Slow Blink builds from a place of conversation.
Slow Blink’s process begins with listening sessions, which grounds us in a collective, focused, and participatory framework. It will always be time to tell your story. But first, you have to take the time to understand each angle, and anchor, in order to tell your story in the ways it deserves to be heard.
Our Story Anchor projects, for example, follows a five-step process, guiding you through the development of your 5-8 brand statements.
If you’re considering Slow Blink for work, book a free and initial listening session, where you’ll have the opportunity to discuss your needs, haves, and wants.
We bring writers into the room to craft your brand and stories.
Enlist Slow Blink for a single workshop session, months-long project, or on a retainer basis. Based on our listening session together, Slow Blink puts together a scope of work for your team to review, ensuring full delivery, access, and adoption. We also tend to work in sprints to maintain momentum, stay ahead of deadlines, and leave room for creative rest. At the end of any project, Slow Blink provides each client with a list of “recommended extensions,” which are next steps that a client could pursue themselves, with Slow Blink, or any other consultant. While Slow Blink will help tell your story, the underlying goal is to help you tell your own story.
Our most common types of projects:
1. Story Anchors
Enlist Slow Blink to build your brand’s set of Story Anchors: evergreen, audience-ready brand statements organized into a clear set of 5-8 sentences. The process begins with an audit, deepens through workshop sessions, and concludes with your set of designed Story Anchors, ready to be put to use on your website, in newsletters, across social channels, and even on collateral or inventory.
2. Narrative Toolkits
Slow Blink’s signature “Narrative Toolkit” will give your brand materials and brands messages a refresh. Each toolkit is designed with and around your existing brand ecosystem, and is filled with new applications, ideas, and structures tailored to your brand’s positioning. Take your stories one step further and turn them into community-driven programs, platforms, and presences.
3. Storytelling Series
Are you having internal discussions about “what your story is”? On the cusp of an anniversary or launch of a new campaign? Are you in need of a website refresh, or did you just refresh your branding, and now you’re ready to tell some stories newly? Slow Blink helps bring your brand’s voice to life by creating community-minded storytelling series for your websites and channels.
4. Workshops
Hour-long to full-day, educational to generative, single session to our curated curriculum, consider bringing in Slow Blink for one of their signature workshops. Designed to inspire, educate, and empower, Slow Blink’s workshops are perfect for professional development, team building, and strategic planning. Whether you’re at a crossroads of not, these workshops go a long way for your teams.
Story Anchors are the foundation of the Slow Blink process. It’s what most clients hire us for.
Make your first impression a lasting one.
Story Anchors are brand statements that are deeply rooted in your mission, vision, and values. They cut through the noise by speaking in a shared language with your primary audience, like this Story Anchor for Seventh Wave, which is on their homepage.
Make your mantras rememberable.
Borrowing from classical and creative forms of storytelling, Story Anchors are open-ended, invitational, and experiential. They use colloquial language and shorthand expressions to elicit an emotional response, like this Story Anchor for Born to Adapt, which is also on their homepage.
A story for your stories.
Story Anchors are meant to anchor your stories. In that, they’re designed to hold a lot of other stories. For example, this Story Anchor for Walla Walla Valley Wine Alliance — “The Walla Walla Way: _ ” — later became the name a blog we built for them, The Walla Walla Way, which tells the stories of the 130+ wineries in their region.
The right anchors can organize a lot.
While some Story Anchors are highly visible, the set is designed to work behind the scenes and organize your annual storytelling efforts. For example, we curated this Social Media Kit for Runners for Public Lands, which pre-built 50% of their social media posts for the upcoming year, filtered and organized by Story Anchor.
Fill in the blanks with substance.
Story Anchors are designed to fill in your gaps, from websites to newsletters, social media captions to collateral. They are great for spaces where you have no room for verbosity, like this pocket map for Washington Wine, which they printed 100,000 of, each with a Story Anchor on the front.
“Slow Blink is able to pull out content that’s already sitting there dormant—inside your brain, your group, your files, your origin story—and is able to come up with Story Anchors that allow you to tell your story in a way that’s meaningful and fruitful.”
—Zachary Friedley, founder of Born to Adapt
Want to learn more?
Get in touch today.