On the cusp of its 100 anniversary, The Bush School hired Slow Blink for a half-day professional development workshop, guiding their key leadership, marketing, and admission teams through two participatory sessions about the art and act of digital storytelling in today’s sociopolitical world.
digital community building
One part educational and one part generative, these interactive workshops provided a blueprint for digital community building through data-driven and craft-based storytelling strategies.
The sessions were tailored to help their teams of marketing and communications professionals approach, interrogate, and refresh their relationship to storytelling in advance of their anniversary campaign and brand refresh project. These sessions underscored different approaches that help teams work together to tell your collective stories.
Slow Blink
Staff walked away with robust conversation and dialogue about the role, nature, and art of storytelling today.
Coming from a place of craft, we broke down storytelling into its two main components: the stories and their telling. Grounded in data and research, we consider the psychology of reading, as well as the power dynamics that quietly exist in a field as fluid as art.
we all play a role
Whether or not you consider yourself a storyteller, creative, or writer, you still play an important role in the telling of your stories.
Learn how to harness your inner writer, and bring elements of craft to your digital storytelling efforts through signature workshops. Types of topics we cover:
- Story Anchors: Anchoring your stories to your audiences. Slow Blink’s main service is creating “Story Anchors” for brands and projects, companies and teams. In this workshop, we teach you about Story Anchors—the craft, psychology, and linguistics—so that you walk away with new tools to tell your stories across channels.
- Crafting Brand: The role of the human touch in marketing. In this workshop, we look at several classical forms of storytelling—ABDCE, six word memoirs, and hint fiction, among others—and how they can play the perfect role (or structure) for different content types. From brand taglines to newsletter subject lines, there’s a craft for every type of content.
- Ways of Telling: 7 key principles to digital storytelling today. In this workshop, we zero in on seven specific principles and approaches to digital storytelling today. Nodding to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, this workshop tugs at our individual and collective attitudes and approaches to the role and importance of storytelling.
- Digital Community Building: Cultivating connection through content. In this workshop, we look at how to build community through your content strategies. The environment of your content—think blog vs. a social media handle vs. newsletter—is what frames the rules of and for engagement. By the end of this workshop, we make the case for conversation: how it can be used at different points in a content strategy or hub to grow your community.
- Response Required: Language maps and a vocabulary of response. In this workshop, we operate from a shared reality of: At some point, you or your organization is going to get called in, called out, or called on. And so here, we look at how to be a part of the conversation that your consumers—however you define them—care about.
