by Jacqueline Koch | May 10, 2017 |
The story of how two women devised a grand plan to help level the playing field for women
We first met Amy Nelson at a workshop we hosted on messaging and storytelling at the end of last year. She told us about this crazy idea to start a co-working space for women. A few months later, she called to tell us that their crazy idea had grown a bit (a lot) and she was ready for us to help her develop The Riveter’s message in time for the launch of the first of 20 planned locations – in Seattle on May 1. This is their story.
The Riveter is founded in a story that women in the workplace know well. We’ve worked hard to break through arbitrary, man-made barriers to claim our seat at the table. In the end, we realized that there was only one way for our voices to be heard, to make a difference and to create the life we want. We had to build a brand new—fundamentally different—table.
That’s The Riveter: an inspired collaborative workspace built by women, for women.
We want to support women to take bigger risks: to write a business plan, to pitch a really smart idea, to raise her first round of venture funding, to launch a company. We’re an ally to every woman, anywhere, and wherever she may find herself in her career. We’ve created a community of support so she can start her second—or third—act. We offer a network of resources so she can come back from years at home raising her children or taking care of others. We are a source of expertise and empowerment so she can off-ramp from her corporate job and on-ramp to her next successful venture, as a freelancer, a small business owner or any role she chooses!
Women are no strangers to hard work and accomplishment. But we’ve paid the price with self-sacrifice and burnout. We’re changing that. Providing women with a great space to work isn’t about ping pong tables and beer kegs. It is about redefining the workplace guided by our fierce conviction that women are strongest when we take care of our minds and our bodies. The Riveter creates a new way to work, integrating wellness into our lives, simply and seamlessly. With yoga and meditation on site, just steps from your desk, we offer the space to breathe, stretch, pause and build self-care into each day.
Yes, we are equal, but we are not the same. And women deserve a place to define success on their own terms.
The Riveter is more than a collaborative workspace, it’s a movement. We aren’t celebrities, we are working mothers. We are not a club, we are a community and we are entrepreneurs in the broadest sense of the term. We own businesses and build brands. We give to good causes with our time, talent and treasure. We manage households and lead our nation’s youth. There is strength in numbers and to truly amplify our voices, we intend to share what we know and who we know. We welcome everyone, including men. We want all to have a place at our table: The Riveter.
Boost! Collective is a story-driven marketing and communications firm. We work collaboratively to discover, create and tell powerful stories that driven authentic engagement.
by Jacqueline Koch | Apr 14, 2017 |
By Janinne Brunyee
It may not be sexy, but messaging may be one of the most important foundational tasks your team will ever take on. This is true whether you’re launching a new company or a new product or service. Why? Because messaging allows you to communicate the value of what you are delivering to each key audience simply and clearly: investors, customers, partners, employees and more.
Your message allows you to answer the question why? Why should your audience care about your offering? What transformation are you enabling for them? It also allows you to explain briefly how you are delivering value and what tangible results your audience can expect.
There are other reasons to develop messaging as well. A well thought out messaging framework that has been socialized within your organization ensures that everyone is in effect “singing off the same hymn sheet” when asked the question: What does your company do?
One client provided a great example: “If you ask each of the 16 people who work in this group what we do, each one will give a different response.” The impact, internally and externally can be quite significant as customers receive different messages and employees are not really sure what they are working on and why.
Another reason for creating a formalized messaging framework is that it acts as a foundation for creating downstream content – everything from customer presentations, web copy, email templates, press release boilerplates and more. Not only does a messaging framework allow you to spin up content quickly, but it ensures that all content consistently communicates the value that your offering delivers.
Messaging: a three-step process
In reality, the exercise of creating messaging is simultaneously a science and an art. At Boost! Collective, we have developed a methodology, the science, that is a three-step process that starts with uncovering your unique value proposition.
First, we gather all existing audience-facing materials, if any exist, so we can see how you have been talking about your offering to date. Then, we review the websites of three competitors. Our goal is to uncover their implicit messaging so we can develop messaging for you that is unique. We also want to understand what category your competitor’s offerings falls into. This is particularly important if you are creating a new category or are trying to stand out in a crowded field. It’s not enough, for example, to say that your offering is a predictive analytics platform. Clearly, this is too broad and barely gets you into the ballpark. You need to add a few descriptors: Financial performance analytics platform, for example.
Defining your unique value
We then conduct a value proposition workshop with your team during which we ask a series of structured questions designed to uncover three unique value promises you deliver to your audience. These value promises are supported by concrete features or services that allow you to deliver on each promise.
Finally, we interview three people who are representative of your targeted audience – customers, investors, partners etc. We ask them similar questions so that we can validate whether they value the same things that your team identified.
Now comes the art.
We take these inputs and use them to fill out our Messaging Framework template, starting with the three value promises and their supporting points. We also identify two or three audience challenges that each promise resolves.
Delivering an elevator pitch
Then, the magic happens. We write the elevator pitch which ends up being a bit of a “paint-by-numbers’” exercise that draws on the promises, the supporting points and the challenges.
The elevator pitch ends up being 3 paragraphs. The first, ideally, is a single sentence of around 25 words. This sentence should provide the following information:
- The name of your offering
- The category for your offering (i.e. marketing analytics platform)
- The audience you are addressing
- The value you deliver (one or more of your value promises)
How you deliver the value (what your offering does)
This first paragraph should communicate everything you need to convey if you only have limited time and space. It should stand alone.
The second and third paragraphs should each convey a bit more information. By the time you’ve finished, you should have used all three value promises and as many supporting points as are useful. Together, all three paragraphs should total about 100 words.
While this process may seem daunting, it can be completed step-by step. Bringing in impartial outsiders to lead the process who have no skin in the game can be extremely valuable. The key step is to define the unique value that your offering delivers as honestly as possible. This is not the time to be drinking any Kool Aid!
Whether you are a startup, an existing company launching a new product or it’s time to refresh the messaging for an existing product, we would love to work with you. We believe messaging is the first step on the journey to driving deep and authentic connections with your audiences. The next step? Using storytelling to bring your messaging
BOOST! COLLECTIVE is a story-driven marketing and communications firm. We work collaboratively to discover, create and tell powerful stories that drive deep engagement.
by Jacqueline Koch | Mar 28, 2017 |
By Christopher Ross
Few people dispute the effectiveness of storytelling. Whether it’s an anecdote of how a story silenced a room filled with people, or how neuroscientists use MRI’s to demonstrate how our brains light up and react to stories. From Harvard Business Review to independent labs, there is a tremendous amount of research underway to continue to explain the efficacy of stories. However, I would suggest this is something we intuitively understand because there is a very simple explanation: A good story can capture an audience.
Yet there is even something more basic at work. Stories can feed a need. A compelling story, especially a great fictional story, can be the perfect diversion to all that is going on in the world today. Perhaps that’s why for the past two years in a row, adult non-fiction book sales are up. And live action miniseries are on the rise with more and more cable channels like AMC and FX and streaming services like Netflix and Amazon entering the space. They are all delivering action and entertainment to a hungry audience that wants a story.
And why not, we all survived an unrelenting bombardment of news during the election season, only to find that as 2017 unfolds, the majority of the news we are consuming continues to be taxing, challenging and vexing. Day in and day out, the steady drip of news feels unrelenting. As Susan Malone says in This Is Why Your Brain Needs A Diversion Right Now, “Have you ever noticed that the more you get caught up in the chaos, the more chaos comes bounding in?”
The distraction of a good story
The challenge is where to turn your attention when you want to relax? The answer for many is to dive into a satisfying story. Nothing provides a better antidote to the news stories today than to turn to a gripping, engaging fictional story. Stories, especially fictional stories, embrace their license to create a narrative that is purely for entertainment, where it is less daunting to decipher who you can trust or what you should believe. While all story genres are great, few would argue that action stories are especially effective at engaging your brain and leveraging all of the audience’s senses.
Perhaps the undisputed king of all action stories today that provides a great diversion and entertains, is HBO’s medieval-fantasy drama series, Game of Thrones (GOT). It is clearly resonating with a huge audience and holds two world records from the Guinness Book of World Records: the most pirated TV program ever, and the largest TV drama simulcast. By the end of its sixth season in 2016, each episode had an average of 25M viewers.
If GOT tells us anything, it’s that the power of a fantastical escape story is undeniable. In 2016, Game of Thrones became the most awarded series in Emmy Awards history. Why? Because GOT is a storyline that follows the traditional hero’s journey, several hero’s as a matter of fact, and it is often challenging to know who the hero is and where their journey will end up. It’s a story that keeps you on your toes and reminds you nothing should be assumed to be off-limits. And it is that unpredictability that keeps the brain so engaged, every cortex lights up and as Paul Zak, a neurologist says, “an amazing neural ballet in which a story line changes the activity of people’s brains” occurs with every episode.
Villains and heroes apply here
What makes GOT particularly satisfying as a diversion, is villains are clearly evil and identifiable. At a time when the news cycles make it impossible to know what you can you trust, it is nice to have some normalcy in terms of your villains and heroes. Few would argue that Cersei Lannister, the Queen Regent of the Seven Kingdoms in the GOT storyline, complete in her flowing robes, long blond hair and soft, almost haunting voice, must be one of the most exquisite female villain on television, even if she is in a mythical medieval period.
So, while all the studies and research are very helpful, they really don’t tell us anything that we don’t already know. We’re all suckers for a good story. With the right amount of narrative or magical intrigue, you can make just about anybody forget the news and noise of the day and lose themselves in a good story!
Boost! Collective is a story-driven marketing and communications firm. We work collaboratively to discover, create and tell the powerful stories that drive deep engagement with your audiences.
by Jacqueline Koch | Mar 2, 2017 |
By Janinne Brunyee
A new imperative
At Boost! Collective, we believe it has never been more important for organizations – whether they’re startups, established firms or nonprofits – to forge close, personal and authentic connections with their key audiences. This requires moving beyond facts, figures and features. It means engaging with your audience’s head and their heart. And there’s no better way to do that than with a story.
While all organizations have many stories to tell, perhaps one of the most powerful is the story of their founder. It allows the organization to reveal the founder’s personal journey, their values and the big idea that energized their decision to create the organization in the first place.
Connecting with values
As the millennial generation continues to be a key audience for many organizations, the need to find ways to connect at the values level becomes increasingly urgent. According to a recent Forbes article, millennials as a consumer group care about what they perceive to be genuine and authentic. This interest falls somewhere between a purely aesthetic preference and a search for honesty and truth. It’s a powerful force for motivating millennial customers.
There are a number of well-known examples of founder stories that have been integrated into the fiber of an organization’s values-driven message: Blake Mycoskie of TOMS shoes and Jessica Alba’s Honest company.
As a story-driven marketing and communications firm, our team is passionate about working with mission-driven organizations and the bold individuals who found them. One of our favorites is Aimee Robinson, founder of EcoBalanza.
Big idea: Taking care of the environment
Aimee founded EcoBalanza seven years ago to be the anchor for her personal, philosophical and professional equilibrium. The mission: to discover how to create a sofa with integrity. To reach her destination, to build a small, custom, truly toxin-free and sustainable furniture design studio in Seattle, she had to blaze her own trail and draw her own roadmap.
We have told Aimee’s powerful story in a number of formats including on the About us page of her website, a case study that showcases the work we did for her company and through a blog post that provides an intimate and personal experience of visiting the workshop. Here is a short extract:
“Before I leave, Aimee shows me one last thing. She brings it over cradled in two hands; the foot of a couch. It’s only about 4 inches long, hand tooled on a lathe and stained. She hands it to me, like a sacred artifact, and she’s beaming with pride. “Look at this, look at these colors, look how this stain has come out”. And she’s right, it’s beautiful. There are warm tones, cold tones, streaks of lights and darks, more complexities in this one tiny detail than in half of my apartment. “
Read the full post.
Beauty as empowerment
With enthusiasm and excitement, we are putting the finishing touches on the content for a new website for Visette, a one-of-a-kind dress shop in Seattle’s vibrant Capitol Hill district. What makes Visette special? It’s not just the beautiful dresses sourced from emerging local and international designers. It’s Visal Sam, the founder.
Visal is a woman of absolute determination and contrasts. Her drive and ambition for her career as a commodities broker, and now the creative force behind Visette, was borne of a painful childhood shaped by Cambodia’s civil war. Surrounded by hunger, brutality and tragedy, she found solace in the beautiful. “Imagine that all the people around are dressed the same, and all you see is black. This is what made me embrace color and shape,” she recalled.
“We know that beauty is only skin deep,” she acknowledged, “but we also know that you feel differently when you look good, and that’s what motivates me.” She relishes the role as a sage guide for her clients as they explore fashion beyond the box that has hemmed them in. “I think a woman who steps into something unexpected, something new, suddenly sees another side of herself.” It’s a transformation she’s witnessed many times over. This has shaped one of Visal’s fundamental convictions: “We are all inspired by beauty.”
It is Visal’s life experiences and passion for empowerment that are the key drivers for the content we are developing for www.visetteboutique.com which launches in early March.
Your founder story is potentially an unexplored treasure that could allow you to invite your audience – customers, funders, donors and more – into the heart of your organization. We would love the opportunity to work with you to tell it.
Boost! Collective is a story-driven marketing and communications firm. We work collaboratively to discover, create and tell the powerful stories that drive deep engagement with your audiences.
by Jacqueline Koch | Feb 24, 2017 |
By Jacqueline Koch
Hans Rosling, unlikely storyteller that gave data a soul and a mission
Want to understand climate trends, ocean acidification, HIV and the global disease burden, economics or pandemics? Hardly a day goes by without a mention of big data and the promise it holds. Even for those us who are daunted—the volume, complex statistical formulas and the labyrinthine spreadsheets—can understand the essential role data plays in revealing the mysteries of the world we live in. And it’s for this reason the passing of Hans Rosling is such a tremendous loss.
Best known for transforming statistics and data into colorful, dancing bubbles choreographed seamlessly across a screen, Hans Rosling, Director, Gapminder Foundation and Professor, Global Health, Karolinska Institutet, was a pioneer and unexpected storytelling master. Crunching numbers and assembling statistics, while expertly harnessing new techno-color data display technology, Rosling had a gift. And he deployed it for crafting a fantastic tale, complete with an engaging narrative arc to explain global issues such as child mortality, poverty, vaccines and income disparity. His passion for a “fact-based world view,” was matched by an off-beat sense of humor. Quirky meets convincing, he made us all fall in love with data and statistics, his bubbles and with Rosling himself.
Rosling didn’t consider himself optimist or a pessimist, but instead a “very serious possibilist.” Well known for a number of TED talks and featured in a BBC documentary for the “Joy of Stats,” Rosling created a considerable library of compelling videos. They were his megaphone.
In one TED talk he defends the washing machine as the game-changer in the industrial revolution. In another, game-show style, he and Bill Gates discuss childhood vaccines as the “demographic party trick.” Moving away from high-tech data display and bright bubbles on a screen, he managed to explain population growth using IKEA boxes. Creative and always wildly gesticulating, Rosling’s capacity to entertain—making numbers fun—was limitless. And while it may be a noble effort to try explain his videos, it’s not worth it. They generally fall into one category: “Just watch, you’ll see what I mean.”
When I saw my first Rosling video, I was hooked. It was in the midst of the Swine Flu outbreak in 2009. Hysteria, fanned by shrill media headlines, grew exponentially day by day. While only 31 people died of Swine Flu, more than 63,000 had died of TB during the same 13-day period. Guerilla style and with his laptop video web camera rolling, Rosling set red bubbles in motion, migrating across a globe. His goal: to open our eyes to both an unwarranted public health panic and recognize a far greater global health foe, TB. In the video, Rosling coined the term “news per death ratio” and chose an ironic title —“Swine Flu Alert”— to open our eyes to painful truths about our relationship with media. Watch it, you’ll see what I mean.
While Rosling was a nerdy and captivating storyteller, his bubble stories were anything but cursory. Consider his take on the worldwide advances in maternal and newborn health. In one global health summit, he explained how these issues are shaped by a plethora of converging factors: fertility rates, investments in vaccines, improved nutrition, family planning, per capita income and access to electricity. Following the narrative arc, beginning, middle and end, and magically marching backward and forward across the decades, he built in a villain—the lack of infrastructure—and a potential hero, the mobile phone technology.
Rosling’s charisma flowed only from the power of animated graphics and great imagination, but also his personal crusade, “How not to be ignorant about the world.” Fellow TED speaker, Brené Brown said “Maybe stories are just data with a soul.” In any case, it was certainly Rosling that gave data a soul.
Boost! Collective is a story-driven marketing and communications firm. We discover, create and tell the powerful stories that drive deep engagement with your audiences.
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