Reflection - Storytelling

Challenge

I took part in the hackathon “We versus Virus” by the German government to develop  creative ideas in times of the corona pandemic. My team focused on an app for  neighborhood help because we assumed that especially in bigger cities many people have  no friends/family members nearby to help them in need. Our unique selling point was a  secure payment system, because especially in big cities, people rarely know their neighbors  enough to trust them with their money. We were a group of around 10 people with different  professional backgrounds, nationalities, experiences, and personalities. We only had 48  hours to develop our business idea and summarize our results in a two-minute video that a  jury would later evaluate. 23.000 people took part in the hackathon - organized in 1.500  different project.

I was part of the PR-team and part of our job was to produce the final video.

Selection

Form my work as a consultant I know how important storytelling is to convince the audience  of an idea. Since the jury would see many, many videos we knew it was crucial to stand out  with a clear message, a comprehensible storyline, and a focus on the unique selling points.  Therefore, we decided to use storytelling for our video.

Application

We developed two characters – a person in quarantine, Anna, and a helper from the  neighborhood, Johann. First, we made a rough sketch showing how Anna and Johann would  use our app. We started with explaining the problem (Anna being alone and not able to leave  her home due to quarantine) and then presented, step by step, how our app helps them (e.g.  Anna and Johann get connected via our app; Johann does the shopping and receives the  money through our secure payment system).

Then, we reviewed this first draft and asked ourselves, if the message is logical, easy to  understand and creates emotional connection with the audience. These are also key factors  for a good story according to Andre Martin (week 2).

After agreeing on our basic storyline, we refined our story and added more information.  Finally, we had a good story - getting to the point and conveying our main ideas – and  developed a comic video with our two characters in the main roles.

We were very happy to hear that our video has convinced the jury so much that out of  1.000+ submissions they picked our project and our video as winner of the hackathon  (together with 19 other projects).

Insight & Approach

A good story is key to convince the audience of your idea. In our case we only had two  minutes to present 48 hours of work and stand out among 1.500 projects. I saw many, many  great projects that focused a lot on development and came up with innovative ideas but  acted poorly on selling them in the video. Thus, they were not chosen by the jury for further  support.

I like to use storytelling a lot in my professional life. This experience reminds me that it is not  sufficient to have a brilliant idea, but that you must build a strong story around it to be  successful. It found it interesting to hear from Andre Martin (week 2) that it is not only about  solving a problem but creating a cause.

Besides a lot of valuable insight in design thinking in general, this course helped me to  reflect about the purpose of storytelling and how to improve the application in real life.

