Accelerating Strategic Storytelling in 2024

As 2024 unfolds in the age of AI, storytelling becomes even more critical to shape organizational stories for employee engagement and customer experiences. Sometimes it is good to bring back something that was done in the past and update with the current tools we have. MediaMobz sponsored a storytelling hackathon in support of the Digital Narrative Alliance (DNA). DNA brought together thought leaders in storytelling to explore the role of technology in storytelling, from the leaders of gaming studio’s, Academy award winning directors, agency leaders and several corporate communication leaders. We wanted to share a simple way to engage teams in telling stories that inspire teams to align and support the objectives of an organization.

Here is an overview of the storytelling hackathon that is fun, easy to coordinate and delivers stories to improve individual participation that aligns to business objectives. 

 

Hacking the Corporate Brand Story – Aligning Personal Purpose with Organizational Mission

Identify 5-8 executives across the organization to gain a 360 perspective or bring together an executive and small team within a department. The overall workshops would last less than 2 ½ hours.

15 minute overview: Start each workshop by sharing the corporate mission, purpose and primary objectives for the coming year. If there are brand stories that support this, make them available as reference materials.

Leadership 

Hacking your Universal Brand story: From varied perspectives to a Unified Story

  • 4-6 senior leaders, in teams of 2 with a producer/editor

2 Hours Total

  • 15 minute overview,
  • (2) 45 minute hackathons
  • 15 minute summary

Each team is asked to prepare a 30-60 second story on his/her organization from 2 of the following perspectives:

  • Executive leadership
  • Managerial team
  • Customer
  • Market disruptors
  • Employee engagement

Organization

Hacking your Brand Story; From Diverse Stories to a Common Narrative

  • 6-20 leaders and management, break into groups of 3 with a producer/editor on each team

2 Hours Total

  • 15 minute overview
  • (2) 45 minute hackathons
  • 15 minute summary

Each team is asked to prepare a 30-60 second story on his/her organization from 2 of the following perspectives;

  • Executive leadership
  • Managerial team
  • Customer
  • Market disruptors
  • Employee engagement

 

Each option scales the following core elements of the Story Hackathon for the organization’s needs:

Perspective

Discovering Customers: Hacking Insights to Transform Organizational Narrative

Assuming a view other than your own to create empathy and insights into your audience. In this session, which is particularly fitted to organizations seeking to change and embrace customer/ constituent  perspectives, helping the organization better understand the customer by telling their stories. A hackathon approach, for example will provide executives the tools and support to capture and tell a story about new customer segments and target markets.

Voice

Finding and Developing Customer Empathy in Every Engagement. 

Voice operates within the constraints and possibilities defined by the narrative model. A consistent, yet varied, brand or organizational voice is inclusive of all perspectives that interact with employees, stakeholders and customers across muti-channel marketing experiences, and for constituents at decision making time in their relationship with external relationships.

Storytelling

Every story has a beginning, middle and end.

How to craft a beginning, a middle and an end that moves your audience to decision and judgment about the brand/organization. Showing the challenge faced in the story, the changes the that resulted from the story’s progress from beginning to end, and the benefits/costs of the conclusion of the story (progress achieved?/was it worth it?/how is the world/market different after the story’s conclusion?) is essential to framing the decisions and values that define the brand/organization. MediaMobz has shared several storytelling templates that you may want to visit. We will be bringing you more on this as the year unfolds.

Editing

The tools are getting easier to use, and harder to finesse. 

How to create stories that don’t suck using today’s authoring and production tools? What is the role of AI, new ways to repurpose existing content and other aspects of this will be covered later.  This facet of an engagement will concentrate on mining existing content for data, stories and vital imagery or accomplishments that move the narrative forward. Additionally, with a sense of how archival content can be used, the participants will learn how to assess the need for additional material to complete a compelling authentic story. Think of what is worthy of sharing with internal influencers.

Reflection

Feedback grows your storytelling confidence. 

Have a look at the map on organizational storytelling maturity that aligns with your internal editorial calendar. Hearing from others (the experts we bring into the engagement) what a brand story communicated to them and what is says about the brand and organization is a keystone event for emerging storytellers. Your  curated team, which will bring in experts based on client’s industry or competitive environment, will provide serious and constructive criticism and complements about the narrative strategy and/or story product of an engagement.

Why It Matters

This is an outline of how you take this for a ride in your organization. It has been proven by dozens of leading organizations to have a direct impact on employee engagement and most important how these stories drive performance with a little bit of fun along the way.

For more resources, check back in with us.