Storytelling

Challenge

My project is based on a circumstance many people can relate to at this moment, which is being

unemployed. Due to the COVID-19 virus, many businesses have taken the decision to close

operations or to fire many employees, this happens not only in the United States, but also in my

country, which is Honduras. So the project is based on getting these people a project to work

with small businesses that have fired employees, but still need help for some marketing or

financial projects. These businesses hire these people for a short amount of time, to complete

the projects, the people get paid, but are not on the business payrolls so the businesses get the

important projects done with less salary.

Selection

I had been working on the project, but had struggled finding ways to get my message across to

business owners. After enrolling in this course I decided to use the tool of Storytelling.

Storytelling is a lot more than just telling a story to an audience, it’s actually more of making the

audience experience and relate to what we are saying. The reason I selected the tool of

Storytelling is because I wanted business owners to feel empathy towards unemployed people,

and even though it’s not completely up to them, and it’s not easy to just hire them or to stop

firing them, maybe they could help in a way that can at least have people get a way of living.

Application

I decided to continue my project, so I talked to some family business owners, and about the

current problems of today’s work situation and how their businesses had struggled. Instead of

just presenting them the project as it is I shared a story about how a friend of mine had been

struggling to get a job even though he has the knowledge and the passion needed to be a good

employee. I told the story in a way that it felt like it was a problem that could happen to anyone

and not just my friend. My friend had been working on this job for around a year and even got

renewed shortly after the crisis began, but then quarantine got extended, and the business had

to reduce the expenses so he got fired. He needed a job to help his family during this tough

time, so that’s when I told them about how my project could help several different people get a

job, maybe not their dream job, but in this crisis every single penny counts.

The business owners started thinking that sometimes their staff really could use a hand to be

effective, and that something like what I presented as a project could help these people get a

job for a short period of time and although they may only work in the same place for a week or

two, and in some rare cases maybe a month, they may get referred to another job to work for

another week and maybe this could help their situation, while many businesses get their feet

back on. They also shared their own stories about people that they had to let go and about how

they see things from their perspective as business owners.

Insights

The way I told the story really influenced how people responded, because they felt the

unemployed people’s problem as their own. They felt engaged with the project as their own and

thus gave me feedback about how to improve. These couple of interviews really helped me,not

only because I received some positive feedback, but I also received some negative feedback.

They helped me understand that some businesses may really like the idea, but instead of

contacting my business, they could just rehire people they had fired, so to make the project

work I have to change a few things and improve some ideas, like providing the unemployed

people that I help get jobs some initiative so they don’t work on their own next time.

Approach

Maybe next time I’ll be more confident when using storytelling, since in some parts I got nervous

explaining my project through the story. This tool really helps getting people invested in a

project, idea or business, so next time I hope I can use it on a larger scale, and have an even

better use of storytelling. I learned through this course that it’s very important to receive

feedback and that storytelling is not only used on a massive scale like a business commercial or

on TV, but can also be used when talking face to face with somebody. Maybe next time I can

use some of the other tools I learned through this course and use them as many times as I

need.

