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Hello everyone, and welcome to this first webinar in the Baby Steps webinar series,
The Heart of a Good Story Is You.
I’m Ale Bezdikian and joining us today, we're very excited to have Matthew Roe
from Dirty Robber to discuss a little bit more about why storytelling, and why it’s so important
for you as the storyteller to be empowered in particular ways to capture
and show your organization’s mission in practice.
Here at TechSoup, we believe that storytelling not only builds but is also the currency
of community. These images are the winning photo submissions
of TechSoup’s Annual Digital Storytelling Competition where for the last four years
we’ve been able to cultivate a community of nonprofits and storytellers
that are now out there contributing rich content to the various landscapes
and communities they touch.
What do you think about when you see these images? Where do you go?
What emotions do you feel?
Understanding the heart of a good story leads to better content, better visibility,
visibility of your message, and of the work that you’re doing in the field.
I’m really very excited to be discussing all of these really exciting concepts
coming up in a few minutes. But before I get ahead of myself I did just want to back up
and take a moment to acknowledge our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk,
whose platform makes all of our webinars possible.
If you’re connected to audio by phone, please note that all lines are muted,
so if you have a question or comment please share those with us in that lower left-hand
chat box window where Becky will be capturing your questions as we go along.
If you lose your connection at all today, don’t worry. You can simply reconnect
using the confirmation email that was sent to you before this event,
or dial the number that Becky will chat out right now.
This webinar is being recorded, and will be sent out to all of you later today with the slides,
and all of the resources and links we discuss. If you hear something worth sharing
on this webinar today, tweet it out @TechSoup or @dirtyrobber, using the #babystepscomp.
Again, I’m Ale Bezdikian. I’m an Interactive Events and Video Producer
here at TechSoup Global where I work with Becky Wiegand on chat,
to program educational events like this, and help produce our digital content.
I’ve been at TechSoup for two years, and before this I got my start in nonprofit communications
as a fellow at Mother Jones Magazine here in San Francisco,
having studied broadcast journalism in university.
Also on the call today, we are so thrilled to have a talented Matthew Roe.
Matt it’s really great to have you with us today.
Matt: Thank you, I’m very excited to be here.
Ale: I was hoping maybe, you know you can start off by telling us a little bit more
about yourself and what you do at Dirty Robber, but then we'll get more into what
we're all working towards with the Baby Steps Campaign for Early Childhood Education.
You know, we'll discuss your own process of story making with the banner film
for the campaign, and then really get into the why of storytelling.
Matt, do you want to take it away?
Matt: Absolutely, so my role at Dirty Robber is I am a Junior Creative Director
which is essentially a fancy term to mean I write. What we do at Dirty Robber,
we're a company that specializes in short form content
[indistinct],
branded content, and we do short films. We were actually nominated for an Oscar
this year for a short film that we did called Buzkashi Boys which is set in Afghanistan.
My role at Dirty Robber is to generate ideas with the other creatives, and directors
to execute on their ideas to develop scripts, develop pitch packets,
anything that goes into the creation of one of our projects. So that's my role at Dirty Robber.
What we've done [inaudible] is this Baby Steps Competition that Ale mentioned
just seconds ago. We have been in partnership with Further by Design, The Kellogg Foundation,
Bay Area Council, and TechSoup. And the competition is
about early childhood development which is the age of the children between zero and five
that statistically is the largest period of growth that we go through as people,
[inaudible], period of time,
[inaudible].
Ale: Hey Matt, if I could just jump in for a brief moment. We’re losing you on the audio
a little bit, I think you’re going in and out.
Matt: I’m not sure, I’m on my landline. I’m not sure what to do.
Let me see if this helps. Is this any better?
Ale: It sounded a little bit better briefly, but keep talking.
Matt: Okay, sorry about that. If it keeps happening, let me know and I will simply
repeat what I’m saying.
Ale: Great.
Matt: So the competition is designed to have parents, educators, caregivers, family members,
to film themselves interacting with their child, or with their student, or with their family member.
And showing us how they interact with their child in a unique and specific way
that helps engage the child.
What we wanted to do with the video was essentially, raise awareness.
Raise awareness of early childhood development, raise awareness
of it as a concept, and most importantly raise awareness of how critical it can be
in helping our children grow to be healthy and successful adults.
We actually have the video here. I’m going to load up for you in just a second to watch,
it’s only two minutes long. What I think is a good idea here is if we watch the video,
and then I will speak about the sort of generation of the video, about how we developed it,
how we came to this [indistinct], maybe sort of walk through the process
that we walked through to get to this video.I’m going to go ahead and load that up now.
And like I said it’ll take about two minutes to play. So just give it a watch,
and will talk about it right after.
[Video begins]
Female Speaker: You can’t remember,
but there was a time when you couldn’t walk,
when just trying to was an adventure,
but sometimes
with a step too far?
You can’t remember,
but someone helped you,
picked you up,
comforted you,
helped you take
your first steps.
This winter Invest Early invites parents, families, caregivers, and educators nationwide
to answer one question, “This is what I do with my child, what do you do with yours?”
The Baby Steps Competition asks you to submit videos that capture a snapshot
of how we care for children during the first five years of their lives.
For parents and families, we're looking for short videos taken by iPhone or by camera,
whatever you have that’s able to capture the simple everyday things that you do
with your child or family member.
For care providers or teachers, we want to help you generate videos by capturing all the creative
things you do to inspire your students, whether it’s reading, singing, playing, or coloring.
The Baby Steps Competition will be running from December 2 to February 2,
and we’ll be recognizing winners based on four criteria,
their emotional value, their educational value, the creativity of the activity,
and the quality of the video.
Go to babystepscompetition.com to learn more about how to enter,
and to see why we believe the first five years of a child’s life are vital to invest in.
Matt: So that’s is the banner video for the competition. The announcement video if you like
for the competition, had [indistinct] sort of information.
So what I would like to do now is maybe talk about the process of how we arrived
at that video. So one of the very first things to bear in mind when crafting a story
is that very often you are not crafting your own story, and by that I mean
you are working with and for other people.
And very often, what you are dealing with is you're dealing with multiple bosses
for want of a better phrase. You’re working with various groups who all have information,
all have a vested interest in the story, or in the project itself.
And so one of your very, very first jobs as the crafter of the story is to identify
what needs to be said. And I know that sounds may be slightly redundant,
but when you’re dealing with sort of multiple people, and multiple groups
it’s really, really the critical first step to get everybody on the same page
to agree to what the story is that you’re telling, because without that you end up going around
in circles. It’s very hard to make sure that everybody is being represented.
It’s very hard to take all this information and turn it into a compelling,
and emotionally engaging story.
So the very first step once you’ve assessed the lay of the land with the various elements
involved, this is literally the most critical step.
You have to identify a clarity of purpose. Without sounding too much like its marketing,
you essentially have to identify what it is that your story is selling. What is the concept?
What is the message? What is the point of the story being told?
So with the Baby Steps competition, the video you guys just watched in particular,
what we were dealing with in early childhood development is an incredibly complex
philosophy. It’s a very broad, very comprehensive sort of way of looking at
how to deal with children at that age. And so the initial conversation that we had
with the various partners, with the various elements, there was a lot of discussion
about what parts of early childhood development are we going to focus on,
how are we going to best communicate the complexity of the philosophy.
And the worry there was that you could get bogged down in trying to relay
too much information, and never ever getting people engaged.
So one of the very first steps that we as a team took that was such a huge step for us
to be able to make our video, is we agreed on a single purpose of the video.
It wasn’t necessarily to jump into the various sort of mechanisms
of early childhood development, to discuss in detail or in length some of the issues of it
because you couldn't [indistinct] video.What we wanted to do was raise awareness
of early childhood development, as a concept to the general public.
Because it’s easy to forget when you’re enthralled in a story, when you’re dealing
with particular thing that very often by the time you get to writing or crafting the story,
you have a pretty good understanding of it, but when you came into the project,
you probably didn't. And you've got to remember that most of the people that will be watching
your story, or engaging with your story, they don’t have that. They are like you
when you first started working on the project. They don’t necessarily have the breath
of information that you do now.
So it was one of the great moments for us when we were developing this video
is when we all came to the realization that if we are simply trying to raise awareness
of the importance of early childhood development that as a single point of focus
allows us to do so much more than trying to incorporate multiple different purposes,
for want of a better phrase.
So the very first thing we did was clarity of purpose.
Now, once you have your clarity of purpose with your story. What is the story supposed do?
It allows you to look at who you want to watch the story.
Because again, when trying to craft a story that people are going to watch,
knowing the kind of people that are going to watch it is critical to how you end up writing
the story. So when we realized we were trying to raise awareness
of what early childhood development was, it was a pretty easy jump to go from that to parents,
to educators, to caregivers, to family members because these are the people
that are not only going to care the most about early childhood development,
but ultimately are the very people responsible for early childhood development.
So once we had the purpose to raise awareness, finding our audience
became that much easier. Now, before we can even put pen to paper on writing our story,
we have two of the three key criteria mapped out. We know what we’re trying to do,
and we know who we're going to try to tell our story to.
So once you’ve got those two elements locked in, the third element and this is the big one
for me, is the simplicity of the story.
Okay, it can become very easy to get wrapped up in trying to be clever
with how you communicate your story, with how you tell your message.
And very often, you can find yourself, especially I find when you first start writing stories,
or crafting messages, it’s so, so easy to get caught up in how clever you can be,
or unique way that you can tell the story.
That’s fine, but none of that matters unless your story itself, the nuts and bolts of the story
is really, really simple to follow. So if we look at the banner video that we just watched, right?
It’s broken essentially into two components. The first was 55 seconds to a minute tell the story
of a child walking towards camera. It is the simplest story you can imagine.
So to give you a Genesis of how we get to that point, the simplicity of that.
Once we have clarity of purpose, we wanted to raise awareness
of what early childhood development is, and how impactful it can be.
Once we knew who we would want to watch this video, who we wanted to engage this video with,
and ultimately who we wanted to have enter the competition,
developing a story that would capitalize on those two things
became a [indistinct] simplicity.
Because for us the competition, the Baby Steps competition, is about – sorry, sorry,
I'm getting caught up. Early childhood development is about helping children 0 to 5.
You are talking about taking the very first steps in nurturing and growing a child.
And so with that imagery, and with that language, and with that sort of discussion
going on amongst the creative group, and coming to the conclusion that the competition
is called the Baby Steps competition, it occurred to us that literally
showing a child taking that very first baby step. The simplicity of that would be
a really great way of introducing this much larger concept called early childhood development.
So the story of this child walking toward the camera, falling over, and then mom coming in
and helping him that is a very simple story. The reason why that is so important for us
is because the simpler the story the more you allow the emotion of the story,
the more you allow the purpose of the story to become the dominant factor.
You aren’t trying to be clever. You aren’t trying to show off. You are in a way,
getting out of the way of the story, and allowing the power, and the beauty of this moment
of this child walking to be the story itself.
By going that route, by making it that simple, it becomes, to my mind
that much more engaging.
Ale: Yeah, Matt what you said there, I think is really powerful. Often times as a storyteller
you need to know when to move out of the way of the story. I think it’s really powerful concept.
Matt: Absolutely, and it’s a very much a learned skill. You know, it’s one of those things
that you have to trust, at some juncture you have to trust that the work that you’ve done,
the story that you’ve developed, and obviously you almost never develop these things
in a vacuum. You’re working with other people. So the team of people that have developed
this idea that are executing this idea, at some juncture you have to trust that that’s correct.
And once you get to that place, you step out of the way and allow the story to unfold,
I think you end up almost always with the strongest example of storytelling.
So I just want to recap ever so quickly on for me, the three critical areas of storytelling,
in particular short form storytelling, is you have to identify priority of purpose.
You’re going to be working with multiple groups, multiple people,
everybody bringing their own ideas and opinions to the table.
And as sort of the crafter of the story, you’re very, very first job is to disseminate
all those various voices, and help guide them into a single focused voice.
This is the goal of our story.
Once you’ve done that, it become so much simpler then to look at that goal,
what is our goal? Okay, if our goal is in that case to raise awareness,
finding the audience become so much simpler. Now, we have our goal, raise awareness.
We find the audience, the people we want to be aware of the topic,
and in this case it was the educators, parents, caregivers.
Whatever story you’d be working on, once you have the clarity, you find the audience,
and once those two things are locked in, the next, next step, and this is the biggest step,
the hardest step, and ultimately the most important step,
you have to allow the story a level of simplicity.
That doesn’t mean you can't be innovative in the way that you tell the story.
In a moment, I’m going to talk about a few other commercials that I haven’t – [indistinct]
sadly, but are very successful commercials that are innovative whilst telling simple stories.
You can be innovative in your approach, and often that will come with partnership.
If you’re making a video, you’ll make a partnership with the director,
if you’re writing a story, with the editor. How you tell your story is a separate question.
But the story itself, the more successful stories are the ones that are simple
that allow the story to be the prominent factor.
So those for me are the three key areas of telling particularly short form stories,
and are certainly the rules that we used when developing the banner video
for the Baby Steps competition.
I’m going to talk about right now a pretty unique part of the experience that I just went through
on the Baby Steps competition, and it sort of reinforces why it’s important to have
those 3 steps I just talked about.
When we were shooting this video, we were obviously working with a lot of children.
You saw that there were upwards of 15 to 20 children that we filmed for that spot.
I don’t know how many of you are parents, or interact daily with children,
but from 0 to 5 children can be unpredictable, shall we say.
And obviously when you’re working on a set with a finite amount of time, and a very clear goal
in mind about what you want to achieve, it can be a little nerve-racking
when the children turn up because they’re going to do whatever they’re going to do.
And that’s great, and that’s what you want. You want that spontaneity, you want that joy of life
that only a child brings to you.
So again, one of the reasons why we were so rigid about simplicity of story,
about making sure that we didn't get to clever with what we were trying to do,
was that that meant that when the children came, and we were filming them,
and they were doing what they were doing, when they ended up doing whatever it is
that they wanted to do because they are children. And they’re going to do
what they are going to do it was okay because we had set the parameters up
so that no matter what the child did, if the child walked towards camera great.
If the child couldn’t walk towards camera, he could only stumble, great.
If the child couldn’t walk at all, but only crawl, that’s fine as well.
The point being that we had created the parameters that allowed us to stay very focused
on telling a simple story, and whatever the child gave us would still work
within those parameters.
But that was just a very unique experience. They say never work with pets and children.
I only ever work with pets and children, and I find it to be the most fun you can have,
so I think they’re lying. But, they can be a little bit unpredictable.
So again, the more simple the story, the more focused you are going into the execution
of the story, the more focused you are on what you’re trying to do,
on who you’re trying to reach, and how simple you can make it when it inevitably things arrive.
And obviously for this particular video it was children, but if you’re working
with a different story, or if you are making a commercial or something,
they’re always going to be x-factor moments that you can’t possibly prepare for.
And that’s why it’s so critical, so critical, so, so, so critical to have those three things locked in,
clarity of purpose, know your audience, simple story. Those three things will allow you
to surf over any waves that come unexpectedly.So I want to move away from the video,
the Baby Steps competition because obviously that’s a very specific focus.
And I want to talk a little more broadly about storytelling,
and about how to do successful storytelling.
We are obviously living in an era where the web is becoming essentially our go to source
for almost all information. There’s more and more TV and films being directed
towards the web. Obviously Netflix is exploding with its own content Hulu, Amazon
instant video doing their own content. The web is becoming our sort of where we live for a story.
One of the things that I find very interesting over the last few years,
and obviously because of where I work we sort of specialize on short form content,
what I’ve noticed is that traditional commercials are dying. Very rarely on things like Hulu,
or things like Amazon instant video, on YouTube,
do you watch 30 second commercials. More and more of what you’re seeing
are minute long commercials, or sometimes 90 seconds, two minute long commercials.
I watched the Super Bowl this year, and I was stunned to see how many of the commercials
from Super Bowl ran longer than a minute.What we’re seeing is we're seeing
a move towards instead of simple 30 second commercials, introduce a product,
sell a product, and move on, you’re seeing the essentially branded content spots
where the commercial is designed at creating an emotional engagement with the audience
to take us on a two minute journey, to tell a two minute story, and to give us a satisfying ending.
And I find that to be really very interesting.I’m going to talk about three commercials,
ever so quickly, that I think are really, really important because one of the questions
that we sort of deal with when telling stories is what does a good story look like?
How do you tell when you’ve got a good story? And the reality is it’s very, very hard
to figure that out. And often you don’t know until it’s finished, and people are responding to it
whether or not you’ve done a good job, or whether or not it’s a good story.
One of the things that I find very interesting, and I think this is important for where we are
in terms of working with not-for-profits and working with sort of
nontraditional storytelling entities, is that the most successful commercials
over the last few years. I say commercials, but it’s wrong to call them commercials.
The most successful branded content that I’ve seen over the last few years
have had nothing to do with production value. They've had nothing to do with
how much things cost. They have nothing to do with anything of that nature
which historically have been sort of benchmarks of good storytelling.
What we’re seeing more and more of the short form branded content is –
I don’t want to sort of harp on about the three things I said earlier –
how clear the messaging is, how specifically targeted to an audience they are,
and how simple the stories are.
Because the other thing about the web is that it is a direct link between you the user,
and the interface. So marketing can be targeted much stronger now towards you specifically,
as opposed to on a television show where if you watch a cop detective show,
the commercials are very often geared at sort of males 18 to 35
because that’s the largest demographic that watches cop shows, or whatever.
You’re seeing now more and more because it’s you directly interfacing with your own Internet,
and it has a memory of what you've watched. The commercials are getting far more specific,
and far more simple to use.
So I’m going to talk about three spots that I think are incredibly successful storytelling,
branded content. The first one is a spot called Embrace Life. There's a link there for you guys
to look at. I do really strongly suggest it if you have a few minutes when we're done
you go and watch these spots.
Embrace Life was a PSA that was built by a company in England.
They were approached by a group called the Sussex Safer Road Society.
And they basically said, “We want you to make a PSA on why it’s important
to wear safety belts.”
But we don’t want you to make a PSA because PSA’s never work.
We want you to do something completely different." And what follows when you watch it,
and I am hesitant to talk about this one in particular because giving away anything
in the spot will ruin the experience, but what follows is 90 seconds
of spellbinding storytelling.
But again, it comes from the three very simple principles. They are very clear on their purpose.
They want you to know why it’s important to wear safety belts.
They have a very specific audience that they are geared towards which is ultimately everybody.
And I know that might sound counterintuitive, but there is a simplicity [indistinct].
There’s a simplicity that everything that they are trying to do allows it to be so universal.
So they have a very specific goal of why you should wear safety belts.
They have a very specific audience, everybody.
And the story they tell is very simple.
It’s about a man playing with his family, and he is driving,
and then an unexpected twist happens. The reason why this is the one I started with
is because having worked in production, having done stories on a low budget,
I can say that this spot was done for hardly any money at all. It costs next to nothing,
and yet it’s incredibly compelling, a motive, brilliant piece of storytelling.
And it just further proves that if you have a really clear goal in mind, you tell a very simple story,
and you execute it well then you can really, really affect change.
Again, I’m really reticent talk about this one. It really is such a great watch,
and I cannot recommend strongly that you watch it.
It’s absolutely brilliant.
As you can see there it won a Cannes Lions, which is a big award for advertising.
It was a very big hit.
The second spot I want to speak about, which I’m sure is probably far more familiar
to a lot of you is the Dear Sophie spots that were run by Google and Gmail.
The concept is really very simple.
It’s about a father whose wife is just about to give birth, and he opens up a Gmail account
for his dearSophie@Gmail.com, and he writes her an email every day, or every ever the day
until she turns 18. It charts her growth from the adorable child that you see on the screen
to when she is a 16 or 17-year-old girl.
And this one is interesting because this is a, this is not a cheap commercial,
it’s not an expensive commercial, it’s somewhere in between.
And again, it’s incredibly effective branded content spot,. It’s an incredibly effective story
because it does again the three things. It’s a very clear purpose.
They want to show you the power, the stability, the lasting power of Gmail, of Google.
They want to show you how they are the cutting edge of technological involvement in our lives.
It’s a really simple concept they use that they utilized brilliantly.
Again, the audience is very clear. It’s directed at parents. It’s directed at millennials,
the sort of 18 to 35-year-olds who are either are about to start a family,
or thinking about having a family. And the story is incredibly simple.
So that’s just simply show a child’s getting older.
And what’s incredible about this spot, and also about the Embrace Life spot,
is the innovative way they do it. If I was to pitch this story to you, I would do a commercial
in which I show a small child’s getting older, and how that affects me as the parent.
That’s not necessarily that interesting or that clever.
If I say what I’m going to do is do it through the prism of my email of my involvement
with Google and Gmail, and all it has to it, well, now it’s elevated slightly. It’s intriguing.
It’s an innovative way of telling a story. It’s so simple. It’s still a clarity of purpose.
It’s still going to an incredibly specific audience, but it is innovative in its approach.
The third spot I want to talk about, and this is the top end. This spot cost lots, and lots,
and lots, and lots of money. I’ve got it here, it’s the Olympic Moms.
It’s actually Thank You Mom is the name of the spot. It was run during, as you can tell,
during the 2012 Olympics by P&G. And it’s a brilliant, brilliant spot about showing four
or five different children from being very young. One of them wants to be a runner.
One of them wants to be a swimmer. One wants to be a volleyball player. One is a gymnast.
And it just shows you the different children, and how their moms every step of their lives,
they wake them up in the morning. They make them breakfast.
They take them to their first practice. When they hurt themselves they bandage them up.
When they fall off the beam, they help them get back on top.
They drive them to the various meetings. They help make them costumes.
They basically show you, over 2 ½ minutes or 2 minutes, these moms interacting
with their children. Their children get older, their children get bigger, and of course the finale,
is these 4 or 5 kids now at the London Olympics winning their events.
And essentially, the backbones of that success is their mums.
It is again, an unbelievably successful story. It is again, clarity of purpose.
They knew exactly what they wanted to do. They wanted to say, thank you to their moms.
Like literally, that’s the title of the spot. That’s what the spot is about.
It couldn't be clearer.
Now, obviously from the clarity of purpose, who is your audience? That’s pretty obvious.
It's for moms. And to the simplicity of the story, literally they are just showing moms
helping their children. It’s no different in terms of concept to the Baby Steps competition video.
This is about parents helping their children. That’s its goal.
What’s amazing again, is the innovative approach that they take to achieving that goal
which is this is where it gets Hollywood. They have lots of locations, it’s in Asia,
it’s set in Brazil, it’s set in London, it’s all over the world. They have beautifully shot footage.
It’s a very expensive spot.
The reason why I wanted to show you these three branded content spots in particular,
are these are three incredibly, incredibly powerful stories.
In the question of what is a good story look like? These three spots look like good stories.
They couldn’t be more different if they tried. They couldn’t cost different amounts of money
if they tried. They could it have more different more different styles if they tried.
What they all do share in common is they all know exactly what they’re trying to do,
who they’re trying to reach, and they allow the story to be the dominant factor in the equation.
That to me, is proof in the pudding of how successful stories look.
Successful stories look like that.
So for me, it’s one of those things where branded content is becoming more and more
the norm I think, for how we are going to receive a lot of the stories that we see.
And for me, the way you make those stories successful is you have to engage your audience
in a way that perhaps previously we didn’t, because if we are all moving much
more towards the web based interface with how we receive our stories,
whilst they can focus those stories much closer to us as the user specifically,
the issue that they’re going to run into is that the web is essentially an infinite space.
Unlike television where there are parameters, and checks and balances
that if you are a brand, or if you are a company, you can essentially pay for your way
on to television. The web is an open space that we as a user dictate where we want to go.
The reason why I bring that up is that in an infinite space finding an audience
is incredibly difficult, incredibly difficult. Whilst we look at these three spots,
and two of them are massively recognizable brands. You’ve got Google,
which is arguably the most recognizable brand in the world,
and P&G which is very, very famous.
The very first spot, the Embrace Life spot, is for a regional English safety belt PSA.
It couldn’t be less glamorous if it tried, but it is incredibly effective,
and became incredibly popular, and became incredibly famous because it was so well done,
because the story was so simple, because it's clarity of purpose was so clear,
and because they knew exactly who they wanted to watch that spot.
And for me, I think those three really sort of sampling of the marketplace if you like,
are great examples of how good stories in this sort of branded content era are not about cost,
they are about main value. They’re about connection. And I think, that those are the three
sort of key elements, clarity of purpose, know your audience,
simplicity of story that will help tell a good stories.
The final step that I want to talk about in terms of crafting a good story is the storyteller,
which is to say you.
Very often, you are going to be the lens through which the story is crafted.
Now, what do I mean by that? Essentially, as I said earlier, you are very, very rarely writing
a story for you, or very rarely writing a story in which you are the ultimate "yes" or "no"
sort of power. Very often you are working with other creatives.
You are almost always working for at least one other boss, often multiple bosses.
And it’s really, really important that you, and your point of view,
that you allow your point of view to essentially shape the story itself.
Earlier I mentioned once you have the simplicity of the story locked in,
you sort of have to get out of the way, and allow the story to do what it’s got to do.
But before that, you have to – another sort of thing that’s very easy to do in the initial stages
of crafting a message is to simply try and please everybody around you.
If you’re working for multiple directors, or you’re working with different grant funders,
if you are working with different people who are important in the process
then very often you simply want to make sure that they are happy,
that what they want is recognized.
Obviously, that’s a very important step. But the reason why you are telling the story,
why you are the person crafting the message is because you have a point of view.
You have a message that you need to craft. And it is really, really important
that you don’t lose that.
And that’s true of anything that you write, it doesn’t matter if you’re writing a commercial,
if you’re writing a novel, if you’re writing a movie. You have to, have to, have to remember
that you are the lens through which this story is going to interact with the world.
You essentially are the conjurer of the story, without you it doesn’t go anywhere.
It simply exists as an idea on a page, or an ethos. You are the one who will turn it
into a tangible, watchable, readable, engageable item.
And so, when I say that you are the lens, you shouldn’t forget that.
I’m not suggesting you should go rogue and ignore the people you are working with,
and don’t listen to the influences of your officers, your bosses, or your fellow creators.
What I’m saying is that you have to recognize when you know in your gut
what the story needs go, where the story needs to go, how it needs to be constructed.
Essentially though, what I am trying to do here is reinforce in this process
that you are an incredibly valuable part of it becoming a created, existing object.
As a writer, it’s very easy to – when things go well, you find the writer is very often
the very last person that is thanked. I speak from experience. And, it’s very easy to get lost
behind if you’re making sort of a commercial the director takes all the praise.
Or the product itself gets “Oh, that’s a great spot by Google!”
Nobody ever thinks, “Who wrote that spot for Google?”
The reason why I’m sort of bringing this up is because you have to recognize that
as the conduit between the item that you are trying to sell, and I don’t mean that to be sort of
marketing advertising. No matter what you are doing, and no matter if you are writing a script,
novel, commercial, whatever you’re writing, you are selling either a concept, or a brand,
or a very specific object but your job is to sell the story to the audience.
And so, it’s really very, very important that you don’t ever forget that,
that you allow who you are, and the experiences that you've had, and the influences
that you exert, to shape the story. It’s a really hard thing to do. It’s a really hard thing to learn,
but it is something that as you are going forward you shouldn't really ever stop.
You shouldn't ever lose sight of that.
So that is sort of, for me that is sort of an overview of how the process that we go through
at Dirty Robber to sort of craft these short form stories that we do.
I think that pretty much sort of covers the overview of it.
So yeah, I feel like just to recap ever so quickly, I’ve said it 100 times.
I’m sure it’s pretty locked in. The very first step, clarity of purpose.
You’ve got to make sure that all the various interests are on the same page,
that there is an agreement on what the message is going to be, on what the story is going to be
because once you’ve got that clarity it’s really easy to find who it is who's going to watch
these spots, who’s going to read this novel, who is going to whatever it might be.
Once you have the clarity of purpose, and the audience in mind, the next important step
is simplicity of the story. Do not allow the story to get complicated.
You can tell it in an innovative way, but you cannot allow the story itself
to become too complicated because when you do that you are robbing the story of its power.
You are robbing the story of – You aren't trusting the story to do what it’s there to do
which is engage an audience. Once you’ve got those three things,
you have to take a step back and allow the story to do its job.
Before you do any of that, the very, very first thing is remember that you have to embrace
that you are the lens through which this message is being crafted,
that your point of view, your voice, is critical to the success overall of how a story is shaped.
And those are sort of like the big things for us.
Ale: Thank you so much Matt. That was really informative, and you brought some really great
examples of effective storytelling to the table today.
Those of you in the audience, do take the time to watch a few of those clips
when you receive the post event email later today. They’re really good,
and very thought-provoking, and heartstring tugging.
And that banner film, Matt, your team did really an amazing job with that. It’s quite moving,
and really gets at the heart of what the Baby Steps campaign is all about.
So now, I would like to speak quickly in the time that we have left to why digital storytelling?
Matt, as you started to get at it earlier, for me the most obvious answer is that
we are visual creatures. And as we saw in the banner film, stories are moving.
That’s just how we experience and process life. You know, how did social media
become the Goliath that it is today? It’s really simple, photos and videos
are extremely engaging, and people want to see them.
As I mentioned before, stories are the currency of community. And really, an Instagram feed
is a testament to that. You know, we follow people we don’t know personally,
but feel like we know them intimately. We photograph breakfast, road signs, sunsets,
moments spent playing and learning with our children, championship moments.
These are the things that really matter to us.So, it’s these moments
that are sort of the timestamps of our lives that show we accomplish things in life.
But as Matt pointed out without a storyteller to make sense of those random moments,
those moments are static. You know, they are fixed in a moment in time.
As a storyteller for your organization, your challenge is to capture and consider
the many images around us, and arrange them in an order that speaks to your audience
to inspire others to get involved in your mission.
Technology has really made it possible to capture and share many of those moments
in an instant really, and often times to a widespread and distributed audience.
You know, many of us have gone mobile to capture and engage with the rest of the world.
Nowadays, you don’t necessarily need to put aside a huge budget, or go all out
to start telling stories. I mean, bless your heart if you get work with some of the best of the best
like Matt and the Dirty Robber team.
I mean, there are many positive reasons to work with professionals,
but I do want to stress the idea of starting within reach. Start somewhere by taking inventory
of the technology at your disposal right now. If that’s purchasing a few apps
for your smart phone, thinking about putting aside a small budget for handheld device,
or a flip camera, just take a manageable baby step toward digital production.
You can start by interviewing your community, or donor members at your next conference
using your smart phone. You can record technology events live and publish to YouTube
directly with an app called YouTube Capture, for example. There are many ways
that you can start telling your own stories now.
There are opportunities for storytelling everywhere, all around us.
Curating that, and following it back to the communities served ultimately fosters trust
and mutual respect between funders, donors, board members, and community members.
I would encourage you all to think about ways to transform the content that you already produce,
whether those are case studies, datasets, maps, timelines, charts
transform those into opportunities for storytelling. Ask questions.
Get out there and spotlight members of your community doing interesting things.
Capture clips at conferences, and use them as assets on social media
in your reports and proposals.
So you know, storytelling really is at the core of what we do. It should be incorporated
into ways we communicate with each other on social media, in the work that
we are already producing as nonprofits, libraries, and charities.
And storytelling really builds community, and open doors, opens opportunities
for conversation, and really is a powerful medium.
I would like to now open the floor for questions directed towards Matt or myself.
If the audience has any questions at this time we’ll take it now.
But, I did want to go ahead and thank you all for joining us today.
Especially thanks to Matt for being an amazing presenter, and to his team
as well as everyone else involved in making this webinar possible
especially our platform sponsor ReadyTalk.
And we do have one question for you Matt before we wrap it up here today.
The question is, what inexpensive equipment would you recommend for capturing stories
outside of the few apps that I mentioned, or your smart phone.
What’s your go to recommendation for inexpensive equipment?
Matt: Are you talking about writing software, or are you talking about cameras and such?
Ale: No, just camera, just for capturing the stories specifically.
Matt: Honestly, the camera called the 5 D it’s a Canon camera. It is the industry standard go to, lo
w-budget camera. It’s often automatic. I can’t remember exactly how much it costs,
but the great thing about the 5 D is it’s relatively inexpensive to purchase,
which is obviously critical. But it is also, it works with if you ever get lucky enough to have
the money to get the fancy lens, they will work on the 5 D, but it’s not necessary to have them.
And so for me, if you’re talking about, hey what can I go and buy right now
and I could then use right now to make something? A 5 D would be 100 percent
be my answer.
That said, I’ve been looking at the specs on the new camera on the new iPhone,
and I've got to say that the new iPhone camera is pretty spectacular as well.
So I would say those are the 2 sort of everyday objects that you could buy
to really start capturing footage and start telling stories.
Ale: Thanks so much, do you have any recommendations on apps in particular
or apps that you personally use to capture and share quickly? Small clips, or?
Matt: I don’t have – what I use is an app called Snap Feed, which is a free app.
It has filters, and it allows you to basically do very simple Photoshop esque things
to your image. Snap Feed also has a video component. The name is escaping me
as I think about it, but there is a similar thing that you can add filters, and color effects,
and stuff like that to your video clips. And it’s a very, very involved app.
Like you can literally pick specific parts of the frame that you want to be saturated,
and then another part be desaturated, and stuff like that. It’s a really, really great app.
Ale: Cool, great. In the last three minutes that we have, one last question,
and that is really you know, how do nonprofits go out there and convince funders
to provide support for storytelling in a way that shows dollars and cents,
and that the project actually has benefit to the community?
How do you make that pitch to a funder?
Matt: And that is the million-dollar question, how do you go to somebody
and get them to agree to fund something?
For me, the simplest thing I can say to you honestly, is it's about two things.
There is no better way of getting people involved in whatever you’re doing,
getting an engaged audience than telling a story. It’s very, very simple. It’s a fact.
I don’t think anyone can argue with that.
But for me, the critical thing that you have to do when you’re engaging,
when you’re talking to funders, my experience, nine times out of 10, is the two things
they care about are your passion. Again, you are the person telling the story,
so they really care that you care. And, they want to know that they’re going to have
the widest reach possible. And it goes back to nothing gets an audience quicker,
and nothing gets a bigger audience than a brilliantly crafted story.
And again, I would just reemphasize that Embrace Life commercial.
It was done for next to nothing for a Regional PSA, and it’s gotten 30 million views
on YouTube, and one Cannes award. So that right there is proof in the pudding.
Ale: And that one in particular is such a great clip. It really tugs at your heartstrings.
Yeah, thanks again to you Matt for being super stellar. And I wanted to thank you all again
for joining us today. We hope you’ll join us again on December 12,
same time for our next webinar in this Baby Steps series.
We’re very excited to discuss telling stories from your community,
what goes into the process of preproduction before you press record,
and capturing your story.
So thank you so much Matt, thanks again everyone, and have a wonderful day.
Matt: Thanks everybody.
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