Whether we are storytellers, story practitioners, journalers, writers, bloggers, memoirists, or just folks seeking personal growth and self-actualization, we can always use good story prompts for inspiration. Here are three I liked that I came across recently:
Tell the story of the most inspiring, influential storyteller you’ve known. This one comes from the blog, The Sunlit Desk. The blogger, “Sharon,” also offers a List of prompts & exercises.
Write your life legacy in three lines of 14 characters each. This one, in the ilk of the six-word memoir or the Twitter story (if there really is such a thing), comes from Brickstorming, a PDF template at Creativity Portal (and introduced here). Here’s the actual prompt:
A world museum is creating an exhibit of “wisdom bricks” featuring unique quotes and bits of wisdom from 1,000 people from all over the world. You’ve been chosen as one of the people to participate in this legacy-making exhibit — you get to make your mark! What will you impart to future generations?
The brick engraving company has some parameters: Your message must be contained within 3 lines with 14 characters each (spaces and punctuation count).
Why did homo sapiens survive while Neanderthals didn’t? Thriller novelist Lee Child wrote not long ago that it was because homo sapiens developed language.
“But then something strange happened,” Child wrote. “We invented fiction. We started talking about things that hadn’t happened to people that didn’t exist.”
Speculating, based on various bits of evidence, that storytelling may be 100,000 years old, Child asked: “Why? Why tell stories?” Noting that “no new behavior could possibly become established unless, at least to some slight degree, it made it more likely that we would still be alive in the morning,” Child argued that storytelling kept homo sapiens alive “by managing our fear.” The thinking, Child posited, may have gone like this:
“Things happen to people like you, but they’re survivable. In other words — don’t worry. Things turn out OK.”
An ability to invent and absorb stories … would have helped early humans work out “what if” scenarios without risking their lives, pass along survival tips and build capacities for understanding other people around the campfire. The best storytellers and best listeners would have had slightly greater odds of survival, giving future generations a higher percentage of good storytellers and listeners, and so on.
Then storytelling bolstered human progress: “We started telling stories about clan members who ventured out of the valley and came back a week or a month or a year later with tales of what lies beyond the hill. We legitimized exploration, and adventure, and progress,” Child wrote.
Blogger’s Note: A Storied Career is participating in a project to publish the same blog entry — this one — across many blogs simultaneously today. An accompanying entry, Storytelling Edition: Ways to Support Charity Through Social Media, looks at ways to use storytelling in social media to support charity.
Social media is about connecting people and providing the tools necessary to have a conversation. That global conversation is an extremely powerful platform for spreading information and awareness about social causes and issues. That’s one of the reasons charities can benefit so greatly from being active on social media channels. But you can also do a lot to help your favorite charity or causes you are passionate about through social media.
Below is a list of 10 ways you can use social media to show your support for issues that are important to you. If you can think of any other ways to help charities via social web tools, please add them in the comments. If you’d like to retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways.
1. Write a Blog Post
Blogging is one of the easiest ways you can help a charity or cause you feel passionate about. Almost everyone has an outlet for blogging these days — whether that means a site running WordPress, an account at LiveJournal, or a blog on MySpace or Facebook. By writing about issues you’re passionate about, you’re helping to spread awareness among your social circle. Because your friends or readers already trust you, what you say is influential.
You should also consider taking part in Blog Action Day, a once a year event in which thousands of blogs pledge to write at least one post about a specific social cause (last year it was fighting poverty). Blog Action Day will be on October 15 this year.
2. Share Stories with Friends
Another way to spread awareness among your social graph is to share links to blog posts and news articles via sites like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, and even through email. Your network of friends is likely interested in what you have to say, so you have influence wherever you’ve gathered a social network.
You’ll be doing charities you support a great service when you share links to their campaigns, or to articles about causes you care about.
3. Follow Charities on Social Networks
In addition to sharing links to articles about issues you come across, you should also follow charities you support on the social networks where they are active. By increasing the size of their social graph, you’re increasing the size of their reach. When your charities tweet or post information about a campaign or a cause, statistics or a link to a good article, consider retweeting that post on Twitter, liking it on Facebook, or blogging about it.
Following charities on social media sites is a great way to keep in the loop and get updates, and it’s a great way to help the charity increase its reach by spreading information to your friends and followers.
You can follow the Summer of Social Good Charities:
Another way you can show your support for the charities you care about is to rally around them on awareness hubs like Change.org, Care2, or the Facebook Causes application. These are social networks or applications specifically built with non-profits in mind. They offer special tools and opportunities for charities to spread awareness of issues, take action, and raise money.
It’s important to follow and support organizations on these sites because they’re another point of access for you to gather information about a charity or cause, and because by supporting your charity you’ll be increasing their overall reach. The more people they have following them and receiving their updates, the greater the chance that information they put out will spread virally.
5. Find Volunteer Opportunities
Using social media online can help connect you with volunteer opportunities offline, and according to web analytics firm Compete, traffic to volunteering sites is actually up sharply in 2009. Two of the biggest sites for locating volunteer opportunities are VolunteerMatch, which has almost 60,000 opportunities listed, and Idealist.org, which also lists paying jobs in the non-profit sector, in addition to maintaining databases of both volunteer jobs and willing volunteers.
For those who are interested in helping out when volunteers are urgently needed in crisis situations, check out HelpInDisaster.org, a site which helps register and educate those who want to help during disasters so that local resources are not tied up directing the calls of eager volunteers. Teenagers, meanwhile, should check out DoSomething.org, a site targeted at young adults seeking volunteer opportunities in their communities.
6. Embed a Widget on Your Site
Many charities offer embeddable widgets or badges that you can use on your social networking profiles or blogs to show your support. These badges generally serve one of two purposes (or both). They raise awareness of an issue and offer up a link or links to additional information. And very often they are used to raise money.
Mashable’s Summer of Social Good campaign, for example, has a widget that does both. The embeddable widget, which was custom built using Sprout (the creators of ChipIn), can both collect funds and offer information about the four charities the campaign supports.
7. Organize a Tweetup
You can use online social media tools to organize offline events, which are a great way to gather together like-minded people to raise awareness, raise money, or just discuss an issue that’s important to you. Getting people together offline to learn about an important issue can really kick start the conversation and make supporting the cause seem more real.
As mentioned, blog posts are great, but a picture really says a thousand words. The web has become a lot more visual in recent years and there are now a large number of social tools to help you express yourself using video. When you record a video plea or call to action about your issue or charity, you can make your message sound more authentic and real. You can use sites like 12seconds.tv, Vimeo, and YouTube to easily record and spread your video message.
Last week, the Summer of Social Good campaign encouraged people to use video to show support for charity. The #12forGood campaign challenged people to submit a 12 second video of themselves doing something for the Summer of Social Good. That could be anything, from singing a song to reciting a poem to just dancing around like a maniac — the idea was to use the power of video to spread awareness about the campaign and the charities it supports.
If you’re more into watching videos than recording them, Givzy.com enables you to raise funds for charities like Unicef and St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital by sharing viral videos by e-mail.
9. Sign or Start a Petition
There aren’t many more powerful ways to support a cause than to sign your name to a petition. Petitions spread awareness and, when successfully carried out, can demonstrate massive support for an issue. By making petitions viral, the social web has arguably made them even more powerful tools for social change. There are a large number of petition creation and hosting web sites out there. One of the biggest is The Petition Site, which is operated by the social awareness network Care2, or PetitionOnline.com, which has collected more than 79 million signatures over the years.
Petitions are extremely powerful, because they can strike a chord, spread virally, and serve as a visual demonstration of the support that an issue has gathered. Social media fans will want to check out a fairly new option for creating and spreading petitions: Twitition, an application that allows people to create, spread, and sign petitions via Twitter.
10. Organize an Online Event
Social media is a great way to organize offline, but you can also use online tools to organize effective online events. That can mean free form fund raising drives, like the Twitter-and-blog-powered campaign to raise money for a crisis center in Illinois last month that took in over $130,000 in just two weeks. Or it could mean an organized “tweet-a-thon” like the ones run by the 12for12k group, which aims to raise $12,000 each month for a different charity.
In March, 12for12k ran a 12-hour tweet-a-thon, in which any donation of at least $12 over a 12 hour period gained the person donating an entry into a drawing for prizes like an iPod Touch or a Nintendo Wii Fit. Last month, 12for12k took a different approach to an online event by holding a more ambitious 24-hour live video-a-thon, which included video interviews, music and sketch comedy performances, call-ins, and drawings for a large number of prizes given out to anyone who donated $12 or more.
Bonus: Think Outside the Box
Social media provides almost limitless opportunity for being creative. You can think outside the box to come up with all sorts of innovative ways to raise money or awareness for a charity or cause. When Drew Olanoff was diagnosed with cancer, for example, he created Blame Drew’s Cancer, a campaign that encourages people to blow off steam by blaming his cancer for bad things in their lives using the Twitter hashtag #BlameDrewsCancer. Over 16,000 things have been blamed on Drew’s cancer, and he intends to find sponsors to turn those tweets into donations to LIVESTRONG once he beats the disease.
Or check out Nathan Winters, who is biking across the United States and documenting the entire trip using social media tools, in order to raise money and awareness for The Nature Conservancy.
The number of innovative things you can do using social media to support a charity or spread information about an issue is nearly endless. Can you think of any others? Please share them in the comments.
Special thanks to VPS.net
A special thanks to VPS.net, who are donating $100 to the Summer of Social Good for every signup they receive this week.
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About the “10 Ways” Series
The “10 Ways” Series was originated by Max Gladwell. This is the second simultaneous blog post in the series. The first ran on more than 80 blogs, including Mashable. Among other things, it is a social media experiment and the exploration of a new content distribution model. You can follow Max Gladwell on Twitter.
This entry is in conjunction with the multi-blog campaign, 10 Ways to Support Charity Through Social Media, which A Storied Career is participating in. Some of the 10 Ways mentioned are already story-driven — such as sharing stories with others and supporting causes on “awareness hubs” (because one of the ways these hubs raise awareness is though stories), Here, I talk about more story-related ways to support charity through social media:
Garner support for your charity (or a charity you believe in) through storytelling. As I’ve mentioned ad nauseum in this space, Andy Goodman is the best-known evangelist for helping nonprofits gain support through stories. He and many others hammer home the point that data points and stats don’t work nearly as well to endear an audience to a cause as stories do. Learn more here.
Collect and share stories of those affected by your cause. Some recent discoveries that effectively share these stories: Fonografia Collective, which brings “local and international stories about human rights and social issues to a wider audience. By combining traditional approaches with multimedia storytelling, we focus on how important global issues like development, economic trends, health care, immigration, or poverty affect people’s everyday lives” (one of the collective’s stories is pictured at right); the StoryTelling & Organizing Project (STOP), a community project collecting and sharing stories about everyday people taking action to end interpersonal violence; the Digital Media and Learning Hub of the Global Fund for Children, which put on a “workshop … to give youth the tools to document best practices used by grassroots groups and to provide youth with a medium through which they are able to express and share their own perspectives” (the foregoing link takes visitors to the videos created in the workshop); and the Stories and Experiences section of Brown Bagging It for Calgary’s Kids (link goes to “Joanne’s Story”), which prepares lunches for hungry children in Calgary’s schools.
Tell compelling stories with video. The 10 Ways entry lists video as one of the ways to support charity. While telling your charity’s story in video is effective, other compelling stories, like this one from the Peruvian Cancer Foundation get the message across, too.
In what other ways might we use story to support charity through social media?
It’s time for another one of my roundups of storytelling news and views that have been experiencing considerable buzz in the Twitterverse. My usual buzz test is that an item continues to be re-tweeted by multiple people (not that all re-tweeted items are buzz-worthy, in my opinion). If these much-re-tweeted items align with what I like to cover in A Storied Career, I list them here every month or so. Here’s the storytelling buzz from the Twitterverse since my last update:
“We Operate Best Together: Mapping the Stories of Social Change & Innovation Worldwide,” was a much-re-tweeted project, in part because its founder, Morgan Sully (pictured), was trying to reach a fundraising goal on site called Kickstarter, so he tweeted a great deal about the project and asked others to as well. He met the goal — $1,500 from 32 people. The project asks the question, “How is social change made in spaces where media, technology and creative people meet?” Sully asked backers to “help [him] tell the story this summer.”
Sometimes items don’t really get re-tweeted all that much, but I just think they’re cool, like this quote attributed to Gloria Steinem by @randomdeanna: “Humans have been storytelling for 100,000 years around the campfire; the media is now our campfire” or this thought by @Darrell_Nelson: “Storytelling and blogging [are] the ubiquitous wallpaper of the postmodern era.”
Storytelling-in-nonprofits evangelist Andy Goodman is quoted as saying, “Make your mission statement a story. People identify with other people. Storytelling helps us remember,” at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service. I would be really interested in seeing mission statements that could be considered a story. Anyone have any nominations?
An item in the Christian Post Reporter by Lillian Kwon, “Improving the Storytelling of the Gospel,” garnered attention. Kwon reported on Ben Arment, who is bringing together “six ‘master’ communicators of the Gospel to one stage for what he calls a ‘theatrical conference experience.'” Further,
The fall event, called “Story,” will feature music, drama, comedy and interactive exchanges with attendees. The goal is to create a place where Gospel communicators can be inspired to be better and more effective at what they do.
Arment apparently feels most preachers deliver the Gospel in a dry, academic manner.
Much re-tweeted was this article from Variety, “Transmedia storytelling is future of biz.” The article notes that transmedia storytelling is “a new tool [that] has emerged to help those who want to extend film and TV properties across multiple platforms” and defines the tool as “developing a piece of intellectual property in a consistent manner across multiple media platforms.”
Not exactly a new concept to many readers of this blog was the buzzed-about article on Forbes.com, “The CEO As Storyteller In Chief,” in which Sangeeth Varghese cites Howard Schultz of Starbucks and Bill Gates as CEOs who’ve told a good story and states: “A CEO who has a great story and tells it has a much easier time reaching out to people, connecting to them and creating a sustainable community of them, than anyone who relies entirely on data points and charts has.”
… we are all wired as storytellers. The amazing thing is we’re all born as storytellers and story-listeners and somehow we don’t venerate its value. It’s only later in our life that we … wonder why this [leadership strategy] is working or why it’s not working. My mission is to … empower [people] to be better storytellers [and better] story listeners for the purpose of realizing their own success….
There wasn’t enough to Chris Albrect’s blog entry, “For Online Storytelling, What Is “Participation,” Anyways?” for me to really grasp it, but it sure did get re-tweeted. The entry is a brief rumination based on Albrecht’s participation on a panel at a conference that discussed the “evolving nature of participation in online storytelling.”
Practically, empathy is created through storytelling, which is not only the most successful remote means of creating social empathy, but has actually been the engine of social/cultural liberalization and change. I will demonstrate both the positive and negative affects on empathy through the increasing reliance we have on transhuman media technologies and how I believe storytelling is the key to empathy creation.
How can you develop “dramatic” stories and how can you share them in a way that promotes trust and builds successful collaboration? As well, it is important to ask how to shift the organization’s narrative from the typical rehashing of problems to an inspiring, aspirational narrative representing the culture we want to create?
And … more than five weeks after my last report on storytelling buzz in the Twitterverse, at which time people were gushing en masse about the Pixar movie, Up, people are still gushing about the amazing storytelling in the film. A good interview with some of the key players is It’s Gotta Be the Storytelling: The Makers of Up Discuss the Secret of Pixar’s Success.
Finally, I spotted two more oft-re-tweeted items — real gems, in fact — but I’m saving them for my next video and/or visual storytelling roundup. Stay tuned.
Here I am, once again beating my drum about the “storytelling resume” that I am convinced must someday emerge — and that I believe many signs point to.
I’ve written here about a number of concepts, mostly suggested by recruiters, that signal a desire for the resume to evolve into a new form.
Now, this is not entirely a new idea. Newspapers have long carried a “Positions Wanted” section in their classified sections. Today, people advertise their cleaning, babysitting, and handyperson services in such ads.
Roberts, who doesn’t suggest that the job-wanted description replace the resume but rather supplement it, provides this description:
Anyone who reads your job wanted description should know immediately what your perfect job looks like. When they read this they should know what you do (and have done) well and how you will succeed in this job. There should be no ambiguity. In this case, you are going to be very specific about your expertise.
He suggests that the job-wanted description would include:
ideal job title — a role that you’ve done and done well.
a good summary of what you would like to do.
background information as to why you are in the market and looking.
A job-responsibilities section in which you get into specific details.
Roberts didn’t say what this description would look like. Although several comments had been posted, they seem to have disappeared. One comment asked how the job-wanted description would differ from a resume objective statement. I asked what the job-wanted description would look like.
A job-wanted description is counter to commonly dispensed job-search advice not to be self-serving — in other words, don’t tell what the employer (or position) can do for you, tell what you can do for the employer. But perhaps it’s part of the new perspective that social media has brought to recruiting and the job search.
In storytelling terms, a job-wanted description could be a “future story” that would enable an employer to picture you performing in exactly the kind of job in which you would most excel.
So let’s review some of the other story-related suggestions for resume replacements or components thereof that recruiters have hinted at and I’ve reported on:
Profiles, whether profiles on already existing social-media venues such as LinkedIn or Facebook, or specialized profiles on job and career sites.
Perhaps the elusive Storytelling Resume will incorporate elements from some or all of these concepts.
And one more sign on the horizon, a new site called BriteTab, which will have a beta release this month, claims to be “changing the face of resumes.” Its tagline is “Resumes with Personality.” Virtually no information is available on its Web site, but you can sign up to be informed of the beta release. I don’t know if this concept is related to storytelling, but it will be interesting to find out.
One of my favorite TV shows, especially in the summer (and I am so psyched that it will this year be shown in the fall as well), is “So You Think You Can Dance,” a dance competition along the lines of “American Idol,” but with much more heart. My lifelong secret ambition has been to be a dancer, though I ruled that out early on because I am the world’s worst kinesthetic learner.
Over the five seasons of the show, the judges have always seemed to give more positive critiques to the young dancers whose choreographers gave them a story to dance to. The show always presents a clip of the dancers working with the choreographer, who usually reveals the story behind the dance. Sometimes there is no story. Ballroom dance tends to be story-less, though not always. Some genres — Broadway, hop-hop, lyrical — almost always have a story.
I find it fascinating to speculate: Would I be able to see and interpret the story if I did not hear the choreographer describe it in the rehearsal clip? Now, there’s a great exercise: Mute the TV during the rehearsal clips, watch the dance performances, and see what story the dance tells you.
Can you guess the story the dancers pictured are portraying?
They are Brandon and Janine playing thieves in the midst of a caper choreographed by the brilliant Wade Robson.
Regular readers know I am spending the summer (and into October) in gorgeous Kettle Falls, WA. What I may not have mentioned is that we’re living in an RV while building our house here. The house will not be habitable until fall at the earliest.
As you might imagine, RV living can be rather cramped — even for two adults and a 40-lb. Staffordshire bull terrier — especially when we not only live here but run several Web-based business ventures out of the RV.
My workspace is about 4 inches from our bed when I’m sitting at my desk, so I don’t have a lot of space to spread out and consider materials for A Storied Career. I can spread them on the bed, but then I have to move them every night when we retire.
Today I set up an ancillary workspace inside the (very) unfinished house. This is where I will perform “triage” on materials I’m considering for A Storied Career. I love this setup — with the comfy chair (that even has little pockets for my favorite kinds of pens and stapler), the table to spread out the materials, sunlight streaming in, and cool breezes blowing in from the Columbia River.
As I began doing triage in there this morning, I already felt more passionate, fired up, and excited about future blog entries than I did while reviewing materials in the RV. My workspace and tools are exceedingly important to me.
Bloggers, writers, storytellers, practitioners — to what extent does your workspace influence your effectiveness and creativity? Is it uber important like mine is — or does it not really make a big difference to you where you work?
Q: To what extent do you feel the current economic crisis increases the need for financial storytelling? How might business be improved, assuming lessons learned from the current situation, by better storytelling?
A: The current economic crisis came about because the relevant stories were at best ignored and at worst deliberately covered up. The complexities of the financial instruments which started this cycle, such as sub-prime mortgages, derivatives, etc., are beyond the knowledge of most people. Yet in many cases it is these same people, who have had to take a pay cut, or lost their jobs and in too many cases their homes. Do they not deserve an explanation? Not highbrow, not technical jargon but a clear honest story? In this context, financial storytelling has never been more critical.
More positively, I believe the way out of the financial crisis will come though entrepreneurs — people who through changing circumstances have been forced to innovate. Not only will they produce innovative products but the way they do business will also be innovative. This can be truly inspirational and we should attempt to share this story as much as we can. Financial Storytelling can help communicate this message and also build trust. Inspiration will lead to confidence, which ultimately is what we all need for the future.
Since this week’s Q&A with Stewart Marshall focuses on “financial storytelling” and the stories behind numbers and data, I thought I’d look at another view on this topic.
Storytelling is receiving lots of much-needed attention these days in nonprofits. I’m constantly seeing blog entries and webinars on storytelling for nonprofits. One of my heroes, Andy Goodman, is a major evangelist on this topic. The bottom line is that data don’t do much toward getting people to support causes; stories do.
But as a couple of other recent writings point out, numbers still have a place, and they can even be woven into stories. An entry on Impactmax titled “Social math: Yes…data can tell stories too” talks about “social math” as “a way of presenting numbers in a real-life, familiar context that helps people see the story behind them.”
Without a story, your data can be misinterpreted in a way that counters the message you’re trying to get across.
Once a certain perspective is established in our minds, it will trump the data — even making us deaf and blind to new numbers. In other words, unless we tell a “sticky” story with our numbers, some other default story that might not fit our message will kick in.
Sightline institute then offers these three tips for making your numbers count:
Hitch numbers to a story — paint a vivid picture, then back it up
Illustrate solutions rather than focusing only on the size of a problem
Become a “social math” whiz — relate to what’s familiar and concrete
Here’s the example given for the first point:
On average, our food is traveling over 1500 miles before it gets to our plates – the distance from Seattle to Chicago. Long distance travel decreases food’s nutritional value, wastes valuable energy in shipping and storage, and undermines the economic strength of our local family farms.
Now, some might argue with Sightline’s contention that “there’s a complete story here.” Here’s how the institute supports that argument: “Our food is the main character, making a long journey across the country. The nutritional and environmental costs inherent in the food system are underlined while at the same time the importance of our community’s connection (or lack thereof) to local farms is reinforced.”
On the second piece, Sightline offers an example it describes as “not so good” and then gives a better version of the example. I agree, but I disagree with the rationale for why the better reason is better.
The not-so-good version: “Replace 3 frequently used light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs. Save 300 lbs. of carbon dioxide and $60 per year.”
The better version:
Lots of energy goes to waste in office buildings each night with computers and lights left on while the city sleeps. Lights Out San Francisco — an event organized to illustrate an easy cost-cutting climate solution — estimated that turning lights out in San Francisco for even one hour could save as much as 15 percent of the energy consumed on an average Saturday night. During a similar event in Sydney, Australia, 2.2 million people participated. One hour of lights out meant that the atmosphere was spared 24.86 tons of carbon dioxide — three times the amount an average American produces in an entire year (or 48,613 cars driving for one hour). Think of how much we could save if we turned out the lights more often — or better yet, if systems were in place to automatically shut off unnecessary lights in entire cities.
To me, the better version is better because it’s a story, while the not-so-good version really isn’t.
The “social math” piece “unifies the narrative and the numbers — bringing them down to earth … by blending them with compelling stories and by providing comparisons with familiar things. It works by analogy.”
Sightline gives several examples, of which my favorite is this one:
If every person in the U.S. were to change their page margins from 1.25 to .75, we would save a forest around the size of Rhode Island each year.
It drives me nuts that the Microsoft Word default margin is set at 1.25″ and most people don’t think to reset it! (However, I’m not sure any of Sightline’s social-math examples are actually stories.)
Footnote: Sightline Institute is of particular interest to me because it focuses on the Pacific Northwest, my current place of residence. And I learned something new: “Cascadia” is a term for the Pacific Northwest.
the ilk of the six-word memoir or the Twitter story (if there really is such a thing), comes from Brickstorming, a PDF template at Creativity Portal (and introduced here). Here’s the actual prompt:
Social media provides almost limitless opportunity for being creative. You can think outside the box to come up with all sorts of innovative ways to raise money or awareness for a charity or cause. When Drew Olanoff was diagnosed with cancer, for example, he created 
A special thanks to 
