Today, many families are scattered around the country, or even around the world. With every passing year, family members start to lose touch in spite of their good resolutions. The family experiences and lore that once bound them together begin to fade into distant memories, and those ties may weaken as older family members pass away.
Someone we’ll call Alice had grown up hearing stories about her family’s dramatic WWII escape to America. Those stories were the glue that reinforced their sense of family pride and unity.
“I’ll get those down when I have more time,” she told herself. But she never found “more time.” Her 82-year-old aunt, one of the family’s key storytellers, developed dementia; an elderly cousin died suddenly; others discarded their belongings and family mementoes when they moved to assisted living facilities. She was never able to collect those stories into a meaningful family narrative.
Meeting us years later, Alice confided that with the family elders and their stories gone, she and her cousins were less motivated to meet regularly. She regretted not having enlisted outside help to preserve her family’s story.
Businesses and organizations also risk losing their origin stories. They grow, adding new staff and broadening their geographic or product focus, taking them further away from their roots. This success may mean that your clients, competitors and the general public—even your own employees—may not fully appreciate how your company achieved all it has. That’s why institutional memory is priceless: It helps provide a new generation of leaders with lessons on how their predecessors coped with mistakes and learned from them and how they identified priceless opportunities. At the same time, understanding a business’s founding and growth fosters a sense of legacy and pride in what the company stands for. It’s a story that can deliver an equally powerful message to the general public, providing an organization with a unique branding opportunity. You also have a story, a powerful one, and it deserves to be shared.
Few companies possess the in-house expertise or bandwidth required to research and craft such a story. We can help.
Recording, preserving and sharing impact stories is an effective way to engage with not only clients, donors, and the general public, but with your own employees as well. Rather than post an online list of your activities or the groups you support, you can offer vivid, meaningful stories that bring to life how your organization is changing the world. Let us help.
Every project we undertake shares some key stages, although we will customize these for each client to ensure we deliver precisely the kind of engaging and memorable narrative you seek.
