I have had numerous people ask me, what is your approach to your business…your creative approach. Well, I could talk or even lecture about my approach. It comes from years and years of experience, training, education, and teaching. So…here it is in two paragraphs.
Bobby Rettew, llc – Creative Approach to Storytelling
Storytelling has been and will always be the major focus of how we work with our clients. Every organization has a story to tell, so it is up to us practitioners to find and tell that story. We work with organizations to identify the audience, the purpose, and the delivery of each and every message. Then we create a plan that best identifies the message within the organization, and work with the organization to deliver that message.
We bring a documentary approach to production, looking within and allowing the individuals within the organization to become the voice of the message. We have the ability to write and craft a traditional-style message, but we find that if the organization and its members are a part of the message, then the audience connects with the organization. We use the storytelling approach to building relationships.
How do we make information for our communities creative, usable, and easy to access? Thinking back to my academic days of User-Centered Design and Usability Testing Methodologies…it is all about AUDIENCE.
We have to find a focus! Seriously, we have to have a mission statement for the information we are trying to communicate. It takes a some time to sit down and write out a mission statement. The one thing that helps me frame this initiative is to identify three points.
1 – Who is the audience
2 – What is the purpose of this communication effort?
3 – How are we trying to reach this audience with this piece(s) of communication?
Not hard, but sit down and do this simple analysis. Take time to break down the audiences, list them all. Then, write out the purpose of the effort/initiative when communicating to these audience(s). next, how are you going to get this information to the audience. Take a few moments and see how each of these are inter-dependent. The method of distribution might differ from audience to audience and might even change your purpose.
Now use this research to write a mission statement for your overall initiative. Explain it to yourself and say it out loud, imagine if you have to pitch this to your client.
OK…to make it usable, you have to know your audience. You have to live, breath, eat, sleep, smell, taste, etc…just like your audience. You have to know their pre-dispositions before your can communicate with them .So, take that little analysis above and list out each audience. Then for each one, write a complete description for each audience. Describe them in a way that you can paint a picture for your mother who knows nothing about these people. You want to paint that picture so you can almost see everything through their eyes.
Once you have done this little exercise, you should have a better understanding of your audience. Now, begin creating your piece of communication. Go through the creative process iteratively. Create static drafts of the design, rough drafts of the copy, story boards of the video, etc. Put together the first look.
Now, pull out that audience analysis you created previously, and ask yourself if you think they can see/understand this information. Use this as a litmus test. Then, conduct a simple usability test, invite individuals that represent each audience and let them interact with these “static” designs. You think of this as a focus group, but to me you are conducting a simple usability test. Let them play, ask questions, but do not predispose them .Do this on a global basis, looking at the overall communication initiative; and also do this very micro with a small part of the communication piece. RECORD THIER THOUGHTS. DO this either with note taking, audio recording, or video recording. Then…make changes based on the mission statement.
Now…create the piece of communication in a dynamic form. This means make the website, the Facebook page, the Blog, the Video, etc. Pull out the mission statement and audience analysis and compare the final dynamic piece and with this initial research. Find another group of individuals to come to review. Let them watch, interact, etc. with the dynamic piece of communication. Watch them as the interact. See where they engage and disengage. What their faces, their eyes, and their body language.
Does this make any sense. Is it too methodical. Well, you can make this as big or as small a process as you want. But ultimately, it is the purpose to come up with a creative idea, understand the audience, test with the audience, adapt, and launch. This empowers a community of creatives and audiences to engage in a process to learn and come up with a wonderful piece of creative!
Be passionate…communicate passionately…engage with your audience(s) passionately!
The creative zone can sometimes be so hard to find. It does not matter when we need to create, but if inspiration has not eclipsed to the point of transferring the epiphany to our actionable finger tips, then we have not crossed the creative chasm.
The other day, I was speaking to my class about writing passionately. It is hard to grasp this idea…to write passionately. To sit down and bring theatre to the fingertips…orchestrating what is singing in our heads as true articulation. We have a hard time jumping over that creative chasm…finding the happy place, the place where we call the zone. That is why so many creatives have writer’s block or dead periods. We sometimes take days to begin a project…mainly because it has not come to full understanding in our heads…in our hearts. We have to believe passionately about the message, the project. We have to feel it to articulate it verbally, contextually, visually, audibly .
How do we find the passion…well we have to look within ourselves and decide what makes us tick. What makes us peek up from the normal hustle and bustle of life? We have to focus in on the things that take us away from the status-quo and invigorate the juices in our heart, the passion inside us. What makes us smell the breathe of life?
How do we communicate our passion? We have to find a way to focus the energy…and be able to articualte it so others can see it through our eyes. Some of us write, some of us take pictures, some of us draw. What ever the medium may be…we have to allow it to connect with our inner thoughts as an instrument to translate, so others can see our point-of-view. The other day I watched a very successful entrepreneur articulate a vision, not through words, not through a powerpoint, but by drawing a graph, his medium…he crossed the creative chasm. No other way made sense, until he found a piece of white paper and a Sharpe.
What is the one place where you can go…the one place you know you can find the zone. You know, when you are fully in-touch with your passion? Athletes have it when they get on a hot streak, hit the next 5 three pointers back, to back, to back…without even hesitating. That is the zone…the happy place. The place where we are fully in-touch with our abilities to articulate our passion for others to see. Mine is when I am driving with the windows down and the music blasting. I go to my creative place, the place where I am in-touch with my ability to see things clearly.
Where is this place for you? Where is the zone? How do you find it to release your inner passion for others to clearly see the world through your senses…that is when we tell our story. It helps us lead!
We are visionaries!
We are creative and we are strategic. We have passion and willingness to work infinite amount of hours to execute an idea. But sometimes, it is hard to lead. Seriously! This is by means no admission that I have not tried or will try again to successfully lead a group with a common mission/goal. It is a self-reflection that I realize that I was not pre-disposed to be a natural born leader. I think? We just believe in tomorrow’s human capital!
We generate great ideas!
We live in a world that beats to many different drums. We feel our path and not objectively understand how to get to the final resting place. But we understand that the path is so much fun. Our ideas do not come to us during a planning session, they happen in the middle of the night when we least expect. They happen in the shower or when we are screaming down the road at 85 mph with the windows down. But the logical side of our brain knows and understands that we must capitalize on that very moment of true epiphany. We must implement the creative thought right when it pops in our brain. You will find us running through the house stark naked to jot down the idea, draw that vision, create that master piece. We will cut across five lanes of traffic under creative transcendental inspiration, just to get to the side of the interstate to jot it down. We are passionate about our ideas.
We need implementors!
We need help. We see the vision and can articulate the vision, but we rely on those who have the expertise to help us implement the vision. The vision is clear in our head…so clear we can almost reach out and touch it. But, we need those who can decipher our vision into a palatable final product. Yes, we can be technicians of our trade, but as practitioners we understand to rely on those have the technical expertise to make the final product shine!
We like living within our creative freedom!
We know when to turn on that perfect song to get us into a creative rhythm. We like to spread our wings and let the emotion of the story influence the direction. We get so in-tune with our creative thoughts that those looking in have a hard time communicating with us during the moments of inspiration. We can see the lips flapping, but the words just do not register. We are in the zone. We are in the place where we so connected with our big “T” truth, that it only makes sense to us. It feeds our ego and separates us from others. We love our passion.
Structure is a necessary evil!
We understand that organization is the one thing that still keeps us human. It is that calendar or the to-do list that brings us back to reality. It is that assistant that is so OCD about keeping structure, that we knew when we hired them…it was necessary for not only our mental sanity but to ensure we kept our business thriving. We find value in the other side of the brain, just sometimes it is hard to make it happen.
Our minds rationalize differently!
We articulate our thoughts verbally so that we when hear ourselves say it out loud, we can then find the holes in the idea. We speak in tangents and outliers that ultimately have meaning to the bigger story, but we have to rationalize it in our own brains just to get to the final point. We chose to take the road less traveled because sometimes we do not like to feel mainstreamed. We like the opposing argument, just to argue that position with out any pre-disposition…because we can! We like a-typical. We want to be in the minds of those we are trying to influence, so we can understand how to truly create and influential piece of creative. We are flat out manic!
We do not create on a timeline!
What is a timeline…oh, that thing that keeps us on task. We just cannot force our inspiration…it just happens at 3am when the dog happened to lick our face and that is the one little thing that made it all click. We procrastinate because we work better under pressure, knowing we have to deliver the best thing since sliced bread in the next few hours. It is like a drug…the ability to create a masterpiece in a tight timeframe knowing inspiration will hit us at that an unknown moment. Then we deliver and sleep like no tomorrow.
We lead by example!
We lead from our hearts, our passions, and our past experiences. We want to create a community of ideas, bring people together with a common vision, and allow them to create more pieces of fine art. We have been down that road before. Living the dream with bad bosses, bad corporate structure…and it is our hope to make it a little better for those that will lead us to the next millennium. Why, because we believe in our future. We believe we must give back because those we are trying to inspire will be the ones who decide how our legacy(s) will live for the next millennium.
