How to ensure your audience will read your stories

Your organisation is more likely to achieve greater reputational reach, increase its funding and sell more products with better-told and engaging stories

A good story transports you. It takes you somewhere, sometimes to a place it describes, sometimes inside the mind of a protagonist, sometimes into the heart of a situation. A good story doesn't do this just for the sake of it, or merely to tell you something you didn't already know, but to make you feel differently. Ideally, this change in how you feel will encourage you to take action along the lines that the author suggests, even if that action isn't explicitly spelt out in the story you are reading.

That's why stories that truly engage the reader are so important. If they don't engage, the reader won't get beyond the first paragraph, or perhaps even the first line, and any call to action will be lost even before it's been found. It's easy enough to write a story of a few hundred words, a general description of what your organisation been up to, especially if the annual financial review is closing in. But to really engage your readership? That's a different matter.

So how to make stories more engaging?

There are several different ways, but the following tips strike me as a good place to get started.

1. Good writing is 'soft on the eye'

Firstly, try and craft your stories in the same way as publications such as the Economist, the Guardian and the New York Times. Their writing is 'soft on the eye' and gently leads you along by the arm, lulling you into the story.

2. Use shorter sentences

Shorter sentences help immeasurably with this. How many times have you read publicity material that starts off promisingly enough, but in which sentences then slip from line-to-line and suddenly take up whole paragraphs? There's only so much information the human mind (and eye!) can take at any one moment, and chunky sentence-paragraphs are never going to help. Try it. It works!

3. Detailed examples must illustrate your point

Secondly, early on in the story use a specific example (or examples) of how your organisation is changing people's lives. Readers of your stories want to know how they can make a difference (in the case of non-profits) or how a product will make a difference for them (in the case of for-profits), so an illustration of how this occurs will always make your stories more engaging. This then allows you to connect seamlessly with the wider purpose of the organisation.

4. Use visual images

Next, always use images – graphics or photographs – but only use images that properly connect with the text. Too often on websites, in brochures, annual reports and the like, we come across photos that are either too poor in quality or don't really reflect what the story is really about. Here's an easy way to avoid this: commission the photographs before the story has been written, not afterwards as you head towards publication. If the story is wrapped around your key messages, it shouldn't matter that you don't yet have the text.

5. Avoid jargon!

Where possible – and believe me, it's more than possible – please avoid jargon. Sure, a few technical terms aren't going to do much harm (and of course some will be necessary), but a general reader really doesn't want to have to put up with a lot of words and phrases they simply don't understand. Or more to the point, don't want to have to understand. It will cause them to stop reading.

6. Use a strong headline...

You also need to concentrate on more than just the 'body text' of the article in hand. A several-hundred word story will need a few 'extras' to keep the reader engaged, or for that matter get them reading in the first place. An eye-grabbing headline is essential (which incidentally is also a good way of encapsulating your message), followed by a 'stand-first', a further piece of explanatory text about a line or line-and-a-half long.

7...as well as sub-headings and pull-quotes

Then make sure the text is broken up with sub-headings, and depending on the length of the story or stories, you can pepper the text with 'pull-quotes'. These enlarged chunks of text serve the same purpose as graphics, and heighten impact and highlight your key messages.

8. Please focus on results!

Above all, focus on results and not process. By all means explain why something is being done, with perhaps a sentence or two on how, but for your stories to really make a difference, you must go all-in on the positive change your work is bringing to people's lives. Only then will the benefits you have brought to the world stand out in the mind of your reader, and only then will they take action.

If you feel that you or your organisation could benefit from better Corporate Storytelling, then do feel free to drop me a line at [email protected]

#CorporateStorytelling

#MakeStoriesMoreEngaging

#AchieveBetterResults

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