How do you describe the experiences of many?
Big organizations like colleges, corporations and hospitals are complicated. If you ask 10 different people about their experience, you’ll get 10 different stories. Maybe more.
An effective solution is to create a composite persona and tell his or her story as a first-person narrative.
A persona is simply a made-up person that is representative of your target audience. Web developers often use personas for planning purposes. Radio stations use them to help DJs relate to their audience. There are many other examples.
A first-person narrative is a storytelling device in which the narrator explains things from their own point of view, using terms like “I” and “we.” Charlotte Brontë famously used a first-person protagonist narrator in Jane Eyre.
We took this approach when producing an admissions video for Millersville University. Millersville has 6,980 students in more than 100 undergraduate degree programs. Working with the marketing team at Millersville, we developed a persona and scripted a first-person narration.
This is how it came out.
It’s kind of an E pluribus unum strategy. You might want to use it on your next complicated story.
P.S. Have a question about video? Let me know and I’ll try to answer it in a future post.