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Story Bank
Table of contents
What is Story Bank?
Story Bank is a card from the Storyteller Tactics deck by Pip Decks.
When you’ve got a good story, you’re the centre of attention. But if you bore us or break a confidence, you’ll lose our trust. You need a collection of useful stories (think of them as your data). But you also need information about those stories (meta-data) if you don’t want to mess up. You need a Story Bank.
Tip: put your Story Bank into a collaborative online space so you can share stories across your team.
When to use Story Bank
- Preparing for a high-stakes presentation or pitch
- Needing to improve team engagement and communication
- Facing challenges in maintaining audience interest
- Experiencing a lack of impactful storytelling in marketing
- Struggling with inconsistent messaging across teams
- Desiring to build a repository of brand stories
- Addressing feedback about boring or repetitive content
How to use Story Bank
We mess up when we tell stories that are:
- Boring: tell the same story twice to the same person
- Disrespectful: wasting the audience’s time
- Gossipy: repeat a story we were told in confidence
- Stolen: pass someone else’s story off as our own
- Stale: a story that’s past its sell-by date
You need a Story Bank to avoid these pitfalls. Use a notebook or spreadsheet with these headings:
- What’s the story? (keywords are usually all you need)
- Why would I tell this story? What’s the point?
- Who might find this story useful?
- Who have I told this story to already?
- Whose story is it? Is it OK for me to share it?
- Is this story still up to date?
If you create an online Story Bank, you can link to posts, articles and shared documents that give the full story.
