Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.
Robert McKee – author, lecturer, and story consultant.
Once upon a time, a hopeful project applicant filled out the application form and sent it in a box, along with 1000 pages of other documents. Many years have passed since that fateful deadline rush, but both the project and the programme officers are still using the same dry project description, as if bound to it by some ancient curse.
Sounds scary, right?
It looks even worse when a communication expert takes that formal bureaucratic description from the application form and posts it on Facebook, illustrated with a bad photo from a boring meeting. The photo usually shows experts sitting around a table with some papers on it and a neglected plant in the background.
This is not how we are supposed to communicate with any of our target groups. Even if you are sending a report to the people in the European Commission, it is better if your project description is easy to read and understand. Don’t just list the number of park benches you procured within the project. Leave the dry quantitative descriptions for the auditors. Instead, explain how the park benches have helped the local community to enjoy the park better, to get together and socialize. You can tell the whole story with two photos and three words – ‘before and after’.
Digital storytelling doesn’t mean that you need to sound like the Brothers Grimm. It doesn’t even mean that you must be original or clever at all cost. Digital storytelling simply means that instead of writing a report about the important things we have done, we can tell a story. How do we do that? Simply put, we can use a few basic writing techniques to make our content relatable and easier to understand. And this is why we have created this course – to help you turn your project descriptions into engaging texts that people will actually want to read and, more importantly, retell.
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