How do you measure success?
I had to spend $4000 before July 1st and only two months to do it. As a non-profit, the Florida Storytelling Association had received a state grant, and some of the funds were earmarked to support University Programming. Two months to go! What do I do? An idea materialized into my head… a Summer Conference!
As the Festival Director for the Florida Storytelling Festival, I had the contacts in the storytelling community. I recruited local Florida Tellers so that I would not need to cover airline travel. As the producer of the FGCU Storytelling events, I had the contacts at FGCU and in the community to make it happen. Now I needed a theme… “Storytelling as Healing: Creating Community, Transforming Lives” … Since I’m a holistic medical doctor and I teach an undergraduate course called “Storytelling as Healing,” this was something I could easily promote.
SUCCESS: Out of necessity and deadlines, a creative idea takes root and gets launched into action.
In collaboration with a professor in the FGCU Department of Language & Literature’s Creative Writing Program, the campus meeting room and performance space were provided by the university. In order to get the venue at no cost, the university-sponsored event had to be FREE and open to the community of students, faculty, staff, and the general public. I created a preliminary budget. The grant funds would pay the storytellers. The venue is provided at no cost. The Creative Writing Program offered to sponsor lunch on one day. I could also get local magazines to sponsor ads and calendar listings. As a free event, the online registration software would be free. Several faculty and students volunteered to staff the event, so I did not have to hire staff.
SUCCESS: The budget is going to work out! I’ve got a team. Let’s pull this together with minimal funding and a skeleton crew. Let’s create a high-impact free event for the community!
I started by choosing the weekend of June 21 – 23, 2024. I kept the event schedule simple and avoided simultaneous events.
- Friday evening – opening tell and talk keynote event by Featured Tellers to introduce storytelling and the theme
- Saturday morning – two 90-minute workshops (no experience necessary, appeal to all levels)
- Saturday afternoon – coaching session and panel discussion
- Saturday evening – performance by Featured Tellers
- Sunday morning – storytelling circle (all welcome to present a story)
I selected and booked the featured storytellers, the venues, and the audio-visual equipment. The Creative Writing Program ordered lunch for Saturday so that attendees could stay on campus. I assigned roles to volunteers. As the date rapidly approached, I set up several virtual meetings with all the speakers/storytellers, organizers, and volunteers to finalize all the details.
SUCCESS: We have a plan! The event is happening…
Throughout the planning, I also focused on marketing. During the summer, most faculty and students were not on campus. While I sent out personal invitations to FGCU community members and listed the event on FGCU calendars, I also knew that the marketing for a summer event needed to focus on bringing the outside community onto campus. I relied on email lists, social media posts and paid ads, print ads donated by local magazines, storytelling groups across the state, and the most important–word of mouth.
One other challenge for a free event is that people often RSVP without attending. (“No skin in the game” as they say.) I used online registration software to send multiple reminders and encouragement for those that registered. I reminded them of the “free lunch.” I asked them to be mindful of the limited space and to release their tickets if they could not attend.
SUCCESS: People came! 30 – 50 people at each session of the conference. About 100 unique people over the weekend.
As I envisioned, most people came from the local community outside of FGCU. The audience included those interested in telling their story, learning about storytelling, and the alternative health community. With promotion through the Florida Storytelling Association, members came all the way from Tampa area. There was even a contingent of FGCU alumni with whom I had connected by the most potent of marketing techniques: Word of Mouth! I had been talking about and hyping the event to anyone that would listen for the two months that I had been planning the event. I was encouraged to feel the support of friends in the many different communities that I am a part of.
The Friday night and Saturday events received glowing feedback. My goal of exposing new people to the art and craft of oral storytelling was a success. We had new converts who understood the power of “Spoken Stories” to create community and connection.
SUCCESS: Appreciative feedback from participants during the event.
On the final Sunday morning, we scheduled an informal storytelling circle. I did not expect many people. I even debated whether to have a Sunday morning event. Just to be sure that someone would attend, I asked the local Fort Myers guild (the Tamiami Tale Tellers) to co-host the event. Four members brought stories that they would tell if no one volunteered. We created a circle of chairs for 15 people. About 8 of us sat down as organizers of the event, and then we waited. People slowly began to arrive. When we got to 15 people, I thought… wow! Then, the late arrivals tricked in, the circle expanded, and to my surprise, as more chairs were added, we slowly expanded to 35 people. The final circle was so large that we had to use a microphone so that people across the room could hear.
The guidelines for creating the safe space for story were shared… and the circle was open. Someone volunteered, and then another, and then the momentum sparked stories from those that did not think they had stories. The energy in the room was palpable. Over the course of the weekend, stories had deeply connected this community.
One woman asked if she could tell a story. “Of course!” we said. I had met her in the workshop on the previous day. She was in her late 60’s, retired, overweight, short-cropped lackluster grey to white hair, and her face seemed flat—no expression, no emotion. In the workshop, her energy seemed dampened, but she was engaged and excited by the activities.
“I came to this event to start getting out of the house. My husband passed away a few months ago,” she said. “Today would have been our anniversary. I saw this ad for a storytelling conference. I didn’t know what it was, but it seemed interesting. I’ve really enjoyed the workshops.”
She went on to describe how the conference had changed her perspective of stories and storytelling. She didn’t really think she had anything worthy of sharing before she came.
“I want to tell a story that I worked on in the workshop.”
I was expecting a story about her husband and recent events… but to my surprise, she took us back to her early 20’s. Her whole face changed. With humor, she told us that she had put on weight in her middle years. She took us back in time. She was young and slender with long red hair, fresh out of college and recently enrolled in the Peace Corp. She was assigned to Costa Rica. She would go to local communities to give lectures on healthy lifestyle and eating. She had a projector with expensive batteries. In fact, the cost of the batteries would be a month salary for the locals.
“But I had no way to get around, so I contacted the Peace Corp. Eventually, they sent me a motorcycle. It came on a plane in a box. I had to learn how to put it together. I worked with a local mechanic to figure it out. He had never worked on this type of motorcycle, so we had to figure a lot of things out.”
As she told the story, I could visualize her riding the bright orange motorcycle and traveling the roads between communities. She was not sure what impact she had on the Costa Rica community, but she kept doing the work of education.
One day, she was going down a curving gravel road when a kid ran out into the middle of the path. She swerved, went off the road into a ditch, and the next thing that she remembered was being face up on the back of a truck headed to the local hospital. The kid was ok, they told her, but she was not.
After an hour on the truck, she arrived, but the hospital had no electricity. This was pretty common, she said. The power would go out frequently in different communities with scheduled outages. Luckily, a plastic surgeon was on duty. He stitched up her face in the sunshine of the courtyard. She was in the hospital for several weeks recovering from her injuries. She expected that she would return to a wrecked motorcycle and none of her belongings.
When she was finally released, she went back to the community.
“That is when I really understood the impact that I had on the local people,” she said.
When she returned, she found the motorcycle repaired, clean, and in pristine condition. All her belongings had been collected into her backpack with projector and all the expensive batteries.
“That is the moment that I knew my impact on the community. That is the moment that I knew that the work that I was doing had connected to the local people. That is the moment when I knew that they considered me part of the community.”
She described the many blessings of that time in the Peace Corp.
“What happened to the orange motorcycle?” someone in the circle asked later.
“After my two years with the Peace Corp, I had to take it apart, but it back in the box, and ship it back to the United States.”
We all laughed and marveled at the stories that we did not suspect this elder woman had inside of her. She had offered up a story of her younger self, brought us an image of her courage and vitality, and reconnected to a part of herself that she needed for healing in her present time.
As a recently widowed woman in her sixties, she was on a new mission to find purpose for the next stage of life. As listeners, we reflected back the power of the story that she had shared. We honored her younger self and the courage that she still possessed in just getting out and telling her story. We honored her the path of healing through grief. Together, we experienced “Storytelling as Healing: Creating Community, Transforming Lives.”
SUCCESS: Touching the life of one woman so deeply that she shared a healing story where now I feel blessed and healed.
