Fireside Agency

We loved going deep with Lucy Richards, Marike Knight and Hayley Morris to unearth the essential story of their new venture The Regenerative Leader. Check it out - they’re already doing amazing work equipping leaders with the inner tools they need to confront the many challenges the world is facing.

If Mum’s happy, then we’re all happy. This week we put out our latest Fireside EDM and got lots of great feedback, including this notable message in the company inbox: “Great work, Fireside. Really interesting and accessible read. Proud of you and what you’ve become. Love Ben’s Mum" Really, who needs any more validation than that? Subscribe here to see what all the fuss is about : https://lnkd.in/gQtm8SZn

And that's a wrap. Recently Fireside said goodbye to one of our foundation clients, Nightingale Housing. We've been helping Nightingale since 2019 and feel like in many ways our journeys have been intertwined. We're immensely proud of the way we have sat with the NGH team as they navigated the challenges of growth, and helped the team develop and then build on its powerful story and mission of revolutionising the way we live together. It says a lot that decision-makers from all sides of politics have over the past few years beaten a path to Nightingale's door to see the magic for themselves. (When Jacinta Allan became Premier, a trip to Nightingale Village was one of her very first events.) We couldn't be happier to have worked with good and visionary people - most notably Nightingale's incredible CEO Dan McKenna, who has done an amazing job steering the ship through some really challenging market conditions. We leave with gratitude that we could be a small part of the Nightingale story.

Back in the early 2010s, if you wanted to build a following all you had to do was make good content. Alas, these days, things aren’t quite that simple: with everyone fighting for attention on increasingly crowded platforms, it’s harder than ever for purpose-led businesses, not-for-profits and other organisations to find the communities of support they need to grow. It’s a thorny problem requiring a multipronged solution. And that’s exactly what we’re offering with Stories That Stick, an exciting new workshop to help organisations build committed, loyal and engaged followings. To bring this program to life, we’re teaming up with?Isaac Peiris, one of the country’s leading audience growth experts. Isaac recently spearheaded audience growth at?The Daily Aus, boosting their newsletter subscriptions fivefold, gaining over 140k Instagram followers and doubling their TikTok audience –?all within one year. We’re combining Isaac’s skills with our storytelling nouse to create a powerful workshop that engages and retains audiences across multiple platforms. Keen to know more? Send us a message, or contact Ben Hart or Louise Bannister to start the conversation.

Whether you're a corporate bigwig or a non-profit bleeding heart, a great story can supercharge your efforts to get noticed, sell an idea, get that job you’re going for or energise a team around a new project. With that in mind, we've decided to load all of our storytelling IP into a cool little volume and give it away - so anyone can benefit from the art and craft of storytelling (or at the very least hold the table’s attention at your next dinner party.) "Storycraft: The Fireside Guide to Telling Stories for Impact" is a comprehensive handbook that’s also a crash course in the power of narrative to get things done. This little book contains all our storytelling secrets, which we've successfully applied to narratives for Oxfam Australia, Nightingale Housing, Clean Energy Finance Corporation, Climateworks Centre and a host of other clients. This guide offers: - Evidence-based insights on the psychology of storytelling - Three robust frameworks for structuring impactful narratives - Practical techniques to enhance your storytelling effectiveness To get a email link to the PDF, all you have to do is sign up to our newsletter via www.firesideagency.com.au. Fill in your details in the popup box or hit the newsletter tab on the left. Let us know what you think!

One of the best things about running your own agency is that if you have an idea for something cool, you don’t have to wait for someone else to create it. You can roll up your sleeves and bring it into the world yourself. That’s exactly what we did when we launched The Story, a magazine about storytelling in all its forms –?the good, the bad, the ugly. It’s been two and a half years since we published our first issue, and the espresso-like buzz that comes from pressing print (or, um, hitting publish on our CMS) is as palpable today as it was then. As a bunch of former journos, we were always going to enjoy running a magazine. But the biggest thrill is working with some of our favourite writers from around the world. Take this article, written by Monocle editor Andrew Mueller. We’ve been fans of Andrew’s since his music-writing days, and we remain fans now that he’s shifted to political reporting – some of which we’ve been proud to publish at The Story. (Name another reporter who’s toured with both Radiohead and Hezbollah. We’ll wait.) His latest piece is a corker: a cultural-historical takedown of “one of the more pernicious and corrosive fallacies to have ever steered human history: the myth of the underdog”. In some ways, the myth of the underdog is a tale as old as time. But with half the world heading to the polls this year –?and with many of those elections likely to be shaped by an underdog narrative – we thought now was the perfect time to unpack its outsized impact. You can read Andrew’s piece, and sign up for The Story’s free newsletter, via the link in the comments.

From cold water therapy (aka swimming in Copenhagen’s version of the Yarra) and rooftop bars on industrial waste facilities to brain-stretching chats that make you reconsider the very concept of positive impact, our fearless leader Ben Hart is having a blast on the Small Giants Academy Impact Safari across Scandinavia. Can’t wait to see what the final stretch of the trip brings.

Everyone’s in a bit of a flap about AI at the moment, and for good reason: whether you see large language models like ChatGPT as the singularity incarnate or just a fancy autocomplete, there’s no denying they’re tearing through entire industries at breakneck speed. Storytellers are right in the eye of this storm, so it was an honour when our very own Ben Hart was asked by the Melbourne Press Club to host a panel on how AI is reshaping the communications profession. Chatham House Rules prohibit us from repeating who said what for you here, but there’s no law that says we can’t share some of the more practical (and head-scratching) tips and tricks we’ve gleaned about AI in our travels. Here are three of our favourites, care of Wharton School researcher Ethan Mollick: 1) AIs differ from humans in many obvious ways, but there’s one way we’re similar: bribery works on both of us. Tell ChatGPT or Claude or whichever program you use that your job depends on its answers, or promise it a big tip, and you'll see a noticeable boost in performance. Freaky, and borderline unethical! But according to actual studies, true. 2) Also like us, AIs seem to have seasonal moods. They tend to perform better in May than in December. No one knows why for sure, but the running theory is that they’ve internalised the idea of the winter break in the northern hemisphere. Need it to crank out something good at the end of the year? Try showing it a photo of a warm location (or simply mention that you’re in Australia) and tell it to get to work. 3) To get the most out of an AI, you need to trick it into ‘thinking’. Start by specifying the task you want it to achieve, then have it create a plan for accomplishing it. If the task involves text, tell it to write the first line of each paragraph before going back and fleshing out the entire piece. Finally, make it revise its own work. This step-by-step method helps the AI simulate a thought process, instead of mindlessly placing one word after another. Got a top AI tip or puzzling factoid we missed? Let us know in the comments ?

Two things we love: 1) The manic, sniff-inflected ramblings of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj ?i?ek 2) Practical tips on turning complex ideas into simple writing. This might explain why we often revisit this video, in which the prolific writer and thinker details his writing process. His secret? Fooling himself into doing it. “It's psychologically impossible for me to sit down [and just write],” ?i?ek says, reflecting the struggle of tortured writers everywhere. “So I have to trick myself.” “I put down ideas… A line of thought and then in full sentences and so on.” “So up to a certain point, I am telling myself: ‘No, I'm not yet writing. I'm just putting down ideas.’” “Then at a certain point I tell myself: ‘Everything is already there, now I just have to edit.’” Those of us who’ve struggled through one of ?i?ek’s books might have some questions about his editing process. But if getting started is the problem, a little self-deception can go a long way.

Yes, it's a digital world. But we really, really love to make tangible, IRL things at Fireside Agency. Thanks to some amazing work by our world-class wordsmith Chris Harrigan and without a doubt one of the best designers in the country Lara Burke, this one has come up a treat. Can't wait to start getting it into peoples' actual IRL hands.