Susan Bordson knows how to get her point across. She’s an award-winning video producer, creative director, and message strategist who works with national and international nonprofits on high-stakes projects.
Case in point: she created this stunning video for live-audience presentation at a fundraiser for the Minnesota-based nonprofit Children’s HeartLink:
Makes you want to go to their website and donate, no? Go ahead. We’ll be here when you get back.
But you should come back: We recently had the chance to talk to Susan about the much-discussed “pivot to video,” which we’ve watched with interest (like everyone with a foot in the world of digital content). With so many media companies putting all their eggs into the video basket—sometimes even
reorganizing their companies wholesale—many are convinced that video is
the future of digital media. And while
skeptics abound, the trend shows no signs of slowing.
Susan has decades of experience and accolades—and an eagle eye for what works and what doesn’t, both within any given video and in the pivot to video writ large.
“It’s such a paradox that video is becoming such a commodity,” she says, “because good video is so hard to create. In a way, it’s the least commodifiable medium.”
As viewers, we know what she means. Too much of the video out there just seems to get in the way, popping up unavoidably when we’re least interested. But as content creators, we also know that the omnipresent pressure to stay relevant makes it hard to ignore video’s potential reach.
Of course, as Susan points out, that reach depends on integrated decisions that use the best tools to craft the most persuasive message for the most receptive audience.
That’s a lot harder than it looks, particularly in light of the accessibility of video technology. Sometimes, Susan says, that
smartphone video app is a great tool. “If you’re a relief organization, and you’ve got workers in the field, they might be able to get some really authentic, moving video on their phones.” Then later, “we can create a piece that we would never have gotten if we had done it all professionally.”
But moving smartphone footage is not enough: “It’s how you take that [footage] and put it together into a coherent message—that’s the expertise that’s often missing.”
An expert knows how to manage the tools of production, from visual elements, to music, to narrator tone of voice and accent. “It’s layer upon layer of all of these subjective calls,” says Susan. And each call matters because together they powerfully (and often immediately) affect a video’s message. “Even if the message is sincere,” says Susan, “if the production value makes it feel like a commercial, then we immediately look for the x [to exit the video].”
The best production decisions, Susan argues, follow from an overarching goal and “a really drilled-down objective.” To guide such decisions, you have to ask yourself whether you “are trying to educate, or move peoples’ hearts.” It’s simply impossible to do both.
Susan’s HeartLink video, for example, clearly falls on the emotional end of the spectrum, focusing almost exclusively on
anecdotal information about the organization while really drawing the audience in emotionally.
On the other end of the spectrum, a marketing spot that Susan produced for a product re-launch, designed to reach current and potential users via email and at trade shows, is just as effective—in a totally different way.
Here, Susan uses entertaining, easy-to-understand graphics, text, and narration to provide clear information about a complex product.
Regardless of where a video falls on this spectrum, the difference between making a video that’s compelling enough to share, and making one that’s imminently scroll-past-able, lies in crafting “the right message for the right audience,” says Susan.
Those that miss the mark usually use what Susan calls the “megaphone” approach: it’s a video that screams “I have a story to tell! Here’s the message I’m sending out! I just want to pitch myself and sell myself to anyone within range!”
The opposite of a megaphone? The magnet: “If you think about being a magnet, that means you have to know your audience and know what’s going to be compelling to them and draw them in … Our culture tends to reward megaphones—but it’s the magnets who get things done.”
For Susan, being a magnet means really understanding the tools necessary for communicating a message that reaches your audience. It also means getting up close and personal with your audience and really understanding what you want to achieve with them.
In our next post, we’ll take a closer look at Susan’s videos to determine what makes them—and her—so magnetic.
Present Better!
Whatever the case, you want your presentation to be good. Because as we all know from bitter experience, little compares to an awful presentation.
Luckily, you don’t have to be a designer to create a truly engaging presentation. If your budget doesn’t allow you to hire a professional, you can find free tools that make your presentation a pleasure to behold. One tool we like is Prezi. Here’s why:
We like Prezi, but we like Zoho Show and Visme and Oomfo, too. How do you overthrow slide deck standards? And what tools do you use?
All the Good Books (Lately)
Maybe I go too far?
And yet, a few books over the last few weeks have given me so much…well, if not deep and democratic thoughtfulness, then an opportunity for the kind of far-ranging meditative rumination that makes life meaningful. If you also require an unTwitter, consider taking a tour of the following titles.
First, head west to L.A., where IQ (Joe Ide) is set. It’s a detective story featuring the kind of Sherlockian genius who is erratic and cold but also earnest and redeemable. It hits some familiar urban-mystery beats, but its South-Central-L.A. backdrop is so playful and poignant, and the idiosyncratic detective is so over the top and understated, that it exceeds the category.
Next up, travel to rainy Dublin, where Conversations with Friends (Sally Rooney) unfurls. It was a critical darling of late 2017, and though I almost hated the emo-reanimating, aggressively first-person narrator, I felt like I got her (which…?). The book’s inability to conceive of a woman in her late-30s as anything but completely irrelevant (sorry, ladies) is (mostly) offset by an interestingly indirect, unresolved depiction of marriage.
Now go back (way back) to the 1970s Midwest of Everything I Never Told You (Celeste Ng). Everyone loves Little Fires Everywhere, but Ng’s first book about a disconnected interracial family is affecting. I spent the first half arching my brows at the pat characters and adherence to the plot’s pattern. I spent the last half crying my eyes out. And it wasn’t just because I was sad. It was because—what’s the cliché?—the world is so beautiful and life is so short.
End your tour in France with How to Behave in a Crowd (Camille Bordas). Isadore, the protagonist-narrator, is an empathetic 11-year-old kid brother of five genius older siblings. His anthropological view of his family, and his tendency to engage rather than alienate make him a delightful narrative companion. Also delightful: This is Bordas’s first book in English, and the slight disruption in the English-language rendering of the French family is very charming.
These books took me places, but mostly by offering a respite from the hot takes and Twitter feed that regularly ignite the flames on the side of my face. I wouldn’t call them escapist, though—or I would, but what they allowed me to escape was my own tiny sphere of tech-abetted interiority. My new problem is that the only book left on my bedside table is Behave. Help! Which books have helped you log off, mute all, and carry on?
Why You Need Communications Templates
But maybe you should be. After all, the word template has its etymological roots in temple, a consecrated place of worship. The closer relative templet came into usage in the 17th century, to refer specifically to part of the support structure of a building (holy or otherwise). And by the 19th century, that architectural usage had developed into the word template as we use it today: a pattern or gauge that provides a guide for the creation of something new.
If you ask us, it’s not crazy to think of a template as a sort of holy architecture for communications.
Every organization has routine communications to create, whether a simple blog post or complex client-facing correspondence. And too often, we waste time reinventing the wheel (and risk introducing errors or inconsistencies) when it’s time to get those communications out the door.
Not only are templates enormous time and money savers, they also ensure that your communications are visually and formally consistent, and anchored in your house style.
A template that provides the structure for visuals and content makes simple communications almost effortless. And even with more complex communications, such as strategic plans or project reports, working with a template frees up your brain—and your budget—to focus on your message.
Building a temple of templates: it’s often one of the first things we discuss when consulting with clients about how to streamline and improve their communications. And it doesn’t have to be complicated. When creating a blog post, a slide deck, or a project report, set your document design, determine your formatting styles, and block out space for visuals and captions. Then your save your work as a template.
Piecing It Together
It’s called Feverish Fragments and Dis-eased Desire: The Archive as Literature. (Roll your eyes if you must, but hey, it’s a product of context.)
In it, I use 225 sources to write 300 pages with 400 footnotes about archives—those places (real or virtual) where all our stuff is saved.
I say that it’s about archives, but it’s really about the desire to save stuff, and sometimes to save all the stuff, to keep it forever in the hopes of informing an indeterminate future about the importance of The Past.
Because of this personal fragment, I am always particularly drawn to stories about making meaning from scraps. Case in point: The New York Times article Scanning an Ancient Biblical Text that Humans Fear to Open about a severely damaged book (dubbed M.910), written between 400 – 600 A.D., that contains a heretofore illegible Coptic version of the Acts of the Apostles.
The codex, too delicate to be opened, is being deciphered through x-ray technology that can both identify the book’s letters and assign those letters to appropriate positions on scanned and software-modeled pages.
The result? A story from a book that is so damaged and so fragile that it can’t even be opened to be read.
I love the tale emerging from this technology (and not just because the tech suggests a way to access a few of the other fragmentary texts I discuss in my diss). I love it because it offers an accessible example of the vital link between technology and reading, bytes and bits.
Technology used to be feared as a tool that would close the books and kill the stories. But M.910 contributes to the argument that technology is as imperative to modern storytelling as it was to The Past. It’s just that now, instead of bound books and printing presses, we look to x-rays and algorithms (and blogs [and Twitter]) to help us create new, whole narratives from old bits and pieces.
Writing a New Chapter: Double Shift Press
Women writers are underrepresented in virtually every segment of the publishing world, from magazines to newspapers to books. And their books get reviewed far less frequently and garner fewer accolades than men’s.
Of course, the causes—and implications—of these disparities are complex. They run as deep as any of our cultural wounds; and like it or not, we’re in an age when those wounds are laid bare in a new way.
There’s no easy path to parity, but there is increasing (if contentious) discussion about how to get there.
We started our publishing imprint, Double Shift Press, to join that dialogue.
At Double Shift Press, we aim to advance women’s voices in critical conversations about business and leadership, education and art, and politics and activism. This means that we not only publish the work of women authors, but we also help women conceive, write, design, and produce smart, thought-provoking work.
We still create and perfect business and nonprofit communications through Modern Writing Services. But now, through Double Shift Press, we partner with thought leaders, entrepreneurs, activists, and artists to turn their ideas, mind maps, and (sometimes endlessly worked-over) drafts into gripping narratives.
We can’t wait to share our authors’ stories with you!
The Words that Make the Year
I’m speaking figuratively, of course, but Merriam-Webster offers something a bit more literal.
The “sassiest dictionary on Twitter” welcomed 2018 with a reflection on 2017’s “words of the year.” Although these sorts of essays are typical hot-take fodder for a ravenous SEO maw, this particular piece offers an opportunity to pause the internet’s infinite conversation.
The words we speak and write and define (and redefine) shape our experiences in profound but subtle and fluid ways. Takes on the words of the year are certainly diversions, but they’re also attempts to ask us to consider why we use the words we use…and what we mean when we use them.
Merriam-Webster tells us that 2017 was a year underscored by the widespread rediscovery of feminism, by the uncomplicated meaning of complicit, by the technical definition of recuse, by the relentless search for empathy, by the high-stakes insult dotard, by the celestial experience of syzygy, by the multifaceted-if-also-mundane gyro, by the confusing denotations of federalism, by the inescapability of a hurricane, and by the omnipresence of the gaffe.
The page may have already turned on 2017, but we find that we’re still speaking and writing and defining (and then redefining) people and politics and prose. After all, a conclusion is not actually an ending, and we’re looking forward to reading—and writing—the next chapter. We hope you are, too.
Does Technical Writing Mean Complicated Writing?
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But the real purpose of technical writing is to clarify—to clearly and efficiently transfer information to readers (see, for example, the inimitably easy-to-read Nikon D7000 User Manual):
Best writer on staff? We’re here to help.
Successful execution of technical writing depends on five general principles: committing to the process, articulating the purpose, identifying the audience, determining the organizational schema, and using precise and concise language to convey the content.
Technical writing can be intimidating—there can be reams of information to condense, and the stakes can be relatively high. (And then, of course, there are the not-at-all-insignificant elements of style and format.) But keeping these five principles in mind ensures that the best writer on staff approaches the project with confidence.
Making Magnetic Video: A Closer Look
Today, we want to explore what exactly makes a video like the one for Children’s HeartLink capable of such intense attraction.
Saving Children in China – Team to Team Cardiac Training from Susan Bordson on Vimeo.
Pathos describes an appeal to emotions, logos, an appeal to logic and reason, and ethos, an appeal to the credibility of character. If we view Susan’s HeartLink video through the lens of these appeals, we can begin to see how and why it draws us in.
The video opens with appeals to both pathos and logos. The first images fill the screen with the grayscale urban grittiness of Chengdu, China, and a spare, violin-based melody cuts through the scene. A statistic appears onscreen to mirror the starkness of the city: “90% of children with heart disease live where care is inadequate.”
The next line signals a shift: “Children’s HeartLink is working to change that.” The music also takes a hopeful turn, and we next see the hustle and bustle of a brightly lit city and then the crisp antiseptic colors of a hospital. Here, the appeal to our emotions is made the more intense. In the hospital, we see a gurney wheeled by doctors; the image slows to focus on the still image of a child’s—clearly the patient’s—bare foot. Next, an image of a woman wearing a surgical mask appears, her eyes welling with tears, and we are told in a translated voiceover that “parents everywhere are the same.”
In this moment, Susan matches rhetorical appeal with video technique. The slow-mo hospital gurney and the still frame on the bare foot stretch out the appeal to our emotions. We are given the space to consider a time (in the past or to come) in which a hospital gurney holds not just a patient but a person, someone we ourselves love.
At this point in the video, pathos has done its job—the audience can now intimately relate to material it actually knows very little about. The video thus shifts to more balanced appeals: pathos in the children’s faces and actions, logos in the story of the program’s founding, and ethos in the clear expertise of the doctors.
Susan uses video to execute powerful rhetorical appeals that draw in and convince readers of the importance of HeartLink’s work. But she also makes video an extension of the nonprofit’s mission: just as HeartLink connects experts in heart disease with medical teams in underserved parts the world, its video, too, is a magnet—a tool of connection.
Be a Magnet, Not a Megaphone: Susan Bordson on Good Video
Case in point: she created this stunning video for live-audience presentation at a fundraiser for the Minnesota-based nonprofit Children’s HeartLink:
Saving Children in China – Team to Team Cardiac Training from Susan Bordson on Vimeo.
Makes you want to go to their website and donate, no? Go ahead. We’ll be here when you get back.
But you should come back: We recently had the chance to talk to Susan about the much-discussed “pivot to video,” which we’ve watched with interest (like everyone with a foot in the world of digital content). With so many media companies putting all their eggs into the video basket—sometimes even reorganizing their companies wholesale—many are convinced that video is the future of digital media. And while skeptics abound, the trend shows no signs of slowing.
Susan has decades of experience and accolades—and an eagle eye for what works and what doesn’t, both within any given video and in the pivot to video writ large.
“It’s such a paradox that video is becoming such a commodity,” she says, “because good video is so hard to create. In a way, it’s the least commodifiable medium.”
As viewers, we know what she means. Too much of the video out there just seems to get in the way, popping up unavoidably when we’re least interested. But as content creators, we also know that the omnipresent pressure to stay relevant makes it hard to ignore video’s potential reach.
Of course, as Susan points out, that reach depends on integrated decisions that use the best tools to craft the most persuasive message for the most receptive audience.
That’s a lot harder than it looks, particularly in light of the accessibility of video technology. Sometimes, Susan says, that smartphone video app is a great tool. “If you’re a relief organization, and you’ve got workers in the field, they might be able to get some really authentic, moving video on their phones.” Then later, “we can create a piece that we would never have gotten if we had done it all professionally.”
But moving smartphone footage is not enough: “It’s how you take that [footage] and put it together into a coherent message—that’s the expertise that’s often missing.”
An expert knows how to manage the tools of production, from visual elements, to music, to narrator tone of voice and accent. “It’s layer upon layer of all of these subjective calls,” says Susan. And each call matters because together they powerfully (and often immediately) affect a video’s message. “Even if the message is sincere,” says Susan, “if the production value makes it feel like a commercial, then we immediately look for the x [to exit the video].”
The best production decisions, Susan argues, follow from an overarching goal and “a really drilled-down objective.” To guide such decisions, you have to ask yourself whether you “are trying to educate, or move peoples’ hearts.” It’s simply impossible to do both.
Susan’s HeartLink video, for example, clearly falls on the emotional end of the spectrum, focusing almost exclusively on anecdotal information about the organization while really drawing the audience in emotionally.
On the other end of the spectrum, a marketing spot that Susan produced for a product re-launch, designed to reach current and potential users via email and at trade shows, is just as effective—in a totally different way.
Marketing Video for New Software Launch from Susan Bordson on Vimeo.
Regardless of where a video falls on this spectrum, the difference between making a video that’s compelling enough to share, and making one that’s imminently scroll-past-able, lies in crafting “the right message for the right audience,” says Susan.
Those that miss the mark usually use what Susan calls the “megaphone” approach: it’s a video that screams “I have a story to tell! Here’s the message I’m sending out! I just want to pitch myself and sell myself to anyone within range!”
The opposite of a megaphone? The magnet: “If you think about being a magnet, that means you have to know your audience and know what’s going to be compelling to them and draw them in … Our culture tends to reward megaphones—but it’s the magnets who get things done.”
For Susan, being a magnet means really understanding the tools necessary for communicating a message that reaches your audience. It also means getting up close and personal with your audience and really understanding what you want to achieve with them.
In our next post, we’ll take a closer look at Susan’s videos to determine what makes them—and her—so magnetic.
Are you Author Material?
Business leaders and other expert professionals are increasingly inspired to try their hand at authorship. And, as we discussed in our last post, writing a book can be a great idea. Sure, it’s an excellent marketing tool, but more than that, the work of writing a book crystallizes and activates an author’s ideas. It puts an author in conversation with a limitless audience of readers in real and exciting ways.
But writing a book isn’t easy. It usually requires a combination of creativity, determination, persistence, and time management.
At MWS, we support leaders through this process. But first, we ask our clients if they’re ready to become authors. Our vetting process is tough—we’ve learned that not everyone who wants to claim authorship credit is ready for the investment in time, brain space, and, of course, money.
Our best authors are leaders who hit three marks:
Easy, right?
Well, not always.
Let’s take it from the top. A book is an exceptional marketing tool, but it’s neither successful nor particularly useful if its message is buy! buy! buy! Good books are written by authors who have something to say—something that can’t just be said over a power lunch (or a PowerPoint)—not just something to sell.
Second, authors need to know why they’re writing a book. Many aspiring authors cite the book itself as the goal, but we’ve found that this is not particularly sustainable. The investment in writing a book is just too big for the book (and only the book) to be a meaningful incentive. Instead, good books are written by authors with bigger, more specific goals in mind—they want to substantiate their legitimacy by showcasing their knowledge, or they’re ready to tell their secrets in the service of launching a new product or company, or they have a story they want to tell to very specific audiences, or something else (specific and achievable).
Third, writing a great book takes time. Authors of good books have patience for the process. They know that starting with a compelling idea and ending with a smart, persuasive book in hand takes 28 weeks or longer.
Ultimately, becoming an author in business and leadership categories is an achievable dream. Do your research, and then position yourself to benefit from professionals who can support you on the path to publication.