Reflection – Storytelling

Challenge

I was part of an non-governmental organization – GE-HEALTHCARE that the main purpose is the  devolpment of leadership in people between eighteen and thirty years old. In my time there, I  was vice president of business to customer, which means I worked with marketing, and my  main job was to know my customers, try to understand their needs and provide that through  our products – exchanges. Besides that, as a vice president, I was part of na executive board,  so as a team, we had to understand, manage and motivate the volunteers of our office, which  was the most difficult part.

Many of our volunteers did na exchange with us, so I could talk to them to understand what  were their needs and what this experience changed in themselves, and how did those two  things connected and helped them with their lifes.

Application

My example working with the storytelling tool is a great one, because it combine our  volunteers with our customers. One way of motivate the people that used to work in our office  – if our volunteers were motivated than they would sell more exchanges and provide growth  to our office –  was to show them the impact of what our organization and our products could  make, and that would be easier to do if we show them a great story.

I asked to our customers to send me a brief testimonial of their Exchange, if the experience  changed their life, their carreer, their way to see the world – our máster motto was “every  generation gets a chance to change the world”, so it’s possible to imagine that “changing the  world” was I very big deal for people that work there. So, as I received the testemonials, we  add those to our customer’s photos, so our members could saw the experience in a more  realistic way. But that wasn’t enough, so the executive board decided to brought to our  monthly meeting some of our customers and some of our alumni that had the Exchange  experience. There, one girl showed to our volunteers that they helped little girls that suffer  with domestic violence, a guy told us how his international experience helped him in getting a  new job and one alumnus told them that did the Exchange show her how she wanted to have  more experiences like that.

Insight and approach

Well, I think that was one of our best meetings. There we could saw what really motivate our  volunteers, and what we could do in the future to help them to enjoy beeing part of the  organization and how they could use storytelling with our customers, and sell these exchanges,  that in their vision, now it’s called “experiences”.

As I student of law I couldn’t imagine that something so simple would help to motivate our  volunteers. Now that I had the course I observed that in a more technical way, so, if I had to do  something like that in the future, I’ll probably apply more techniques, and don’t do that in a  intuitive way.

