Succeed through Storytelling:
How to Advance Your Work with a Brand Story

There’s a lot of hype about brand stories, but can they really advance your work?

Take my own business is an example: most of you know that I started from scratch in a new field and a new region where I hardly knew anyone, and I quickly created a thriving business … but you may not realize that my primary business-building tool was (and is) my brand story. Many of you first met me at a cafe for tea or just at your office, and I began by telling you how I got to be sitting with you. It felt (and was) genuine, not sales-y, and it got many of you interested in hiring me. That was my brand story.

Make People Like Your Organization
Before They Walk in the Door

You want people to feel connected with your organization, to see it as a supportive friend or mentor and feel a sense of loyalty to it… even if they don’t yet have warm relationships with staff members. Writing is often your organization’s first introduction to prospective clients, donor, or grant funders. How can they feel connected with you before they have even met you?

The answer is simple to understand, but more difficult to achieve: humanize your organization by giving it its own personality when you write about it.

The Most Common Mistake I See:
Can You Guess it? Are You Making It?

Whether I am drawing from previously written materials to write new content, or editing copy drafted by my clients, I see many people’s writing. In this Flight Log, I will discuss the most common mistake I see, both because it’s possible you are making it, and because your competitors probably are. Excelling in areas where your competitors are weak is a great way to stand out from the crowd and get the attention you want.

How to Write About What Went Wrong

You know you didn’t measure up. Your nonprofit didn’t meet its objectives, or you made a mistake on your customer’s order, or maybe someone even complained to your boss about you. No one’s perfect; it may have been an honest mistake, or there may have been unforeseen circumstances that transformed a simple task into something like trying to fly a kite on a windless day, or sitting on the ground in a perfect breeze, muttering and grumbling as you picked at the knotted mass of the kite’s tail. Whatever it was, something went wrong and you need to write to a stakeholder about it. What do you do?

4 Simple Steps
To Creating a Voice that Connects with Readers

In this world of anonymous crowds overflowing with written chatter until we can hardly pick out a single voice, let alone remember it, people respond to your writing only when they feel a connection with you. To earn their attention, your written voice must show real personality, so they feel another human voice speaking to them – one they want to hear. If you actually sit down and think about what you want your voice to convey and how to convey it, the process is simple and the benefit huge – people will listen.

How Your Writing Can
Build Community to Change the World

To truly change our cultural practices and values, we need to bring people together to share and live a new vision. We need to create community. This Flight Log will look at the need for community on three levels – societal, individual, and organizational – and how you can structure your messaging to address all three.

When Business Development = Self-Development

When I became an entrepreneur, I had no idea what it would take. I didn’t realize it would be all that different from salary, except that I would find my own clients, make my own schedule, earn a varying income without benefits, and do most of my work at home with a cat in my lap.

At the moment, the cat is adorable, gray and white Sparrow, radiating happiness even while napping… but the real differences between salary and freelance are much more profound. I’ve discovered that entrepreneurship requires far greater depth and utilization of self-knowledge. My own psychology has become my primary piece of office equipment; to succeed, I must understand and use it to its best advantage. Adapting to the structure of a salaried job never required this. The process is deeply challenging, exhilaratingly creative, and profoundly rewarding. I must unabashedly own up to all of my strengths, weaknesses, and foibles, and use them in creative tinkering to figure out what really makes me tick or jam up and how to graft a business onto my own natural patterns. Thus, business development = self-development.

Two Little Words that Create Community

How you frame your work in speech and writing can make all the difference. If your messaging fosters a sense of community, people will want to be involved. Certain words can subtly and powerfully undermine the atmosphere of equality and mutual support on which real community is based, while other words just as quietly and compellingly boost community feeling, transforming how people feel and what they do. Replacing just two tiny, common words can dramatically shift both your messaging and your results, so that people feel eager and gratified to be part of your community and support you.

Don’t Just Avoid It:
How to Counteract Stereotype in Writing

People are sensitive, and that means not only that they are easily hurt, but that they perceive a great deal of subtlety and are often influenced by nuances of which they aren’t even consciously aware. In writing, outright bigotry is often easy to spot and avoid, but sometimes we subtly support stereotypes, stigmas, and dehumanization without even realizing it. Here are two techniques for increasing your awareness of how writing can either embolden stereotypes or replace them with humanitarian concepts.

Persuasive Verses:
How Outreach & Marketing Copy Are Like Poetry

This title might seem just about as strange to you as “How Polar Bears are Like Toucans,” since we tend to see poetry and marketing/outreach writing as utterly different creatures living in different environments. Indeed, I never expected that studying poetry back in college would be the slightest bit useful commercially; I enrolled in poetry classes simply for the pleasure of playing with the written word. Yet, years later when I started professionally writing outreach and sales materials for nonprofits and mission-based businesses, I immediately found myself applying many of the lessons I learned in my college studies of poetry.

The 8 crucial lessons poetry teaches to outreach and copy writers: