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.
by Jacqueline Koch | Feb 14, 2017 |
By Janinne Brunyee
“Over the years, my hair has changed a lot. I’ve done wigs, weaves and pony tails. Because it changed every week, it got to the point where my coworkers didn’t know if my hair was real or fake.”
This is how Teresa Schribner, an award-winning media teacher at Cleveland High School in Seattle started her 5-minute, 20-slide talk at Ignite Education Lab last week. Schribner was one the eleven speakers who participated in “Unexpected adventures in learning,” a special edition of Seattle Town Hall’s Ignite series hosted by The Seattle Times Education Lab.
But what does Schribner’s hair have to do with inspiring ideas in education? It turns out it was a critical part of her personal journey from trying to build a reputation as a hard teacher to building real relationships with her students.
Schribner said that like many African American women, for years, she treated her hair with toxic chemicals to assimilate to the culture around her. It had become part of her professional outfit.
“When I became a teacher,” she said, “it became about respect and I decided to grow out my natural hair.” The result was not quite what she had expected. “Instead of a big beautiful head of hair, I discovered that I had incredibly thick, comb-breaking hair. The rain was not my friend.”
As the process of growing her hair out progressed, Schribner continued to wear wigs and weaves. Eventually, once she realized that her hair was wearing her out, she nervously decided to wear her hair in all its natural glory.
Black hair matters
On her way into school on that first day, Schribner ran into a student who saw her and exclaimed “Miss Schribner!” before running off. “I was preparing myself for the worst but then later that day, she came to my classroom to tell me that she loved my natural hair and asked if I would be wearing it natural for graduation – which was many months and many potential new hairstyles away.”
When Schribner asked the student why she was required to wearing her hair as an afro, the student replied, “Us black women need to stuck together.” That’s when Schribner realized that her black hair mattered to the student.
“That conversation changed my whole teaching practice because I realized that I was being admired for something that I felt vulnerable about,” she said. Schribner said she is much more relaxed in the classroom now.
“I don’t know what happened that day, but the moment I decided to let my hair down was the moment I decided to let students in,” she said. “I know the way I look matters to them and they matter to me.”
From bad student to badass teacher
The importance of relationships as a force for learning was a key theme for many of the speakers. Rachel Wiley, secondary English teacher in the Puyallup School District shared her story about how she transitioned from ”bad kid to badass teacher.”
“The irony of the fact that I am an English teacher who failed my 9th grade English glass is not lost on me,” said Wiley. Wiley’s life as a “bad” kid changed course when she switched to an alternative high school rather than dropping out of school all together. There she met Rachel Johnson. “Ms Johnson was the first adult who believed in me. She cared about me and supported me and is still doing it 12 years later,” she said.
At college, Wiley decided she wanted to be a teacher, just like Ms Johnson. “I knew I could be a badass teacher who breaks down walls for kids.”
Now Wiley gets to give and receive new life-giving messages and can tell students that they are enough exactly the way they are.
“Where we change lives for the better, we change the world for the better and that is pretty badass,” she concluded.
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.
by Jacqueline Koch | Jan 25, 2017 |
Putting a face on one of the region’s greatest challenges
By Jacqueline Koch
“Without question we are facing one of the greatest epidemics of modern time,” stated Robert M. Bowery, Director of Clinical Services of Seattle’s Compass Housing Alliance (CHA), a non-profit providing shelter, housing and support services to the homeless population in 23 locations in the Puget Sound region.
As our federal, state, county and city governments scramble to find solutions, we are surrounded by the stark realities of homelessness every day: walking through downtown, driving along highway underpasses, jogging through city parks. More than 10,000 people are living on the streets. For each of them, every day is a struggle to find a safe place to spend the night. While right in front of us, homelessness is so pervasive that we barely see it anymore. We are losing sight of the fact homelessness is about real people—men, women, children—and their struggle serves as a daily reminder that there is no easy solution.”
How do we shine a light on the complexities of an issue many choose to turn a blind eye to? How do we ignite the genuine goodwill in a community and mobilize them to identify with and help their new neighbors who are hoping to transition from homelessness to home?
These challenges became paramount when our team began working with CHA on their upcoming project, Compass Crossing. This is an innovative, steel-frame modular housing community that brings together dignified housing and people-centered services to add 13 new housing units in Columbia City in response to Seattle’s homeless crisis. It is an important stride forward to respond rapidly to an escalating need that shows no sign of easing.
Using storytelling to engage the community
For the Compass Crossing project to succeed, it required community support and buy in. The task for Boost! was to humanize a promising project based on an innovative approach and to shifting the spotlight onto the people who will soon call it home. Our task was to effectively bring a voice to the new residents and connect them with local community.
We know emotional, authentic and original stories are a powerful catalyst to building bridges. And we know that genuine, eye-opening perspective comes from unexpected storytellers. And we found one: Justin Phillippi, program manager at CHA’s Nyer Urness House. His hard-won insight from first-hard experience shaped the first of a series—Dispatch from the Frontlines. We are pleased to share this here.
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.
by Jacqueline Koch | Dec 21, 2016 |
Seizing all opportunities on the pathway to college
By Jacqueline Koch
Boost! Collective is proud to showcase one of our clients, Rainier Scholars, which has been making a meaningful difference in the lives of young students and in our community. Our team has joined their team to shine a brighter light on Rainier Scholars, its successes and to share them with a broader audience. For a new website design which is currently in progress, we are taking a story-driven approach—with a focus on “show, don’t tell”—speaking directly to the student and putting rich imagery to work to inspire and engage. As we take this project forward, we’ve had eye-opening experiences meeting a few of the scholars. We are excited to share a little of what we’ve witnessed.
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Hands held high, excitement brimming, the students announce their questions.
“What is the student-to-teacher ratio?”
“How does your school define diversity?”
“Do you have a challenging curriculum?”
Yes, these are considerations I might have entertained as a high school senior heading to college in the fall. But these animated students aren’t in high school. They’re 6th graders.
Wait a minute. These kids are not only young, they are astoundingly articulate and very well informed about the factors that will shape the quality of their education. How did they become subject matter experts on academia at such a young age?
The distinction they all share is that they are in the Rainier Scholars program. They are participating in a 12-year program that provides access to life-changing educational opportunities. Rainier Scholars prepares students to graduate from a four-year college or university and become career professionals and leaders in our community. The group of students I’m watching today is in the first phase of a rigorous 14-month-long academic program. It is a complement to their regular schooling, hosted at South Shore K-8 in Seattle’s Rainier Beach neighborhood.
Hovering above the group of 65 students and standing on a chair, Liz Sadler is packing a lot of energy. Interim Academic Director for Rainier Scholars, she leads this weekly assembly and today’s focus is an upcoming school fair. The kids are practicing the art of introducing themselves to and interviewing with private school admissions reps. She added a few key points she wants the students to remember.
Living up to higher standards
“You’re stepping up to higher standards, you’re stepping out of your comfort zone, be sure to let everyone you meet with know that.”
So what else do all these kids have in common? They are all from low-income families. And, more than likely, they will all be the first in their family to graduate from college. They are all students of color. And as Rainier Scholars, they have all embarked on their personal 12-year, life-changing journey to go to college.
Kids entering the Rainier Scholar program hail from 35-40 different schools across three school districts: Seattle, Highline and Renton. The program begins in the fifth grade and starts with six weeks in summer school. Scholars then go on to attend after-school and weekend programs for the entire academic year. All told, they participate in an additional 1000 school hours to step into advanced-level, college preparatory-focused public and private schools.
I met Brandon, a boy with bright eyes, full of anticipation and a professed love for sports. “I’m looking for teachers that want to be teachers,” he informs me about a key factor in his school choice for next year. This resonated with a few things Sarah Smith, executive director of Rainier Scholars, had explained earlier.
Learning to advocate for yourself
“We teach them to be self-advocates,” she said, “and to become consumers of education, so that they know what choices they have when it comes to educational opportunities.”
Rainier Scholars offers four pillars of support to students through this academic journey: Academic Enrichment, Academic Counseling and Support, Leadership Development, and College Support. Understanding that participating in a rigorous, long-term educational program can be extremely challenging for students and their families, the program connects students with a community that will provide encouragement, guidance, and direction as they make decisions about their futures.
It is a long journey and scholars face many critical transition moments along the pathway to college, Smith said, adding: “It can be hard to walk between multiple worlds and positive identity development is a critical piece of success in these environments which were not necessarily built for you.”
My attention returns to Brandon, who has moved on to practice introducing himself to another student and other interviewing skills. I watch him. He’s challenged by the task. He is clearly trying to push through the social awkwardness and expand his comfort zone. But the excitement in his face is also unmistakable, and he is poised and ready for his next big chapter on this journey.
This is where being a Rainier Scholar comes into play. Brandon’s not going to be watching from the sidelines. He’s going to be a part of the action, and able to access a full range of opportunities when determining his next academic opportunity and his future.
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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