Digital Storytelling Makes More People Part of Your Message
Digital Storytelling Makes More People Part of Your Message
Sometimes your message needs professional content with sharp copywriting, high-quality images, and crisp audio. Whether it’s going online or going out through traditional advertising—marketing deserves the investment it takes to get a return. When there’s more to your message than what makes it into the marketing copy you can tap into the interactive, inclusive, and DIY benefits of digital storytelling.
The marketing world has caught on to the benefits of digital storytelling and put it to work making the wheels of commerce turn. But digital storytelling originated in education and social services. You might have a digital storyteller on your organization’s marketing team. But the main idea behind digital storytelling makes it perfect for including everyone in the stories you tell about your brand and mission.
What’s the difference between a digital story and other forms of digital marketing that use multiple media? Why do digital stories work so well at spreading your message and engaging audiences? What does it take to make digital stories part of your organization’s message plan? Read on to learn everything you need to know about digital storytelling.
What Is Digital Storytelling?
What makes digital storytelling different from digital marketing? If you look for the answer on marketing blogs, you’ll probably end up thinking that it’s just another name for any marketing tactics that tells a story on an online platform. But digital storytelling has a unique history and pedigree that sets it apart.
We like to think of digital storytelling as having more in common with user-generated content than with professional marketing copy. That doesn’t mean that the marketing pros on your team can’t get involved, it just means a different approach.
The origins of digital storytelling can be traced to the early 90s. Pioneers of the technique like Dana Atchley and Joe Lambert developed the methods and standards through organizations like the Center for Digital Storytelling. Digital stories in this mold are typically short and use a mixture of moving images, still images, narration, and soundtrack to get the job done.
This style of digital storytelling took off first in education and then spread to the nonprofit sector via public health campaigns, social services, and international development. In the late 90s and early 00s, high-profile campaigns put digital stories at the intersection of important relationships between nonprofits, government agencies, and mission-driven corporate allies.
What Do Digital Stories Do Best?
One of the biggest reasons that digital stories caught on in education was that they worked equally well as instructional content and as a pedagogical tool.
Digital storytelling allows teachers and professors a wide range of options for creating informative multimedia presentations that appeal to their audience. At the same time, they give students the tools to tell their personal stories with creative expression.
One of the greatest things to come out of digital storytelling models is the increase in interactive storytelling. Students and members of the community found a voice in digital storytelling. Low-tech tools for editing together audio, video, images, and sound meant that everyone had the technology to create a project.
Inclusivity and interaction added an important wrinkle to social services and public health campaigns. That’s the part we find so appealing to nonprofit and mission-driven messaging. When students and community members have the tools that give them a voice, they can respond to university professors, government agencies, or nonprofit organizations. What they say is an important part of the whole story.
What You Need To Become An Effective Digital Storyteller
It doesn’t take a lot of expensive equipment, training, or experience to tell a digital story. That’s half the point. Still, there are technology tools that can make the work easier. Digital storytelling is all about creative expression but there are some essential elements and narrative forms that can help make a story more likely to connect with its audience.
Take some time to get to know the free online tools, inexpensive software, and narrative techniques below and you’ll be ready to make digital storytelling part of how your organization tells its story.
9 Tech Tools For A Great Digital Story
The folks at eLearning Industry have put together a helpful list of websites, apps, and other technology that gives digital storytellers the tools they need to tell a story that will make an audience feel present through 21st-century media.
1. ACMI Generator
This website has a Storyboard Generator that lets you choose a script template or storyboard your own.
2. Bubblr
An online tool that lets users turn photos from Flickr into sequences with comic book-style speech bubbles.
3. PicLits
This site matches writing to pictures. It’s a great way to get the creative juices flowing.
4. Smilebox
A website that helps turn slideshows and photo albums into multimedia narratives. It lets you choose templates to make it easy to add music, narration, and other post-production effects.
5. Storybird
Storybird makes it easy to tell a digital story with illustrations and animations from around the world. It’s free to use but there are fees to download or print the stories you create.
6. Adobe Slate
This is an award-winning app that makes it easy to turn newsletters, impact reports, and even blog posts into visually stunning digital media.
7. Puppet Pals
Puppet Pals is an app that makes it easy to add motion, narration, and other audio to animations. You can even use photos to design animated characters.
8. ShowMe
ShowMe is a tool that lets you create an entire production around an interactive whiteboard. Record voice-over narratives to take full advantage of the digital media possibilities.
9. WeVideo
With a free account, WeVideo lets users create up to 5 minutes of video and store up to 2GB. It’s a great tool for making and editing videos and it makes collaboration easy through a cloud-based platform.
The Essential Elements of a Digital Story
Having the tech tools to take storytelling digital is important—but you still need a story to tell. We all have stories. That’s the whole point of digital storytelling. But how you tell a story can make a big difference to the audience.
At the most fundamental level, the essential elements of a digital story are digital media and a narrative. But the folks at Novel have pointed out an additional 4 elements that make the content more compelling.
Humanity
Remember that people interact with other people, not with brands or logos. Stories are told by people. So, the best way to connect your brand with people is through the stories other people tell. Let team members, the community, or influencers help you tell your story.
Interaction
A great story can draw people in, but it does more for your message when it gets them to talk back and listens when they do. Anything interactive adds to the story’s power to connect—a map, a poll, comments, responses, and more.
Immersion
Like we said earlier, there’s more to your story than the polished copywriting can tell. Your brand story gets deeper, and as a result, more powerful when you enrich it with additional detail. When the audience adds to your story with user-generated content, that’s even better.
Integration
Good stories are told and retold in different ways, by different storytellers, on different platforms, and through different channels. Digital storytelling is a way to focus on how your story gets told from a variety of different perspectives.
Thinking Strategically About Digital Stories
There are a few different approaches to digital storytelling. Each one is designed to work a particular way and achieve a particular way. Think about what you want your digital stories to accomplish then practice aligning creative expression with narrative forms and strategic approaches until you get the results you’re seeking.
A digital story can be shared on the internet through a website or social media. It can be a podcast, a slide show, or a video. Multimedia software allows you to add narration, music, and other audio elements. Whatever you’ve created can go from your computer to the world thanks to 21st-century technology.
When you tell the story in a singular flow, it often ends up looking like a brief version of a film. These types of digital stories are sometimes called micro movies. There is a lot of overlap between this type of digital story and visual storytelling as a marketing tactic. Of course, the source and the perspective come from a wider range in a true digital story.
In contrast to digital stories that follow film conventions, there is the approach of Web 2.0 stories. These set out to aggregate a wide range of voices. They rely less on a script, a storyboard, and a creative process and more on search habits and links. They blur the lines between life and art through the lack of form and process. Interaction and immersion are the primary goals.
Digital Stories Worth Telling
The folks at Brafton want us to remember that there’s more than one way to tell a story and more than one kind of story worth telling. They’ve put together a brief list of story themes that tend to work well in support of an organization’s brand. When you’ve got your digital storytelling program rolling, you can go after a mix of the different themes to round out the perspectives and focus of your stories.
Personal
The best example of a personal story is the “WHY” statement that supplies the motives and the momentum for your organization’s mission.
If you’re going to tell a story, why not make it one about the idea that gave birth to your organization and the sources that supply you with the passion it takes to pursue your goals?
It can be a great feature on your website or you can break it up into sections and feature it on social media. Blending audio, video, and images gives you all the tools you need to create content that will connect with an audience.
Business
Tell the community how your organization helps. Give them specific examples. Use examples that come to you from the community.
Digital storytelling can be inclusive by letting a range of voices participate in the process. Or, a digital story can initiate a process of interaction.
Let audiences learn your story by seeing you through the eyes of the people you serve.
Projects and Programs
Capture audio, video, and images while your team is performing the activities that deliver the services that your programs provide. With a little bit of after-the-fact writing and some creativity, you can storyboard the story of how you make a difference.
Community
One way to make your organization stand out to audiences around the world is to let the people whose lives you touch tell their personal stories through your organization. Feature their stories on your website or your social media. Use them to amplify a blog post or demonstrate impact in a report.
Argonaut Productions Can Help You Create Media You’ll Be Proud To Post
We’re great at creating video content that you can use for visual storytelling. But we’re just as happy to share our experience and expertise to help you with writing to create a personal project.
If you think that digital storytelling might be right for your organization, give us a call to let us know how we can help.