Get Your Story Straight

Museum work is about stories – stories in spaces, stories in objects, bringing stories to light — and even if you aren’t an interpreter yourself, you’ll find yourself doing storytelling work. From exhibits to development to administration, practically every kind of museum work presents the same dilemma: I know this is important, but how do I get other people to care about it?

I face that dilemma too, for every exhibit, grant proposal, or interpretive plan that I help my clients complete. Here are the three questions I ask myself and my client so we can get our story straight.

What’s the point?

This comes up in every conversation about exhibit development because it’s simultaneously essential and devilishly difficult: what’s the point? Can you articulate it simply? If you don’t have clarity, your audience won’t either.

I often think I have a great handle on the point until I try to write it down. Suddenly, I discover a slew of tangential ideas competing for top billing. To get back to the point, I have to ask myself, “If I have successfully told this story, what will the other person walk away with? What’s the single sentence take-away?”

There are lots of methods for distilling that core idea. I frequently use Beverly Serrell’s classic . The idea of was featured on this very blog not too long ago. No matter what thought tool you use to get you there, the important thing is to DO IT. This core idea is the bones of your story – content will make it rich, details will make it exciting, but without that skeleton, it’s going nowhere.

Who’s the audience?

There is no general public.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, we always have a particular audience in mind. I’ll admit that my default audience is me – if I find something interesting, it must be interesting! And when we don’t clearly identify our audience, this is an easy trap to fall into. The “general
public” is so faceless that we can lay all kinds of assumptions on them about what is and isn’t interesting and to whom.

It’s difficult to admit that everything we do isn’t going to be for everybody. Our egalitarian ideals as a field want us to provide our community with valuable content and services, and we can worry that if we are too narrow in defining our audience, it can be exclusionary – but I’d argue that to continue thinking of that community as a faceless “general public” is doing them a disservice.

Who am I speaking to? By naming them – parents with kids under the age of 5, foundation trustees interested in serving people with disabilities, local seniors with an interest in art – I can identify the real person who is hearing my story. And once I have some actual attributes of my audience identified, I can get to know them better (through Census data, survey
responses, or any number of other data) and make decisions based on facts and not assumptions.

Like the point of your story, write down this audience identity. As you form your story, return to that identity often and ask yourself if they are still engaged.

How do we bridge the gap?

So you know what you’re trying to say and who you’re trying to say it to. What’s stopping your audience from hearing you loud and clear?

The exercise of imagining your audience as an actual person has a natural next step: when you imagine telling (or actually tell) your story to that person, what is the response? Just by identifying your audience and getting to know them a little better with data, can you spot the places where they are going to get tripped up by a novel concept, an acronym, or a side note?

If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to identify somebody in my life
who fits the audience description I’ve identified, and I can imagine telling
them the story. If they are close and very generous with their time, I might
even be able to try my story out on them – though I try not to play that card
too often.

Rinse and repeat.

Identifying your point, your audience, and the bridge between the two is no small feat, but it gets easier with practice. Every time you find yourself needing to create that story, whatever the context, practice asking yourself: “what’s the point, who’s the audience, and what’s my
bridge?” Incorporating these three questions into your work can give your stories the clarity they need to make a real impact.