Storytelling

Ah, the annual corporate retreat — a chance to get out of the office with all your colleagues, grab yourself a delicious box lunch, and listen to various company leaders talk about plans for the year. At SMU, I approached our annual division retreat yesterday with the requisite feelings of dread and that my time would be better served by actually working on projects.

But I shouldn’t have felt that way, because I actually left the retreat reminded of something important that will help me do my job better.

The main presenters were the chair of our board of trustees, our VP of development, and the university president — good speakers, all. They were at their best when they put aside the powerpoint slides and statistics and bar charts of our campaign progress and told a funny story, or spoke from the heart.

As you might expect at a retreat, they rigged it so that we wouldn’t sit at tables with people we normally work with, so I had the chance to sit next to a fellow law student and a fundraiser who covers a certain regional territory. The law student and I commiserated about how much we were ready to be done with school and how little we wanted to practice law at a big firm. We shared that we both want to stay in higher ed, probably in some fundraising capacity.

So we asked the fundraiser how she got started, and she shared her path of beginning at a local nonprofit and ending up at SMU. Along the way, she discovered that she really liked being a storyteller.

“That’s the key to being a good fundraiser,” she said. “Telling a good story that people can identify with. That, and not being afraid of a little silence in a conversation.”

I silently let that sink in, and was reminded that making and sharing good stories may be the secret to good fundraising or marketing — but it’s also the secret to a well-lived life.

So this year, I’m going to practice making better stories, and sharing them. I’ve got a lot to learn.