Storytelling with You

chapter 2craft your message

You've identified your target audience and acknowledged their needs. Next comes what might seem like an obvious question: what do you want to communicate?

Too often, we don't pause to think about this. We finish our project or decide on a presentation topic and begin indiscriminately generating content, creating slides or directing others to do so on our behalf. But if we can't succinctly articulate our point, how do we pull together content that will get that message across? That's a tough feat.

Counter that with the scenario where you are able to simply state your key message in a sentence. This puts you in a much stronger position to intentionally plan your materials.

What should my audience do?

When you are getting ready to communicate, identify what you want others to do—a specific action they should follow. The action itself can take many different forms. It could be a discussion, options to weigh, an idea to respond to, or a decision to make. This is an area in which presentations often fall short. We spend a great deal of time putting together content and taking our audience through masses of information without ever thinking about what we want them to actually do. What specific activity will your hard work inform? If you can't clearly articulate the action, you should consider whether you need to communicate in the first place.

We'll touch upon the 3‐minute story briefly and cover the Big Idea in depth as tools to empower you as ...