Air travel drastically changed the way we saw transportation. What once took days, weeks and even months can now be accomplished in a 24 hour period of flight.
If anyone knows this, it’s Erik Lindberg.
His grandfather, Charles Lindberg, was the first man to make the flight from New York City to Paris, France. How’s that for a family story?
But in a recent Nonprofit Storytelling Conference, it wasn’t the story of the flight that Erik was interested in. It was the way the story was used as leverage.
There was a $25,000 reward for the first person to complete the flight…
And $400,000 was spent to develop the technology to do it.
To put that into perspective, it cost 16 times more than the reward to make that flight. But that’s the power of leverage.
If a story is meaningful, people will go to extraordinary lengths to become part of it.
Your organization may not be offering financial rewards, but you can offer outcomes.
You offer the outcome of another child fed, another innocent and loving animal saved, another piece of land preserved for our kids.
Share the direct outcome you can make and the same principles of leverage will apply. People will invest financially to be a part of that story.
What specific outcome (and it’s important to focus on just one) will provide you with the leverage to engage your audience? Where will your audience be most likely to hear it?
–Aeriel Halstead, Positive Change Trailblazer at PiP
(Source: Storytelling Conference 2017 and http://www.poweringimagination.com)