Why do we tell stories?
To speak heart to heart. To communicate what matters to us. To share life's unexpected twists and turns. To introduce how God has called us to be uniquely us.
In this video, Marshall Ganz explains the power of storytelling to affect change and to call people to take action. First, though, we need to tell the Story of Self... John Light writing at Moyers and Company takes us step-by-step in this essay entitled, "How to Tell Your 'Story of Self." For those of you interested in doing prophetic storytelling to call people to action, see another video and transcript on this topic available at: "On the Power of Personal Storytelling in Activist Team Building." What can we learn from the world of marketing? Plenty.
If we understand our message as a form of "product" about which we need to communicate, we can potentially learn something from the examples on this Vimeo Blog on "Nine tips for Creating Killer Product Videos."
Marketers are now the most enthusiastic promoters of using media to tell stories! |
Check out this overview blog from Socialbrite with links to lots of examples of how non-profits have used storytelling.
The video above comes from a series of videos that are part of a project/website called Thirty Seconds of Less, in which we hear someone speak in the first-person over a single image or video and some music or ambient sound. The creators of this site invited people to contribute...and many have welcomed the opportunity. This is an example of what Henry Jenkins has called "participatory culture."
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