How to Find Your Core Story

So many companies have lost their way. Because they’ve lost their place in their own story. 

A story isn’t just a marketing tool that you can use to persuade customers and clients to invest their time in you, or to influence investors to help fund your mission. Sure, those things are important - but your story should do so much more than that. Your story should guide everything you do. It should guide your decision-making process as you strive to stay true to it, it should drive your culture and it should drive the best work you do. When you’re living that story though, day to day, it’s so easy to follow the wrong threads and stray from what makes that story vibrant and exciting and meaningful to you on a personal level. 

I’ve spoken with dozens of companies who think they know what makes them unique, but oftentimes, their own take on their story is not that interesting. It might seem interesting to them because they can see the inside of the honeycomb, but their audience can’t necessarily see why they should give a damn. The honeycomb might be breathtaking to you — but that doesn’t mean it will move the emotional needle for anyone else. 

Telling your story doesn’t have to be about identifying storytelling tropes and making your story match the beats; that’s a short sighted approach because your story is so much bigger and so much more unique than that. 

A little while ago, I was brought on to facilitate a board retreat. It was an alignment retreat with a nonprofit who had been going through a period of change and needed to make sure they were on the same page. They had decided to bring on a new executive director who’d been promoted from within the organization. They also had some new board members joining and they wanted to get aligned not only on how they talked about their organization, but how they approached and embraced their operations too. (Side note: It’s kind of amazing how big the ramifications of storytelling exercises can be — how they don’t just influence how stories are told, they can affect much bigger things like how an organization operates!)

There were a few components to what we did together. First, I did a storytelling Crash Course for them. I wanted them to understand and embrace the structure of what we were going to be talking about and to understand the power that their own story had over their direction and sense of purpose. We built on that by doing a keywording exercise. 

There were a lot of conversations about who the organization really is and what their mission is, and what the challenges are, why they need funding, what problems they have in getting that funding, and what perception problems they have about what they do. 

One of the biggest challenges that was uncovered was the fact that as an organization, they don't fall into any one bucket cleanly. Their definition wasn’t simple, and their story wasn’t a plainly linear narrative. While they sell themselves as a gender focused organization, and place a lot of weight on empowering women, describing them that way is actually too simplistic. That is the checkbox that they tick off on grant applications, but that is only a third of the story. They engage women in order to achieve other goals that might have nothing to do with gender whatsoever. 

Let me take you to a gorilla habitat. It’s in Uganda.

Here's a really good example of what they really did, something that reaches to the heart of their story. There’s this gorilla habitat in Uganda...

It was being encroached on by a community of people. And because the population of that community was growing pretty quickly, they needed more food, they needed more land and they needed to expand — which meant the endangered gorilla habitat was being put at greater risk. 

A typical charity would go and build a big wall and call it a day. But that would actually do more harm than good for a few reasons. For example, the residents of that community might start resenting the gorillas for having so much space and for having resource-rich land that they couldn’t access. Maybe the community would have started going hungry, and then finding ways around the wall, harming the gorillas even more than if the wall had never gone up. 

But this nonprofit went in with a mission to engage not just the community, but specifically the women in that community; they asked the women all kinds of questions beyond the actual gorilla issue. And one of the things that they were noticing is that the women in this community had a ton of children. And so they would be talking to a 27 year old woman who was pregnant with her ninth child. And they would be asking her, are you excited to have this child? And the answer would often be, “no, make it stop.” And so they brainstormed that together with the community; how do we make that stop? The solution ended up being providing access to birth control, specifically through IUDs. About a week after a woman gave birth, they would ask her during the follow-up doctor's appointment whether she would like to have an IUD inserted. 

It addressed a woman's need. It addressed some economic needs as well, given that these women could better afford to feed the fewer children they were having. But on top of it all, the community’s population growth was slowing, and it was benefiting the gorillas. 

This nonprofit is incredibly adept at coming at these problems with really unique and sometimes counterintuitive solutions; Got a gorilla habitat problem? Let's solve it by empowering women to positively impact their own community through birth control and bodily autonomy. 

But the biggest challenge for this nonprofit was this: their approach is hard to explain. Just look at how many words I’ve already typed and we haven’t even gotten to the point yet!

I have two or three other examples like this, in the fishing industry, in girls’ education, and FGM. There are all kinds of ways that they have made significant impacts in three areas: women, environmental conservation, and economic development. The problem is that when you're applying for a grant, you cannot check all three boxes. They just don't let you, and as an organization, you have to pick one. But by picking one, you're not telling the whole story. 

Throughout our exercises, the board members kept saying, this is a problem. This is a problem. This is a problem. 

And then I turned it on its head. I asked them, could we look at this as an opportunity instead? Maybe this is your greatest asset! Because I cannot think of any other nonprofits that are thinking this way!

Every other nonprofit, metaphorically, is just building a wall or digging a well, and then hoping that the community has clean water — and then everything they do fails within a few years because their approach was one-dimensional. 

Whereas this organization was working in a way that's multifaceted, truly in sync with the community, and as a result, it's going to actually make an impact — sustainably. We started asking ourselves whether this organization even needed those more traditional funders to be giving them grants or whether we could be looking to other, more innovative audiences. If we really leaned into the story, that not belonging to any single category is their greatest strength, could we find people with money that would support that? 

Telling their new story

After we finished the alignment exercise, I made the trek home. And the next day, I put together a mock up for a website where the whole public face of the company would become centered around this question: 

Are we a development, gender, or environmental organization? 

YES.

Owning all three was our way of distilling the uniqueness of who they are and giving their audience the threads of their story instead of trying to make them fit into a linear narrative that they just didn’t match. 

We turned their biggest weakness into their greatest strength.

It was just a matter of perspective. And it was the beginning of aligning them with funders who didn’t just have the cash — they had the innovative mindframe to go with it.

I think most organizations looking for their story are in the same boat. You don’t need to write something new. You already have it. I think the hardest story to tell is your own — it's hardest because you're too close to it, and you don't see the whole picture. But not only that, it's also hard to see how others perceive you from the outside when you’re way on the inside. 

The email I got from them the next day!

Something I’ve found as an external storyteller who works with brands to find their narrative is that the mentality is different when there is an external eye, and an external voice. As an outsider that is brought into the fold, I have always felt extremely welcomed, and that my expertise has always been valued. And I cherish that. Because people respect that as an outsider, I can see the story better than the people who are caught in it.

And what an honor it is to get to play that role — constantly finding the gold that makes people so uniquely beautiful.