Let people stand for your association, bill or industry
Promoting an association, union, society or other members-only group? Use members to demonstrate the benefits of membership.
Or use nonmembers.
Richard L. Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, knew how to tap the power of people. In a speech to the Industrial Relations Research Association, Trumka showed the need for unions through short profiles of individual people:
They are workers like Miguel Matta, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who earns substandard wages and whose family has no health benefits, even though he cooks for some of the richest folks in America at the opulent offices of Goldman Sachs in Manhattan.
They are workers like Joe Reeves, an Atlanta resident who for nearly a quarter century has been driving a truck for Overnite Transportation, but who suddenly saw his family’s livelihood threatened and his dreams falling apart when the $1 billion corporation began to slash wages and cut full-time jobs to part-time. …
And they are workers like Harry Thompson of Louisiana, an army veteran who 20 years ago took a job as a pipefitter at Avondale Shipyards — and who knew he needed a union when he discovered he was working at the shipyard with the lowest wages and one of the highest fatal accident rates in the country.
It’s easy to see why … Miguel, Joe and … Harry — and so many other workers — would want to form a union. …
If you want to bring your topic to life for your audience members, take a tip from Trumka: Try writing a good human interest story about people who aren’t getting the benefits your organization offers.
Use members to showcase your values.
The best way for a communicator to make the organization’s values credible is to show the values instead of just telling about them.
That’s what the Houston YMCA did.
Executives at the Y decided one year to organize the annual report by the organization’s values — concepts such as caring, respect and faith. The association could have chosen to have its chairman write a message about each of those values. I imagine it would have sounded something like this:
Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Sharing. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Responsibility. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Caring. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Respect. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Faith. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Honesty. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah.
Instead, the organization presented its values through the stories of some of the people it had helped — people like Yolanda:
Stories like this make the YMCA’s values more concrete, meaningful and credible.
No wonder news reporters covering natural disasters and other major events include poster people in their news stories. Whether you’re writing for social media or another channel, a feature story focused on people grabs attention and makes readers care.
Use constituents to pass your bill.
When Dan Ponder Jr. needed to flesh out a speech supporting hate-crimes legislation in the Georgia House of Representatives, he turned to his own friends and family members.
The results: a powerful, personal testimonial that illustrates the problems of hate crimes:
I have a Jewish brother-in-law. The difference in that religion has caused part of my family to be estranged from each other for over 25 years.
I was the President of the largest fraternity at Auburn University …. Out of over 100 members, six of those are now openly gay. But the “lasting bond of brotherhood” that we pledged ourselves to during those idealistic days apparently doesn’t apply if you should later come out and declare yourself gay.
Some of you know that my family had an exchange student from Kosovo that lived with us for six months, during the entire time of the fighting over there.
When we last heard from her, her entire extended family of 26 members had not been heard from. Not one of them. They had all been killed or disappeared because of religious and ethnic differences that we cannot even begin to understand. …
Talk about compelling.
When Ponder began speaking, the vote stood at 83 to 82 against the legislation. When he finished, the bill passed 116 to 89 after a standing ovation for his speech.
No wonder the speech earned Ponder a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.
How can you tell better business stories?
Stories are so effective that Og Mandino, the late author of the bestselling The Greatest Salesman in the World, says, “If you have a point, find a story.”
Learn to find, develop and write stories that engage readers’ hearts and minds at Master the Art of Storytelling, our content-writing training workshop.
There, you’ll learn how to find the aha! moment that’s the gateway to every anecdote. How to start an anecdote with a bang — instead of a whimper. And how to use “the most powerful form of human communication” to grab attention, boost credibility, make messages more memorable and communicate better.
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