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‘Captivate Your Audience From the Very Beginning’; Steen to Showcase Storytelling Skills at Virtual Event

by Media

“Pay particular attention to the first and last sentences of a story. People tend to remember the first things you say and your concluding thought. Make sure they are as powerful and memorable as possible. I don’t necessarily use the same words when I am telling a story, but I typically know what the first and last words will be.”

Those carefully chosen words come from Scott Steen, executive director of the American Physiological Society, in a white paper he wrote titled Becoming Your Association’s Storyteller-in-Chief. Steen will be one of the featured keynote speakers at the upcoming Reset, Reinvent, Revenue 2021, AM&P Network’s virtual event for association publishing professionals, online everywhere June 16-17.

While Steen’s talk—titled MarComm as Change Agent: How Brand Drives Organizational Change—will delve into other areas, his proficiency at and commitment to the art of storytelling will serve him and his audience well. You’ll hear how he’s led associations through major transformation and why association communicators are perfectly positioned to be the catalysts of change within their organizations. (Can’t wait? Tune in here to learn more from Steen on how communications drives change.)

“Effective associations tell stories to: promote their profession or industry; attract new members; trumpet their accomplishments; honor their members; sell their experiences and products; and more,” Steen wrote. “But few leaders take the time to hone their storytelling skills.”

While Steen’s doubling-down on storytelling is not a revelation, its emphasis is well-warranted. In December 2019, after speaking to our media group for 30-plus minutes about the vital nature of digital design and the reading revolution that digital has thrust upon us, Mario Garcia—a Columbia professor and author of the book, The Story—closed by saying: “The takeaway is if you have a good story, people will stay with you… I don’t sit here and lament what was. I celebrate what is. These are the best times to be a storyteller, but you have to explore all that is there.”

The pandemic may have amplified the value of storytelling even more, as we all experienced things for the first time over the last 15 months.

The Food Marketing Institute opened its virtual meeting last year with footage of members talking about the importance of grocery stores and communities during the pandemic, the role they played, and how they gave back to their communities. “Opening the event with the stories was so powerful,” said Margaret Core, VP of marketing and industry relations. “That’s engagement: We let the actions of our members tell our story.”

Steen lists 5 Principles for Telling a Great Story, based on a version by Stanford Business School Professor JD Schramm. They are:

Parachute In. You have seconds to capture your audience’s attention… Captivate your audience from the very beginning by jumping right into a story.

First & Last. (This is the lead quote about first and last sentences.)

Goldilocks Principle. Not too hot, not too cold, just right. Use too few details and you’ll prevent your audience from truly experiencing your story and lose emotional connection. Use too many and your story will become confusing and (worse) boring. Make your details count.

Poetic Language. Poetry uses carefully chosen and powerful words to communicate both information and emotion. It also uses language economically, conveying tremendous meaning with the fewest words possible. The best presentations and speeches do, too.

The Sound of Silence. [Interesting on the day that A Quiet Place Part II opens up.] Silence tends to make Americans nervous, but it can be an incredibly powerful tool when you are telling a story. It gives people time to “get the joke” when you say something funny. It intensifies the moment when the point is profound or poignant.

As with all of our content, measurement must be considered. In a whitepaper titled, Storytelling 2020: What You Need to Know About Storytelling in Marketing, the Atlanta chapter of the American Marketing Association wrote: “Be prepared to isolate the data that matters to your storytelling efforts. Then analyze what messages had an impact, which ones didn’t and where there is room for optimization. Also, leverage this data to get a better picture of your customer and where there are opportunities to extend the relationship to create stronger, even lifelong, connections.”

Speaking of data, Emily Laermer, managing editor for Ignites at Money-Media, told us this a couple years ago: “Data and visual stories are pretty consistently among our most saved and forwarded content. In the most basic sense, data stories are ones that just have a ton of information. So they can be generated from a huge spreadsheet or Excel file. But they don’t necessarily have to be numbers driven. They can be stories that have a lot of facts. So for example, new rules and regulations are great data stories. The first story I worked on at Ignites required that I read a 400-page rule on mutual fund regulation and how the funds were going to have to change their reporting. That’s a data story.”

Suggesting you read 400 pages of rules is not the best way to encourage data stories, but there are easier ways. Timelines can be very effective. In reporting on a company that had been acquiring other companies, Laermer went through annual reports, press releases, etc., and built out a timeline that proved very engaging.

Finally, Steen believes that everyone can be a storyteller, especially publications pros. “While there are naturally gifted storytellers, storytelling is a skill,” he wrote. “As such, storytelling can be learned and improved with practice… Ask yourself story prompts. What is the worst trouble you ever got in as a kid? What was the best journey you ever took? Who do you admire most and why? What is the most daring thing you ever did? Believe me. You have stories.”

It will be enthralling to hear Steen tell his story on Wednesday, June 16 at 3 pm. Make sure that happens by registering here.

KC Crain

Crain Communications Emerges from the Pandemic Focused on Subscriptions and On the Hunt for M&A

by COVID 19Media
KC Crain

Last November, KC Crain became president and CEO of Crain Communications, representing the third generation of leadership at the 105-year-old, family-owned publisher, whose brands include Advertising Age, Crain’s Chicago Business and Modern Healthcare.

AMPLIFY caught up with KC to talk about his vision for the company, such as changing revenue streams (including digital and print subscriptions, which for the first time will exceed print advertising revenue for Crain this year) and a desire to expand into new markets through acquisition.

AMPLIFY: KC, how has Crain responded to the crisis over the past year and how has that positioned the company as we start to come out of the pandemic?

KC Crain: Like everybody else, the biggest fire was our events business. In a typical year we do about 200 events across all our brands and as it became a reality that we would be canceling all our events for the year, we made a massive pivot. We did over 900 virtual events over the last year and kept about half of our overall events revenue but the margins increased significantly. On the digital side, we had to get smarter about the analytics around our audiences and we paid a lot of attention to our audience strategy. We saw some nice increases in paid digital audience.

AMPLIFY: You’ve mentioned that audience strategy is the key to Crain’s future—can you expand?

KC: When we look at this business, it’s always been based on audience—your events audience, your digital audience, your print audience. We’re trying to get as smart as we can about who is engaging with our brands and on what platforms. We doubled down on our journalism. After 105 years, journalism is integral to our strategy, but now more than ever, it’s fundamental. If you have good journalism that people can’t get anywhere else, then they’re going to have to subscribe.  We’ve put in place a great team, we got smart about the analytics around our audience and their consumption habits and we’ve seen a huge lift.

AMPLIFY: As part of Crain’s prioritization on audience, you made a major hire in Veebha Mehta, who ran audience and marketing at Financial Times, Pearson and Cengage. What is her role with Crain?

KC: We had to look at how we were marketing to consumers and for the first time we have a global CMO in Veebha, whose main focus is our audiences. She’s a great hire and put together job functions we haven’t had in the company before.

AMPLIFY: What’s the revenue mix today for Crain?

KC: For the first time, our audience revenue—print and digital subscriptions—in 2021 will be greater than our print advertising revenue. Our revenue mix really changed from trade print advertising and event revenue to digital and audience revenue and the margins were significantly better. We saw a huge improvement in our first quarter numbers and I think we’ll see that trend continue. We’re up 50 percent year-over-year in our digital business coming out of the pandemic. As we’re focused on audience, digital, data, and custom, those business lines will continue to grow.

AMPLIFY: How does Crain look at the relationship between media and events as events start to come back?

KC: If people didn’t figure out a way to enhance their digital business during the pandemic, then shame on them. The pandemic 100 percent accelerated our digital strategy, namely in the data and analytics around our audiences, which we will continue to push in 2021. Coming out of 2020, nobody knew what 2021 would be like. We originally budgeted for zero in-person events but we will have our first in-person event in July and this fall we will have in-person events all over the world. There will be different aspects to our events such as live streaming and I think we will see a hybrid model for a while yet. We have no interest in running 900 virtual events again; it’s not sustainable. But as we move forward, we will continue to see virtual events where the topic and the market make sense.

AMPLIFY: KC, you are the third generation of leadership for Crain. What’s your vision for the company?

KC: We’ve got the business to where we are 100 percent focused on growth and we’re looking at verticals outside our traditional businesses. When you think about Crain, you might think about healthcare, automotive, marketing and manufacturing, our city brands. We made an acquisition in 2019 in the genomics space—life sciences are a new market for us. You’re going to see us make acquisitions that are adjacencies to our current business but then we will also get pretty focused on growth markets as well. We are in the market and looking at deals weekly. This is an exciting time; there’s a ton of opportunity in our space.

AMPLIFY: What are you excited about?

KC: Our audience strategy. I’m so fired up. We’re a 105-year-old company and we’ve never been so analytical. We’ve got great team members doing things to grow the business and for the first time in a while, we’re having fun. We’ve put ourselves in position to take advantage of these market opportunities out there. We’ve got wonderful traditional brands, great legacy markets and we’re looking to grow into new markets.

PinkWhen

Reaching audiences and driving revenue: Reset, Reinvent, Revenue 2021 keynotes urge creativity

by Media

In his book, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, best-selling author Daniel Pink gives our typical day three stages: a peak, a trough and a recovery. He wants you doing analytic tasks in the morning, administrative tasks—emails, expense reports, etc.—in the midday, and insight problems in the afternoon. “…We’re less vigilant [then] than during the peak,” he says. “[But] that looseness—letting in a few distractions—opens us to new possibilities and boosts our creativity.”

Two of the keynotes for our June 16-17 Reset, Reinvent, Revenue 2021—a virtual event for association publishing professionals—Denise Burrell-Stinson, head of WP Creative Team in the Creative Group at The Washington Post, and Scott Stuart, CEO, Turnaround Management Association, also emphasize the importance of creativity—not the first characteristic you think of for CEOs and brand marketers.

“We’re looking to see how our creativity and ideas and how we reach audiences can be a driver of revenue,” Burrell-Stinson said on a recent Associations Council podcast. “When that’s done well, it’s a good marriage of business and creativity. We used to think that they have to live very separately—the person who was the creative mind was not the business mind, and the person who was the business mind could not be counted on to be creative. I’ve found that as absolutely not true. Everyone can embrace [those two attributes].”

Asked how the Turnaround Management Association was able to pivot so well to put on a successful virtual event, Stuart simply said, “Creativity. We know that a certain percentage will come [to an event] for education. We also know that people are Zoomed out. They also want to have some fun; they’re used to going to Las Vegas for a TMA event.

“How can I give them a feeling that they’re not just stuck on Zoom,” Stuart asked. “We created 24 [short, interactive] sessions on industry topics, built a networking room, covered DEI. We had Colonel [Robert J.] Darling who was in a bunker with Dick Cheney on 9/11. We added a casino experience and dueling pianos, had an illustrator doing drawings while sessions were going on.

“We created variety and”—Stuart slowed down here to accentuate—“actionable optionality. [We brought] you as close to in-person networking as you could ever imagine. Sponsors saw they got value out of it. The only downside was that because people expected the ‘same old,’ it caused us to market louder to get the message out. But once people saw it, they were our great evangelizers.”

That’s something all of us strive for. How much better is it when someone else talks you up, especially a member? That human connection is something Pink also addresses in his book, written before the pandemic but probably more on target now. “Research shows us that social breaks are better than solo breaks—taking a break with somebody else is more restorative than doing it on your own,” he said.

With the water-cooler conversation still mostly out for now, finding a neighbor, a nearby friend, or just a visit to the local barista might be Pink’s restorative recipe. He calls afternoons “the Bermuda Triangles of our days,” citing a Duke University study that found that harmful anesthesia errors are three times more likely at 3 p.m. than 8 a.m., and Danish test takers who scored significantly lower in the afternoon than morning. “Regular, systematic breaks—especially those that involve movement, nature and full detachment—reduce errors, boost mood and can help us steer around this Bermuda Triangle,” Pink said.

That connection to the audience is something Burrell-Stinson came back to time and again during her interview. Before reaching out, she said it’s important—especially during these times—for staff to feel aligned with the organization’s message.

During the early stages of the pandemic, “I was one of those people showing up and asking, ‘What is my job right now?’ I can’t sit here selling. I really wanted to know that I felt right about what my job was.” Fortunately, the Post felt the same. “Let’s talk to our audience and see what they need right now,” she said.

“We did this deep, intentional engaging of the audience. ‘Tell us what it is you need to know. Tell us what’s helpful. Tell us what’s respectful. Tell us what empowers you.’ And they did. And when we listened to the audience we had our North Star. They told us what was going to work. When we had that information, we were actually able to take it to brands and say we’ve heard from this audience, they’re vocal, they’re smart and let’s do more than just market to them. Let’s really engage them on their terms.”

You will want to engage—creatively or otherwise—with Burrell-Stinson, Stuart and the third keynote as well, Scott Steen, executive director of the American Physiological Society, on June 16-17 and hear more of what we can take out of the pandemic to help our organizations to Reset, Reinvent (and grow) Revenue. Find more information and register here.

Listen here as Burrell-Stinson discusses the challenges and opportunities brought by the current publishing climate. And listen here to more with Stuart on how he’s led his organization through this pivot with creativity.

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‘Insights Were Phenomenal’; Audience Conversations Fuel Agenda’s Growth

by Media

Let’s say you run an enterprise subscription-based publication for corporate board directors and have seen two years of declining traffic (2016-2017). You’re an accomplished journalist—like Melissa Anderson, managing editor of Money-Media’s Agenda—so you think sensibly. “Maybe if we position ourselves as covering the news of the day, as it pertains to corporate boards or a corporate governance angle. Yes, that’s what we need to do.” She paused. “But it really wasn’t working.”

Anderson recounted this in her excellent, there’s-a-moral-to-this-story section of a recent webinar hosted by our AM&P Network—titled The New Content Metrics: How Publishers Are Measuring Engagement and Using That to Grow.

In September 2018, Money-Media managing director Dan Fink launched a growth plan with several prongs for all divisions, including marketing, sales, operations and tech. “But I can only speak to the editorial ones that I was involved with,” Anderson said, “which were to perform a traffic and audience engagement analysis. And what we found doing these things was that we were on the wrong path—which is why I titled this presentation, Talk to Your Audience.”

Because Agenda, which also prints and mails twice weekly, only sells enterprise subscriptions, you’re not going to read it through search engines or on social media. It has to come to your inbox or mailbox. “That drives the need for us to tend to our audience really carefully, as a community almost,” Anderson said. “Because the same 12-15 people on each license who are reading Agenda are the ones who are going to vote up and down each year if they want to renew the subscription.”

The first problem she found was a biggie. “If we had a company’s name in the headline for a story, people didn’t read it. They weren’t as interested if they knew who the story was about which suggested that we were we were on the wrong path [with] that kind of this news-of-the-day sort of approach.”

(Interestingly, the next speaker, Davide Savenije, editor in chief at Industry Dive, said that seeing company names brings a completely opposite response for their audience. But that only underlined the moral here, that talking to your audience—not reading what specifically worked for Money-Media—is the elixir of choice. I’ll be reporting soon on Savenije’s also-superb presentation.)

“But that didn’t tell us the whole story,” Anderson continued. “So beginning in January 2019, we launched this audience engagement analysis. We basically emailed a bunch of prospective readers as well as a large chunk of our readership. I ended up doing extensive one-on-one conversations with more than 40 corporate board directors and about a dozen other executives who were in our audience, like corporate secretaries, chief legal officers, people like that who could be reading Agenda, even if they weren’t a director. These conversations took about an hour each. They were very lengthy and detailed, and people were really excited to share what they liked about publication, what they thought we could do better and how they use it. It was a really great exercise, and the insights were just phenomenal. We built them into how we cover corporate boards, our news for our readers and build out our audience. And it’s really been successful.”

That assessment speaks highly of Fink for giving the time for that process to play out, and, of course, to Anderson, for engaging and listening—such a time-honored but often under-appreciated skill—and not rushing through that.

“What we found was that our audience reads Agenda for the analysis,” Anderson said. “They print out—I heard over and over again—‘I love to print out your issue and take it into the boardroom.’ They mark it up, they talk about what they want to do and don’t want to do—things they think are good ideas or bad ideas about how they want to run their own companies. So that’s what we found.”

And the results?

“In 2018 we began implementing what we found from the traffic analysis, and we saw a 15% lift in traffic in that first year and then we continued to see traffic increase over the next three years by positioning ourselves as a resource for our audience,” Anderson said.

That included a pandemic-related, pop-up newsletter that ran for about nine weeks around the beginning of the crisis last year. “We had extremely high engagement from that,” Anderson said, “contributing to the new sales, and it also led to something really interesting and I was excited to see: a double, year-over-year rate for forwards and sales for a newsletter.

“Our readers really aren’t on social media; they’re not sharing these things with their network that way. But they largely are forwarding them and that rate had been pretty stable for the past few years, and this year it skyrocketed… which shows us that people are really finding a lot of value in the content that we’re producing about how to solve problems and how they can take these into their communities. That was really exciting for us.”

What’s next on the agenda for Agenda? “We’ve been piloting an influencer program where we’ve heard again and again from people in the consulting space that they wish they could get our publication, but since they’re not a corporate board they can’t,” Anderson said. “We’ve experimented with providing a few comp accounts to those people [who] we want to be sharing our stories with their clients, and that’s been really successful. We have seen those come up through influential people who want to be sharing our pub.

The most exciting thing, she added, was that the tech team at Money-Media has been hard at work on building an entire new “stats platform that’s going to include metrics like scroll depth and time on page to produce this view into how in-depth our readers are looking at our stories, which again is another view on that value beyond just click-throughs.”

We’ll definitely stay tuned for that.

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Proposed American Families Plan’s Education Provisions

by Policy

Last month, President Biden unveiled the American Families Plan, a proposal aimed at restructuring education, childcare, and paid family leave at the federal level. This proposal, the third in his series to Build Back Better, totals $1.8 trillion dollars and includes investments in education from the preschool to the post-secondary level. The plan addresses equity and access in education, a national teacher shortage, and increasing the use of best practices at universities and colleges to retain and graduate students. As of now, this remains a proposal and there is no information on when this might be turned into a bill, or if the proposed amounts will remain the same. 

 The proposed level of funding for education outlined is:

  • $200 billion for universal preschool
  • $109 billion for two free years of community college
  • $85 billion in additional Pell Grant funding
  • $46 billion for HBCUs, TCUs, and MSIs
  • $62 billion for college retention and graduation 
  • $9 billion for teacher development and diversification

This proposal comes after the passage of the American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act which sent $162 billion to support K-12 and higher ed pandemic related costs. A key difference in the funding allocated in the ARP and the proposed amounts in the American Families Plan are the areas they support. The ARP focuses on addressing the immediate impacts of lost in class instructional time and providing resources for K-12 schools to address the social-emotional well-being of students through summer enrichment programs and comprehensive after school programs. The American Families Plan on the other hand is a direct investment in improving the level of equity students will have access to from the earliest days of in class instruction up until some of their very last. 

 The AFP provides funds to community colleges in two general buckets: (1) money to provide two free years of education, and (2) money to focus on retaining students and improving the rates of graduation. The funds to help retention and graduation are available to all universities that serve low-income students; however, the plan places a strong emphasis on community colleges. 

 In addition to the two free years of community college, the AFP also dedicates funds to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), and other Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs). This $46 billion set aside is intended to close the gap in resources they have in comparison to other universities by subsidizing  tuition and expanding programs in high-demand fields.  

Teacher training will be a key area as teachers continue to build partnerships to create engaging and successful lessons for students, and learning to use and incorporate ed tech resources in classroom settings will be important for teacher development. The development portion is aimed at helping address the national shortage of teachers, which disproportionately impacts schools with higher percentages of students of color. The Administration has also expressed plans to encourage more diversity among new teachers through creating partnerships with university teacher programs, as well as providing existing teachers with access to mentoring and leadership programs, as well as certifications in areas such as special education, and bilingual education.

SIIA is encouraged by many of the education provisions in the American Families Plan. We have long supported robust state and federal investments in education. Recent relief packages have helped students of all ages continue to learn no matter where they are. As we look to a post-pandemic world, SIIA is hopeful policymakers will continue to support critical education initiatives like many included in the AFP and others, such as:

  •  Bolstering student access to high-quality online and digital learning experiences through providing funding for high-quality instructional materials, academic interventions, assessments, and other learning resources, such as professional development and supplemental instructional materials (digital and print).
  • Elevating social emotional learning and mental health resources for students, educators, and parents.
  • The continued expansion of connectivity and virtual capabilities to support digital learning as schools across the country look to support different learning models that have worked for students over the past year.
  • Policies to enhance STEM education for early learners to those looking to complete a credential to bolster their career.
  • Creating lifelong learning accounts by pairing educational funds with tuition reimbursement or other eligible aid so learners can pursue employer-sponsored, college-backed programs, industry-recognized credentials, or to allow employees to participate in apprenticeship and job training programs in the trades or other related opportunities.