Unearthing Hidden Stories in Your Organization

Strong stories are the fuel that propels the communications engine. 

From blogs and brand newsroom articles to media pitches and social media posts, compelling storytelling content fosters meaningful connections with audiences by addressing their interests, needs and concerns. 

These narratives can help amplify your organization’s vision, mission, impact and expertise — building trust and credibility while supporting goals such as reputation building and revenue generation.

However, communications professionals often find themselves flat-footed, hearing about incredible stories after they’re newsworthy. These missed opportunities can be frustrating, but there’s a solution: intentional relationship-building with cross-functional partners. 

Sales and customer-facing roles often have the best understanding of your audience’s challenges and concerns, and development and program staff possess insights into what resonates with people in the market. Boots-on-the-ground staff often discover golden nuggets of great stories without realizing it.

By fostering strong relationships across departments, you can tap into many potential stories that might go unnoticed. This proactive approach ensures your organization’s narrative remains fresh, relevant and aligned with your strategic objectives.

Here are six practical steps to help you build these crucial cross-functional relationships and develop a robust story-mining process within your organization:

1. Excavate insights by meeting with leaders regularly. 

Schedule annual, quarterly or monthly meetings with functional leaders to understand their goals and challenges. Instead of focusing solely on communication needs, ask probing questions to grasp the big picture and prospect for new ideas, such as:

1. What are your strategic priorities or goals for the upcoming quarter/year?
2. What concerns are you hearing from customers and industry leaders right now? 
3. Do any customers use our product or service to solve this problem in a unique, innovative or unexpected way? 
4. Are there customers who have overcome significant challenges using our solution?
5. What big projects will launch in the coming weeks/months?  
6. What upcoming milestones or achievements are we working toward?
   
   Mine the perspectives of frontline staff as well — their boots-on-the-ground insights about standout customer success stories, interesting feedback, and exciting projects and initiatives can be pure gold.

2. Create clarity around storytelling. 

Provide a treasure map of content types to help internal staff identify storytelling opportunities. This ore may vary by industry but could include:

• Evergreen stories: This valuable and relevant content can be published and consumed at any time. It may include articles, guides, educational pieces, human-interest features and thought leadership content. 
• Current events stories: This content addresses current events, trends and issues. It includes coverage of organizational events, legislative/advocacy updates and relevant cultural observances. Your team may prefer to deliver these stories to audiences via social media, media pitches or quick-hit blog posts.  
• Strategic stories: This content directly supports organizational goals, such as expert insights, data visualizations or first-person narratives from executive leadership. Timing may be a key consideration in ensuring stories support key events or operational plans. 
• Timely stories: Unplanned content opportunities that may resonate with audiences will regularly emerge. These may include stories discovered by staff while attending an event or inspired by user-generated content on social media. They may also include accomplishments and announcements about your organization.  

Share your editorial calendar or big-picture strategies to help staff identify potential stories that align with planned content and provide a complete picture of your distribution channels. This is especially important if there is confusion about the difference between a press release published on the website, a blog post and a media pitch. 

3. Provide insight into how you evaluate story ideas. 

Staff may hesitate to share story ideas if they feel they’re tossing them into a bottomless pit. Consider offering clear criteria to help them understand what makes a story idea sparkle,. including: 

• Organizational alignment: Does this story align with the brand values and organizational goals? Can the story help move audiences from the interest and information-gathering phase to action? 
• Compelling narrative: Does the story offer a unique perspective? Will this story be interesting to our audiences?
• Omnichannel potential: Can the story be adapted across our channels to maximize reach and engagement? 
• News hook: Is this story relevant and timely for audiences? Does it relate to current events, trends or issues?

Help staff understand who reviews stories, what happens to unused ideas, how long it may take you to respond, and factors that could affect timing, such as team capacity or campaign launches. 

4. Demystify the creation process.

People are often nervous about being quoted in a story or publicly expressing themselves. Sharing their role in the review process usually alleviates these fears and discomfort. 

Be sure to help staff understand the difference between editing and reviewing. Position the review process as an opportunity to receive a sneak peek at the content before publishing, allowing them to identify missed points, inaccuracies or areas that need reconsideration. You also will want to give them a deadline, such as two business days to review. 

This clarity is critical in reducing friction and frustration. Without clear direction, staff may feel obligated to “edit” using the skills they learned in English 101, such as adding Oxford commas and unnecessary jargon to your content. 

5. Coach staff on what to ask to unearth quality story ideas.

Provide staff with essential questions and guidelines to help them prospect for high-quality story ideas. This approach will help filter out lower-quality ideas.

Introduce the 5 W’s of journalism as a foundation for vetting ideas:

1. Who is this about? Who does it impact?
2. What is happening? Is there a unique point of view here?
3. What is the timeline? 
4. Where does the story take place? Does this have a national impact or a specific market impact?  
5. Why is this important to our organization and to our audiences?

If your organization has events, then offer advice on identifying stories through conversation and engagement — what contact information is needed and how to pass along stories to your team. 

6. Empower your prospectors to mine for stories. 

People, events and activities may occur nationwide, and as budgets shrink, some communications leaders may struggle to get approval for travel costs. Consider creating a guide to help staff feel more comfortable capturing story ideas and content. This could be as simple as collecting names and contact information for interesting perspectives or capturing photo, video and interview content. 

Be sure to help them understand the use cases for content. You may want them to run content capture ideas by your team beforehand to ensure that they best meet the goals. If staff plans to capture video interviews, then provide a solid list of four to six interview questions. Other considerations include photo releases and waivers. If these are required, then indicate whether staff will need to help obtain them. 

Implementing these strategies will give staff the tools and confidence to unearth stories and create a culture of story mining, ensuring no precious narrative remains buried.