• Crafting Your Story With A Website Domain
• Crafting Your Story With A Website Builder
• Crafting Your Story With A Website Youtube
• Crafting Your Story With A Website Book

Crafting Your Story With A Website Domain

Learn how to create compelling stories for projects you’ve made in this tutorial with Lee Andrese, Principal of Akatheme.

The short story has a long and rich tradition, spanning everything from the Gothic tales of Poe to contemporary masterpieces. Writing a short story will improve your writing skills, as you can apply many of the techniques you master in the process to longer forms. Encourage your customers to tell the story. Customer testimonials are one of the most effective ways of broadcasting your story. Customers themselves will experience the problem//solution//success momentum of the story. If they’re satisfied, they will be more than happy to crow about it. Use these stories on your website and marketing materials. Crafting a amazing story always helps to get more user traction in any business. Seth Godin once said, “Either you’re going to tell stories that spread or you’re going to become irrelevant.” Simon Sinek’s TED talk on the Golden Circle Theory is a must watch for founders.

Crafting Your Story With A Website Builder

with Lee Andrese

In today’s Take 5 tutorial, I’m going to introduce you to a formula to help you create compelling stories for projects you’ve created.

Stories are key to helping people decide if they want to work with you, invest in your project, or refer you to someone else.

Big Idea, Number 1: I believe there is a good story within every project you’ve done.

The key is to understand the problem that was solved and how well you solved it.

It’s also true that good storytellers get more funding, rate and salary increases, and more resources. So it’s important to craft compelling stories for the work you’ve produced, which brings us to Best Practice, Number 1: Look through your portfolio and select three to five projects that have had the most significant results in the previous three years.

The way that you do that is Big Idea, Number 2: Follow the PAR formula to craft your story. The PAR formula stands for problem, action, result.

To use the PAR formula, answer these three questions: First, what problem did the project solve? Second, what actions did you take to do this project? Third, how successful were you in solving the problem? Let me explain with a story of my own.

Meet Eric. Eric is a high end PowerPoint designer who knew he should be making more money, but didn’t know how to craft a compelling story to get him where he wanted to be. I asked Eric, “Tell me about your most significant accomplishment.” He said, “Well, I designed a PowerPoint presentation for a conference.” Not impressive. So I asked, “What presentation and what conference?”

It turned out that Eric designed a presentation for his company’s new CEO. Not only that, but it was for the company’s worldwide annual investor conference. Not only was this new CEO’s credibility and integrity at stake, but this type of presentation is supposed to drive share prices up. Big difference from just designing a conference presentation, right?

Next, we talked about how he created the presentation. He said, “Well, first I designed it for the CEO’s review.” Again, that didn’t give me much to go on, so I asked the same question in a different way. “What did it take for you to design it?”

Eric said, “I worked with the CEO to understand what impression and experience he wanted the audience to have. I worked with the IT team to determine technical limitations. I collaborated with illustrators, 3D artists, animators, and content writers to create all new images and content. I met weekly with the CEO to review each iteration, did the technical checks, led the dress rehearsals, and modified the presentation accordingly.”

Oh, and we were ready to go two days prior to the conference. Wow, that’s impressive.

Next, I asked Eric, “What impact the presentation made?” He said, “Everyone seemed to like it.” That isn’t going to cut it, either.

Turns out that Eric didn’t know what the feedback was beyond the CEO’s immediate appreciation for his efforts. This is very common for designers. So I asked Eric to go back to the CEO, his manager, and anyone else that could determine what impact the presentation had at the annual conference.

Eric called me a few days later to say that the CEO credited an increase in stock value due to the successful presentation at the conference. Eric’s manager also told him that the conference survey showed that the CEO’s presentation received the highest satisfaction rating out of all conference sessions. Eric now had a compelling story to ask for a raise, so Eric sat down with his manager and made his case.

Two weeks later, he was offered the role of Communications Officer, overseeing C-level communications with a $15,000 salary increase. Which leads us to Big Idea, Number 3: In order to increase your value, you must advance your business acumen.

Meaning understanding how the work you do ties your organization’s business model and their goals.

When you get down to it, all businesses typically work to achieve three common goals: First, increase revenue by offering useful products and services that people will pay for. Second, reduce costs or improve efficiencies to improve the bottom line. Three, improve their brand value, which ties to increased revenue.

Best Practice, Number 2: When a project comes in, ask how it will impact the company, organization, or the team.

Keep asking why until you understand how the project ties to one or more of the business outcomes we just discussed. The way I helped Eric was by asking questions that drew out key pieces of information that took his story from ordinary to extraordinary.

Focus on developing stories based on your business impact. Use the PAR formula to craft it and work with a trusted advisor to make it as strong as possible.

Thank you for joining me. If you like this Take 5 tutorial, be sure to check out the rest of the series and all courses offered by Gymnasium.

Our previous post focused on how the Analyze phase of training content development applies to journalism and how Microsoft 365 tools can support that process. This article focuses on the Design phase.

We introduced the ADDIE model here.

The five phases of content development are:

D – Design

In learning and development, when we get to the Design phase, we know the project goals and the audience. Now, we build out the training framework.

This stage is when we evaluate the steps to achieve the Learning Objective — the training goal – and answer some key questions, such as:

• Will we host a webinar?
• Will it be a classroom training session?
• Might we accomplish our goal with self-paced video training?
• What sort of follow-up do we want to do?

The Design phase is when the big decisions are made: We’ll put together an outline of content, exercises we have (or need to build), and demos we want to do. Essentially, we create the overall training structure.

My three primary tools for this process are OneNote,Excel, and Teams. For some bigger projects, I’ll use Planner and Word. Here are some tasks and the tools I leverage to complete them.

• Drafting the flow: OneNote is where I build from the Analyze phase. I’ll draft out different learning objectives. I’ll draft outlines of the training flow. I’ll create to-do lists for additional resources. I’ll save files (Excel, PowerPoint, Word) and my links (web pages, other documents) to a single OneNote.
• Managing lists: I rely on Excel for tracking lists that may involve number-crunching or simply complex project details. It’s a powerful tool for calculating dates and tracking status of sub-projects. Lately, for lists that don’t involve as much math, I’ve been using the new Microsoft Lists tool.
• File storage: Teams remains the hub for storing my material. The OneNote notebook can be attached to a Teams channel or multiple channels. I create folders within each channel and load up spreadsheets, outlines, photos, video samples, and more. Teams also can accommodate third-party apps.
• Defining success: I want this to be a successful training. But what does that mean? Is success determined by views or knowledge retention? By business impact or personal satisfaction? OneNote and Teams are important tools here, too, because they facilitate the conversation with other stakeholders. If my definition of success is different from my boss’s or my client’s definition of success, then we will likely have a problem. Using our collaboration tools helps us all reach a collective understanding of the key metrics so we can build the training to meet that goal.

By the end of this Design phase, I’ve locked the core elements of the content and the plan.

For reporters, this is like the early drafting phase. They’ve amassed a lot of information through their interviews and research and can start planning the story. They work through the visual and multimedia support they’ll need, where different elements of the report will sit in the narrative, and be able to do a planning review. Those same bullets and tools apply.

Crafting Your Story With A Website Youtube

• Drafting the Flow: OneNote remain a valuable tool for building on the early work in the analyze phase. It gives you an easy place to work on different story ideas and frameworks. For breaking news, that could mean taking some pieces and dragging them around the page to quickly craft a narrative. For investigational or feature stories, it may mean working through pages of notes, photos, and document in that notebook to tell the story. And if it’s shared, colleagues working on different angles to the story can all share the same outlines to better define the edges between stories.
• Managing lists: That raw data collected throughout reporting has to be processed somewhere, and often that means Excel. Here is where you can start looking at the numbers and design a repot that tells the story of that data. Knowing what the facts tell you is important if you’re going to tell the facts.
• File storage: Teams is the place to store your files, photos, and early drafts whether you are working solo or working as part of a broader reporting team.
• Defining success: What does successfully reporting on this story mean? Are there key metrics you need to hit like circulation or number of comments? Is it time spent on the web page? Teams is a great environment to work through that with your colleagues. The communication platform means everyone can see how you are defining success to reduce surprises. In a multi-person reporting team this can help.

By this point, the hard work is done. You know what resources you have. You know what resources you need to get. You may come out of this phase ready to write and record, or you may know what other work you need to do in the next phase like:

• Conduct interviews with key sources
• Track down an expert
• Shoot video
• Create animations
• Photograph objects or people for the story
• Build a social infrastructure for keeping the story alive

Crafting Your Story With A Website Book

For a complex story, each of these elements could spawn its own ADDIE analysis since ultimately, we’re talking a framework for creating content.

Now, we just have to turn those outlines and plans into a story. It’s time to move to the Develop phase, to be discussed in the next element.

Continue to ADDIE Basics for Journalists: A Framework for Crafting Stories — Develop (Part 4)