Story Dynamics - Stories » Marketing Your Storytelling

A Forest Reborn – and the Business of Storytelling

Doug Lipman — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 02:19:45 +0000

Two weeks ago, Pam and I got back from a woodland vacation in Ontario, Canada. While we were there, we learned the story of the privately owned forest we were staying in, the Haliburton Forest and Wildlife Reserve.

Starting in the 1870s, lumber companies clear-cut the easily accessible white pine stands in the area. Destructive tree harvesting continued until the 1960s, when the forest was so weakened that it had lost much of its ability to regenerate. The rugged land was unsuited for agriculture, so some of the beautiful lake shores were sold to developers, leaving 70,000 acres of dubious commercial value.

Peter Schleifenbaum listens to a question

Sound like a familiar eco-tragedy? Here’s where the story takes a surprising turn.

In 1963, a German businessman bought the abused forest land. Over the next years, he was forced to sell off more lakefront to pay taxes on the property. But in 1987, his son, Peter Schleifenbaum, graduated with a doctorate in forestry – and moved from Germany to Haliburton Forest to try to save the forest.

Support the work that supports the forest?

How do you get enough income to manage a forest that has been stripped of nearly all saleable trees? How do you raise money to care for a natural environment without harming the environment in the process?

Schleifenbaum took this problem as his life’s work. His first attempts were fairly conventional: make the forest available for recreation, including fishing, hunting, and snowmobiling.

Pam and Doug on the canopy walkway

But what would make Haliburton Forest stand out? What could make an experience there unlike any other, and therefore valuable enough to command the kind of admission prices that would be needed to finance 70,000 acres of forest restoration?

One of his projects was the world’s longest canopy walkway through a remote stand of old-growth white pine. Another was a meditative tour below the surface of a mountain lake – in a one-of-a-kind tourist submarine. Still another was a 15-acre Wolf Park, containing a resident, non-tame pack of timber wolves, and a Wolf Center featuring a one-way-mirror viewing-room from which to observe the wolves.

Wolf seen from the viewing room into the Wolf Park

Still other projects are an astronomical observatory (at the right times of the year, the Northern Lights are visible there), ElderHostels, mountain bike trails, and sled-dogging.

Peter has also forged relationships with forest researchers at the University of Toronto. At this point, Haliburton Forest is eagerly sought after as a research site, because so much baseline data has already been gathered there.

The Problem of the Sawmill

One of the problems any forest faces is that lumber is sold to sawmills. Sawmills, in turn, demand the highest grade, healthy trees, which are actually essential to the forest. So Peter built his own sawmill, optimized for processing low-grade trees – which are the trees that the forest needs removed.

One of the normally unsaleable trees is eastern hemlock, in spite of its resistance to decay and insects. To create a market for those trees, Peter began Eco-Log Building Concepts, using eastern hemlock logs that are felled only when they come due for harvesting and are skidded by horse to avoid truck-damage to the forest.

In this way, Peter says, the forest no longer works for the sawmill; the sawmill works for the forest.

What Storytellers Can Learn from Haliburton Forest

As storytellers, we have problems similar to Peter Schleifenbaum’s:

How can we make enough money to support our art?
How can we “monetize” our art without harming it?
How can we make our storytelling stand out in a forest of storytellers?
How can we survive when the book and record publishers, the concert promoters, and all the rest have their own agendas?

From Peter’s story, therefore, we can learn lessons to help us support our art and our selves:

1. Take an active approach to solving the problem of earning a living, no matter how unfair or hopeless your situation seems at first.

2. Apply as much creativity to earning a living as you do to your art – and continue to apply it for decades. Search continuously for new ways to use your assets/skills.

Looking down from the canopy platform

3. Try things that no one else is doing; learn from others, but be willing to go beyond them.

4. Create multiple streams of income. Don’t rely exclusively on any one market, product, or approach.

5. Accept that failures are a part of the process. (Peter’s submarine has been in dry-dock for two years, due to disputes with local regulators. I heard some people complain that a submarine was a crazy idea, but Peter seems to understand that, in order to find lots of things that work, you need to try some that don’t pan out.)

6. If you are not well served by those who earn money from your efforts (like the sawmill owners), create alternatives that work for you.

7. Learn enough about business to succeed, but always work in service to your passion.

What about you? What lessons do you draw from Peter’s story? What ideas does it give you about your storytelling work?

The Power of Their Stories

Doug Lipman — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 15:12:25 +0000

When we storytellers talk about the power of stories, we usually think of the stories we ourselves tell. To be sure, those stories are important and powerful.

But there’s a trend emerging that features another kind of story: the kind told by ordinary individuals about events or things that have affected their lives. Let’s call those “personal encounter stories.”

Personal encounter stories have some very practical uses. At the same time, they are easily overlooked.

Making the Abstract Understandable

Personal encounter stories can help us make abstractions concrete.

For example, it’s one thing to know that the gadget you’re helping assemble in a factory is a heart pacemaker and will save lives. But it’s something else to know the story of a few particular people whose lives were saved by the kind of pacemaker you make every day.

That’s why Medtronic, maker of pacemakers and other medical devices, brings in guest speakers to its annual employee celebration. These are not professional speakers; instead they are actual patients using Medtronic devices – and their families and physicians.

Stories About Social Issues

True personal stories can also help us understand the practical implications of social policy. That’s why Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) features stories of victims on its website, to show the concrete effects of a social attitude that condones (less now than before MADD existed) alcohol-impaired driving.

Such stories of how laws, policies, social trends and products affect individuals are very effective. And they are often even more effective when told by the individuals themselves.

That’s why MADD also provides volunteer speakers – survivors of alcohol-caused crashes or the relatives of victims who died – for all occasions on which persuasion about drunk driving issues is important: legislative hearings, sentencing hearings, policy conferences, etc.

Stories are Data Points

When people in the U.S. recently engaged in a national debate about how to improve healthcare, we had to make sense out of complicated proposals. One sense-making strategy is to say, “How will this plan affect me?” or “How will this affect those with no insurance?” or “How will this affect those wealthy enough not to need insurance?”

When we hear a projected story (a scenario) for how a plan will affect a particular type of person, we begin to understand the plan’s likely effects. In that sense, the (projected) personal testimony story is a data point, an example that shows how the abstract plan will intersect with personal reality.

Stories Show Benefits

Finally, personal encounter stories can show how a particular kind of person has benefited from a service or product – or even an artform.

Years ago, a friend told me about the movie, “The Fast Runner.” He said, “It shows an old Innuit legend. It gave me a sense of being in a completely different culture – of understanding a different way of thinking.” That small slice of personal experience was enough to entice me to watch the film. (Happily, I had a similar experience.)

In a world filled with movies to see (and products to buy, services to try, and places to visit) we are overwhelmed with choices. Often, a story can help us make sense of the info-flood and decide what to attend to, what to buy, what to do.

If someone’s needs and desires match ours and their story includes the outcomes we want for ourselves, then we can conclude that what worked for them will likely work for us.

Are We Forgetting This Power?

Ironically, we storytellers tend to forget to use stories – especially personal encounter stories – to promote our art.

Take a look at the websites of major storytelling organizations in the U.S. I haven’t noticed a single one that contains personal encounter stories from listeners. (Please let me know if you find one I missed!)

In other words, we may have been so busy telling our own stories that we forgot to ask for the stories of those who have benefited from story listening.

In that sense, the power of “their” stories is a hidden power indeed.

Why Don’t More Storytellers Succeed?

Doug Lipman — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:03:51 +0000

Five years ago, I coached a storyteller I’ll call Rita. She’s a terrific teller who deserves to be heard more widely.

When I told her that, she said, “Well, I have trouble doing marketing.”

I said, “You’re not alone! What kind of storytelling jobs would you most like to have more of?”

She thought for a minute, then said, “I want more school residencies focusing on diversity education.”

That was a well-formed and achievable goal. So, over a couple coaching sessions, I helped her come up with a five-part plan to achieve her goal:

1. Establish herself as a local expert in diversity education;
2. Develop an ongoing list of people in a position to hire her for residencies, who have an interest in diversity education;
3. Give the people on her list easy ways to get to know her and her work;
4. Build and maintain mutually-beneficial relationships with any people on her list who show an interest in her work;
5. Make an ongoing series of offers that will be catalysts for these people – offers that will make it convenient and attractive for them to hire her for residencies.

As it happened, I moved from Massachusetts to Oklahoma soon after coaching Rita. We fell out of touch about her progress.

Five Years Later…

Recently, having moved back to Massachusetts, I had a chance to check in with her. I said, “Hey, how is your marketing plan going?”

Rita admitted, “I haven’t really done any of it.” When I asked why, she said, “It was the part about becoming known as an expert. Do you remember, I thought I’d write a series of articles in a regional teacher newsletter about my ideas?”

As it happened, I did remember. It had been Rita’s idea in response to my questions, and it had seemed perfect.

“Well, I wrote one article, but I never sent it in. I had a lot of ideas, but getting them on paper was a struggle. I meant to revise the article and submit it, but I never did. After that, I guess I just lost interest in the plan.”

Rita’s plan was a sound one, but her story helps identify three reasons why many of us storytellers fail to get more work:

1. Not matching the method with her energies;
2. Not getting enough help – and the right kind of help;
3. Not changing the plan when needed.

We can all learn from those reasons, and prevent them from wasting years of our own progress.

An Energy Obstacle

I had approved of Rita’s article-writing plan, in part because of her excitement about it. What I didn’t know was that her excitement was more about coming up with ideas than about actually writing and publishing them.

Is this Rita’s fault? No! We all have tasks that energize us and others that drain us. The problem was that Rita and I didn’t notice that writing was a “drainer” for her.

After our coaching sessions, flushed with excitement about her new plan, she had created a rough draft of an article. But the coaching “boost” wasn’t able to propel her to actually complete this task, given how much energy it would have required from her.

The idea of becoming known as a diversity expert was sound. But the method (writing) turned out to be more difficult than expected.

Change the Method?

How could this method have been changed to match her energies better?

Perhaps instead of writing articles about her good ideas, she could have offered telephone seminars or free workshops in which she’d explain her ideas to a small group. Then she could record those sessions and make the recordings available; she might advertise them in that same teacher newsletter, or even get interviewed about them for it.

Or she might have created workshops containing her ideas to present at teacher conferences. In any case, to stay with the overall plan, Rita could have replaced the writing method with one that energized her.

Getting the Help You Need

What if Rita didn’t want to change the method? It’s possible to use a method that drains you, if you get others to do the draining tasks – or at least to help you with them.

For example, Rita could have found an editor for her articles who could take her first drafts and put them into printable form.

Or she might have asked someone to interview her about her ideas, record the interviews, and then transcribe them into first drafts – or even turn the interviews themselves into articles.

Her plan might also have succeeded if she had sought direct help with her writing difficulty. A good coach could have helped her solve the problem, one way or another.

Changing the Plan

Making a marketing plan is a daunting task. It involves thinking simultaneously about our goals, our abilities, our energies, and the needs and situations of those who might hire us.

As a result, once we have made a plan we often avoid rethinking it, even when unforeseen obstacles arise.

As it turns out, no complex plan ever works without a hitch. Do you remember Apollo 13 – how the method for getting oxygen to the astronauts had to be completely changed, on the fly and with improvised materials?

The “perfect” plan isn’t one that succeds 100% as envisioned. Rather, it is one that directs our energies toward a goal – and then lets us learn from our efforts and change course as needed.

Now that Rita and I are back in touch, I look forward to helping her use one or more strategies to make her plan succeed.

How About You?

Have you made plans for your storytelling – whether in marketing, or in learning new stories, or in sharing your ideas and stories with others – that haven’t worked out so far?

If so, ask yourself about each plan:

1. Does this plan really match my energies?
2. Could I get help with the parts that have turned out to be challenging?
3. Can I change the plan based on the information I’ve gotten so far in response to my efforts?

When you tell stories, you use flexibility and creativity to match the story and your strengths with the audience’s needs.

To allow the world to benefit from your unique strengths, apply that same flexibility and creativity to your own plans for success!