes we found and shared with each other, there was no simple way for me to do so. Our cumulative knowledge and information was lost.

The next time someone emails me to ask “do you still have the research you did on this topic?” I want to be able to simply point them to the collected information. One reason I jumped back into the startup world is because with Plum, such collected knowledge and information will be easy to make and keep accessible. We’re still evolving and refining the service, working to make it simpler than ever to collect and share all kinds of knowledge and information that we care about, stumble across, or need. I think this has the power to change the way we use the net, and I hope it will change the world, if even just a little bit.

The blog Geekpreneur has a nice, comprehensive piece on telling your organization’s story on your About us page, stressing that the story should stick in reader’s minds and “leave important messages in the listener’s memory.”

Somewhere in all these pieces about organizations telling their stories, I came across the Squidoo lens Arrowsmith Printing: Entreprenuership in Small Town Iowa in Mid /Century, which tells the wonderful, detailed story — complete with video — of a small family business. The profile of author Margo Arrowsmith provides a glimpse at the mentality that created this fascinating lens:

I was born into a small business, I believe that small business and entrepreneurs are the backbone of America and what has made us great. They are what made us great and will save us in these unsure times, when corporations are outsources to any place where the labor is cheap.

James Chartrand wrote in the article The Savvy Copywriter’s Advantage: Creative Storytelling on Copyblogger:

Entire websites can be stories too. The About Us page is a great place to start. The Home page of any site tells a story too (and if it doesn’t, it probably isn’t doing very well in the conversion department).

Each page leads a reader from one story to another:

• Who these people are.
• How these people can help.
• Why you need these people.
• Why you should buy.

Finally from a post at Jew Point 0 are some good questions for organizations to ask themselves as they attempt to tell their stories in About Us pages or otherwise:

• In what ways does your online presence depict your organization’s story?
• How does it reflect the diversity of your membership and its experiences?
• What are the values, beliefs, and rituals projected in your online narrative?
• How would someone new to your community — a new “reader” — interpret your organization’s story?
• And in what ways can we facilitate connecting these stories to the larger, ever expanding, intricately interwoven community?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve been interested in entrepreneurial storytelling since I taught an entrepreneurial seminar using storytelling as the central theme.

If I were teaching it now, I might direct my students to a blog entry and podcast by author and marketing expert Lisa Johnson of Reach Group Consulting offering a framework for entrepreneurial stories:

1. Start by identifying a defining story that either highlights the market need for your business or your personal abilities.

2. Next, explain your personal connection to the business. Describe how your business allows you to use your talents, pursue your passions, and/or work with people you care about.

3. Finally, show how your background and past experiences have brought you to where you are today. What key markers affected your decision and ability to run your own business, such as trial-and-error, mistakes, serendipity, etc.

These guidelines also translate to the job-seeker telling the story of how he or she meets the employer’s needs, how he or she uses his or her passion in his or her career, and how the job-seeker has arrived at where he or she is today.

Also on the subject of entrepreneurial storytelling, the office of NASSCOM (a global trade body with more than 1,200 members, of which 250+ are global companies from across US, UK, EU and A-Pac) in Chanakyapuri, New Delhi, India, holds experience-sharing talks on the second Friday of every month.

The idea is to get people from emerging companies to share their best practices in the areas of technology, marketing, business strategy, entrepreneurship etc., so that others could learn from them without having to reinvent the wheel.

No need to travel to New Delhi if you live far away, however; NASSCOM archives the sessions.

Yet another posting about entrepreneurial storytelling is from a blog post in MarketingDeviant by David Kam:

Practice on telling a good story about your business (how it started, why you are doing it and the twist and turns of your business) because many legends and old stories have survived due to great storytellers. A good story about your business makes it very marketable. Pave a way of success through storytelling about your business.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.