Turn Your Customers into Fans: Share Your Story

The importance of bringing customers along for the journey of public service, as told by an award-winning filmmaker.

By Kristin Withrow, CSDA Communications Specialist

Imagine selling a product to customers who don’t have the option to choose other products, and the product you sell is necessary to your customer’s life. It’s the easiest ‘sales job’ around, right? You have a product, your customer needs it, and you have no competitors. Terrific!

But if sales are that easy, why should districts work so hard to keep their customers happy? Why spend precious time and funds on community outreach, or send your leaders to educational and networking events like the CSDA Annual Conference and Exhibitor showcase to learn to excel when your customer base is a sure thing?

The answer is simple: You, your staff and leadership care about doing a good job for the community. As a special district, your agency is specifically designed to overcome a challenge unique to your area. When you think about it, your special district is a sort of low-key hero – bringing essential services to your community that they cannot get anywhere else.

So why is it important to bother marketing your product, sharing your projects, goals, and financial analytics all the while ensuring public access and transparency in every vote, large decision, and meeting? For one thing, you are required to uphold basic transparency practices as a steward of public funds. As a member of the California Special Districts Association, your agency goes beyond the basics. It is important that your customers know the size of your challenges, share your enthusiasm for overcoming the obstacles that arise, and understand and celebrate the stamina your agency displays in its ever-constant march toward its goals.

It’s important to get your public in your corner. One excellent way to do that: Tell Your Story.

Enter CSDA Annual Conference & Exhibitor Showcase

Keynote Speaker Matthew Luhn. Formerly of Pixar, Luhn is an award-winning filmmaker and director with some impressively entertaining story credits in his background, including Monsters, Inc., Toy Story, and Ratatouille. He’s helped take audiences on a hero’s journey through film and now he is coming to show special district leaders the importance of storytelling in business.

“Everybody perks up when a story starts to be shared,” said Luhn.

Humans are natural storytellers, but adults often lack the confidence to break away from the model of presentations that involve data sets, graphs, and long explanations telling the audience what to think. That method is the opposite of storytelling! Break away from the mold and tell a story your audience can relate to; one that generates feeling and uses the senses. These are the stories people relate to and internalize.

Special districts don’t have teams of writers, marketing professionals, graphic designers, or staffers with backgrounds in the filmmaking industry – yet it is possible to take away from Luhn’s keynote presentation the tips, tricks, and confidence to get out of the government mold and reach your audience in a meaningful way.

“Most people are not early adopters, only 15% of the population will try something new without first seeing others adopt the new idea and try it first,” explained Luhn. “I’ll share how to change people and transform them to try something new through a story.”

There are many types of stories to be told from the operations of a district. Perhaps it is the story of a project, a necessary rate increase (gasp), or the broad story of why your district exists, how it came to be and what challenges it solves in the community.

“Districts want to make authentic connections with the community because they want the people to understand what the district is offering. When you only share facts and figures, people will retain only 5% of what you share just 10 minutes after your presentation ends. If you really want people to understand what you’re talking about, and also feel how it’s relatable to them, you have to use some story skills,” said Luhn.

Visual storytelling is the number one tool to be able to communicate information people will remember. When creating a presentation, use few words and select representative images instead. Speak to the images to tell the story while letting the image set the scene. Let your data sets be reference materials for those who glory in combing through a detailed spreadsheet.

Luhn will teach us how to communicate what he calls a “hook” in 8 seconds to capture your audience’s attention.

Learn how to overcome your customer’s inclination to resist change by bringing them along the hero’s journey –set the scene with an act of kindness or favorable outcome your audience relates to, then take them along to feel the tension of the challenge, the ups and downs that your district (in this case, the district is the hero) overcame through dedication and endurance, and allow the audience to share in the satisfaction of a goal attained through perseverance. After all, the goals special districts aspire to achieve are the very goals they were created to achieve by the community itself.

Luhn teaches us that storytelling doesn’t require a special writing skill or film school. Public agencies can reach audiences by staying authentic to universal themes of storytelling, thus connecting with a broad audience, and following a formula of setting up the story (the “hook”), building up the suspense along the journey, and enjoying the satisfaction of the payoff.

Your customers benefit from the successful accomplishment of your mission: Be sure they come along for the journey.

August 28 - 31, 2023 Monterey, California