In this episode, we discuss the importance of guiding principles and story-driven messaging. This is episode 3 in a series where we are sharing our thoughts and insights on all things brand and story. The story is a powerful marketing tool, and today we’re discussing how a story can be applied to your guiding principles and messaging structures.
Transcription:
In last week’s episode we spent some time walking through our organizational why, who, how and what and discussed the importance of purpose being engrained in our communication at a core level. The topic of today’s conversation is Guiding Principles and Story Driven Messaging.
Now that we’ve walked through the core elements of your brand strategy, WHY, WHO, HOW, and WHAT, now I want to spend some time working through a couple of statements that will serve as guiding principles for your brand. To start, we’re going to start with your purpose statement. Your purpose statement is your why statement. This is going to serve as the foundation of your organization and inform everything you say and do as a ministry. This is the core belief behind your brand. This is why it all matters. Historically, this is what you might call your vision statement. Your purpose statement is a big picture statement. If your work was completed tomorrow, what would be the result? In our course on purpose driven strategy, we give a couple of examples from other organizations. New Story has a great example. Their purpose statement is “Pioneering Solutions to End Global Homelessness.” IJM is another great example. Their purpose is to “End Slavery in Our Lifetime.” Notice that these are big picture statements. Also, I want you to notice the simplicity behind these two statements. Single, incredibly simple sentences. They don’t get into the nitty gritty details, they don’t talk about their strategies. No matter how long IJM and New Story are around, their purpose statements are big enough that their purpose statements shouldn’t ever have to change.
For New Story, as they pioneer their solutions, they are fighting to end global homelessness.
If you want to really take your purpose statement to a whole other level, try and make this statement a word picture.
If you can somehow make this a word picture, it’s going to have an even greater effect. This is where creative writing and copywriting come into play. If this statement can conjure up an image in my mind as the reader and communicate the belief behind your brand, all while explaining WHY you do what you do, and if you can do it in a single short sentence, you’re going to have an incredibly powerful purpose statement that will drive, inform, and serve as the foundation of everything you say and do as an organization.
At the end of the day, your purpose statement is WHY it all matters. It’s WHY your organization matters and WHY it exists. What do you believe the world should look like? That question should drive you as you craft a purpose statement for your organization.
Alright, now that we have a purpose statement that serves as our messaging foundation, we can now move onto developing the mission statement. Your mission statement is a simplified version of your story script. I’ll discuss story scripts later on in this episode when I discuss Story-Driven Messaging, but the idea behind this model is this: every ministry brand has a story to tell, and your mission statement is your ministry story in it’s most simplified form. We want to move away from long winded, and confusing paragraphs that use business-speak or business terminology and insider language, and move towards clarity and simplification. Your mission statement should be easy to understand, easy to remember, include a great ambition, and be actionable. With those elements in mind let’s dive into the formula we’ll use for crafting a great mission statement.
In our last episode I referenced a story structure that relates to all people across all cultures. C.S. Lewis referred to this story structure as the Mono Myth. Joseph Campbell gave it its more recognizable name, The Hero’s Journey. It’s a story structure used throughout many of the stories in the Bible, almost all of the most popular Hollywood films, and it’s the story structure we all live on repeat throughout the course of our lives. This story structure engages people well, and we want your communication strategy to use a system that is rooted in story and purpose, rather than strategy and solutions. This structure will help you create a mission statement that is simple, clear, easy to understand, and one that engages your audience.
Alright, so we’re going to break your mission statement down into three parts. The three parts to the mission statement are as follows. First, we want to establish the problem. Every great story has conflict, so we want to start with the pain point you exist to solve. And at this stage, we’re addressing the problem at its highest level. Don’t get into the weeds yet on the problem.We want to address the problem your ministry exists to solve at it’s highest level. Remember back to the New Story example, the problem they are trying to solve is global homelessness. That’s the problem stated at it’s highest level.
The second piece to the mission statement is your solution. Where is your organization headed or what is the solution you’ve created for the problem you’ve just posed? This is where you can start to share a bit of your strategy.
Lastly, we want to include the stakes or results in the mission statement. Bring this story home. What happens if we succeed? What are the end results of our ministries work? The third part in the mission statement is the third act of the story, we complete the story arc with this piece and now we’ve got a complete 3 act story within our mission statement. Notice that the mission statement is an extremely summarized and succinct version of the Hero’s Journey. A character has a problem, your ministry, the guide, has a solution, and that solution will end in this positive result if we succeed. The end. Remember, think simple, think clear, and think short and sweet when designing your mission statement.
Your mission statement should follow this formula. Problem. Solution. Result. There is a stated problem. We have this solution, that results in a better picture of the world.
When you’re crafting your mission statement, please avoid vague, ambiguous language. Share your mission statement with strangers or acquaintances who you don’t know, and test whether or not they understand what you’re saying in your mission statement before you settle on a finished version.
Now that you’ve got your mission statement built, we can move onto your story script. Essentially, your story script is a longer version of your mission statement. Most of us want to talk too much about our ministries and the strategies we use, and the story script is your chance to do so. With that said, the story script is not a long history of how your organization started. We’re still telling a story that invites your donor into a journey. As we work through the story script, it might start to seem a little repetitive because it’s just a longer version of your mission statement. That’s ok, and in fact, that’s by design. There is importance and significance in repetition. It’s going to help your team, your donors, and anyone who loves your brand share and advocate for your ministry.
Just like the mission statement formula, the story script formula follows a 3 act story structure. In act 1, we’ve got a problem. This can be the same problem you’ve presented in your mission statement. This is the external problem, or the problem communicated most obviously. Now that we’ve communicated the external problem, we’re going to add conflict to the story by making the problem worse. This might be an internal problem or a philosophical problem. Ask the question, how does this problem affect my donor personally? You might want to make the problem more granular, or focus on how the big problem affects an individual beneficiaries life. Be creative, but don’t shy away from communicating the problem and then making it worse. In act 2, your brand shows up as the mentor in the story and provides a plan or solution or a strategy to solve the problem. In act 2 we are calling the hero, in most cases the donor, to action and then we want to show the result or success if the plan is followed. Finally, in act 3, we’re going to communicate the moral of the story or the purpose or why behind this cause. This is where you can insert brand beliefs and end the story script with your purpose statement, or some variation of your purpose statement that drives home why you exist. This story script formula can be used to build a brand script for your ministry that you can use in fundraising meetings, on website landing pages, campaign collateral, email campaigns, and in speeches at events. Craft specific story scripts and messaging for each department or all of the separate strategies you use to get your work done. This is meant to be applied in various brand touchpoints throughout your organization. It’s in the form of a formula so that it can be re-used , and if you stay tuned for our upcoming episode on scriptwriting, you’ll see that this forms the basic structure we’ll use when we take beneficiary stories and turn them into video scripts.
Now that you’ve developed your mission statement and brand story script, it’s time to explore vital traits. These are the traits your people are going to need in order to execute your purpose and mission. In traditional corporate manifestos, these would be your core values. The problem with most core values though, is that 1. Ministries often have too many for their teams to remember. 2. They are usually nouns, which are not actionable. As an employee of a company, I cannot take action on a noun. And 3. Values tend to be words that correspond to or communicate what you believe in as an organization. But, remember we’ve already created a purpose statement that holds our why, it is a statement that communicates what we believe, and so there is no need for a set of values that communicate that same thing. They only serve to be one more thing for your team to remember. What if, your core values were a list of vital traits or characteristics that guided the type of people you hired? What if they were a list of traits that communicated who you and your people needed to be in order to achieve the mission? We believe a set of vital traits is a much more effective tool in providing guidance as you develop your teams.
Now, as you work through developing your vital traits, again the traits your team needs to have in order to achieve your mission, I’m going to encourage you to stick to 3 vital traits. It’s very difficult to remember more than that, and if you keep your vital traits to 3, your team is going to be able to remember them better and take action on them more effectively.
As you work through your vital traits, here are the boxes that you need to check off before a vital trait gets added to your list.
First, they need to be necessary traits. By that I mean, the traits you choose need to be necessary to achieve the mission. If a trait isn’t relevant to your work, it probably shouldn’t get added to the list.
Second, they need to be actionable, aspirational, and achievable. Are your traits nouns or are they verbs? Nouns are usually not actionable, while verbs are actionable.
And when I say that your traits need to be aspirational. Are your traits characteristics that your teams can strive towards. Even if your team has the traits you’ve listed, can they continue to strive towards these traits? And that brings us to achievable. Are your traits achievable or are they unattainable because they are either too obscure or out of reach? Perfection should not be on your vital traits list. It shouldn’t even make the short list.
And then third, you’re going to want to put these in rank order. List your vital traits in order of importance, and then communicate to your team that they are listed in rank order. That way, if someone from your team runs into a situation where they need to make a decision on choosing one trait over another, they know the rank order and therefore know the direction they should choose. Remember, we want to provide clarity for our people, and sharing your rank order for your vital traits will help your team in those situations where they need to make a choice between one over the other. For example, if empathy and financially frugal are both items on your vital traits list, you probably want to put empathetic first, that way your team knows that even though they should be financially frugal, it’s never going to be at the expense of people.
So, to summarize, as you work through your vital traits list, make sure they check these boxes. Are they necessary traits? Are they actionable, aspirational, and achievable, and are they listed in rank order for your team? Keep these requirements in mind as you work through your vital traits and remember, stick to 3 traits max. You don’t want your team to have to remember too many things.
Now we’ve come to your one-liner. This is the last piece we’ll discuss in this episode and this is a tool that can be used in various places across your brand. In essence, this is your mission statement, and if you want to simplify things and use your mission statement as your one-liner, you’re welcome to do so. Here’s where the one-liner differs from your mission statement though. Say I run a ministry that employs more than one strategy to get our work done. I could have a one-liner for each of my different strategies. If your ministry has multiple departments, each department can have their own one-liner. Maybe your provide multiple services, each service can have it’s own one-liner. For example, World Vision is known for their child sponsorship programs, but they also do water wells, they fight human trafficking, and they work to end FGM or female dental mutilation. So, World Visions mission statement might communicate a grand vision for the ministry as a whole, and then they might have a one-liner that focuses on each area of expertise or each cause they’re fighting for. A one-liner for child sponsorship, a one-liner for human trafficking, a one-liner for water wells and one for FGM.
Now, the cool thing about a one-liner is that it can be used in a wide variety of brand touchpoints. For example, you could use your one-liner on your email signature, in email campaigns, or as an elevator pitch. My favorite place to use a one-liner is on the header of a website as a statement that grabs the the attention of the user or audience. The one-liner is a powerful little tool for creating simplicity in your messaging. So, let’s look at the one-liner formula in a bit more detail.
If you remember back to our mission statement, the one-liner follows the same formula. Problem, Solution, Result.
That’s because they are the exact same formula. Problem, Solution, and Result.
We’re going to introduce the high level external problem.
Next, you’ll introduce the solution. What is your solution or strategy to solving the external problem?
Lastly, define the results. What does success look like if your strategy succeeds?
By the end, when you put all of these things together, you should have a statement that is 2-3 sentences long and clearly defines what, how, and why you do what you do. How many of your ministries can say you have a statement that is that short and sweet? This can be a powerful tool to help you develop clarity in your communication.
Now, let’s remember back to our purpose driven strategy episode last week. This one-liner formula follows and communicates the What, How, and Why communication we discussed in that course. Notice, your conflict or need is WHAT you do. Your strategy or solution, is How you do what you do to solve the problem, and your result or success if your Why. The same thing goes with your mission statement and your story script. Notice how all of these pieces we’ve been discussing come together to communicate clearly and communicate with WHY or belief or purpose rooted communication? When you start communicating with this level of clarity and intentionality we think things can get really exciting.
Relevant Resources:
Purpose-Driven Strategy
Story-Driven Messaging Course
