Written by: Lauren Ready, North Iowa Marketing Summit Speaker
I recently sat down and calculated how many people I’ve interviewed in my career. A conservative estimate is at least 5,000! The majority of those interviews have been with people on-camera, and I can tell you the exact moment a story starts to matter: the moment after their rehearsed answer. It usually happens when I ask one more question; they stop performing and start speaking from the heart.
For more than a decade, I was a journalist in the Midwest (hello to my former KWWL viewers) and the Midsouth. No matter what the subject, the prepared answer is not the real story. Sure, it’s polished. It’s safe. But it’s not always real. The real story is usually one layer deeper, in the detail someone almost left out because they didn’t think it mattered, or the moment they’re a little embarrassed to admit changed everything.
As a documentary filmmaker now, my job is not to get people to perform their story well. It’s to get curious enough, be patient enough, and allow the person on-camera the chance to forget to perform at all.
That’s the thing about great storytelling that people get backwards: Even as marketers, we’re trained to script, to polish, to control the message. But it can easily go too far. And audiences can feel the difference between a story that was written by the script and a story that was discovered. The latter is full of authenticity that people feel and share.
That distinction is why I am so excited to share my signature IMPACT Storytelling™ Framework, which I’ll be unpacking at the North Iowa Marketing Summit this October. My keynote, Telling Your Untold Story: Storytelling That Starts With Curiosity, starts by identifying a real moment of truth (not the highlight reel moment, the true one), and it insists on authenticity over agenda. The rest of the framework is about the how: how to build personal connection, how to sustain continuous engagement, and ultimately how to transform hearts & minds (to consumers, donors, and supporters), not just impressions.
So if you’re on the fence about spending the day together in October, here’s my challenge to you before: Think about the story your organization tells most often. Now ask yourself what you’re leaving out. What’s the detail that feels too small, too vulnerable, or too unpolished to include? I’d bet that’s exactly where your best story is hiding.
In this session, I’ll show you how to find it, authentically shape it, and use it to move people to act! We’ll dig into how curiosity uncovers the stories worth telling, and why the imperfect, specific, human moments are the ones people remember and repeat.
If you’ve ever felt like your organization’s story is more interesting than the version you’ve been telling, you’re probably right. Come find out how to tell it.