Author: Lyn Chamberlin

During COVID, I advised several college presidents on how to communicate when their institutions were suddenly embroiled in an unprecedented crisis.

My advice was simple: speak directly to your community. Tell students and parents what you know. Tell them what you don’t know. Tell them what you’re doing. Explain what happens next. Be clear about what you cannot disclose and why.

I learned something early on in my higher ed career about crisis communications: when the institution is in crisis, communications cannot substitute for leadership.

Higher education has a long tradition of carefully constructed statements, legal review, and saying as little as possible until absolutely necessary. Sometimes there are good reasons for that. Privacy matters. Due process matters. There are things an institution cannot disclose.

But students, parents, faculty, staff, alumni, and donors need information. They also need leadership.

It’s not about presidential visibility for its own sake. It’s about accountability.

A communications office can issue statements, answer reporters, correct misinformation, and help an institution communicate clearly and responsibly. But it cannot substitute for the person ultimately accountable.

The same president who speaks for the institution at commencement, welcomes a new class, and announces a major gift needs to stand up and speak for it when the institution suddenly finds itself in an unfolding crisis.

The point isn’t to turn the president into a spokesperson.

It’s to make leadership tangible when it matters most.

“Thought leadership” has become an empty, lazy label — a ready-made shorthand that circumvents the need to say anything substantive.

In Forbes, Dan Pontefract makes the case in “Stop Using the Term ‘Thought Leader.’” He says calling yourself a thought leader doesn’t make you one. Authority and influence are conferred by other people, not claimed in a LinkedIn headline.

The International Public Relations Association asks the same question from an industry perspective: “An Overused Term: Has PR Devalued Thought Leadership?”When a term gets applied indiscriminately, eventually it stops distinguishing anything.

In “The Problem with Thought Leadership,” Chris Paicely questions the premise embedded in the phrase itself: do people actually want their thoughts “led” by someone else?

Tom Goodwin is even less delicate about it on LinkedIn, questioning how much of what gets presented as thought leadership deserves the designation in the first place.

We’ve turned a description into a catch-all category. And once we have a category, we start jamming people into it.

And while we’re at it, let’s get rid of visionary, innovator, and change maker, too.

Instead of calling someone a visionary, tell me what they saw before other people did. Instead of innovator, tell me what they created that didn’t exist before. Instead of calling someone a change maker, tell me what changed because of them. 

And instead of expert, tell me what you know. Tell me what all those years of experience actually add up to. How has that enabled you to understand, question, recognize, or do what someone else has not?

That’s much harder.

It requires us to do the deeper work of finding language precise enough to capture substance, distinction, and authority. Because when language is label-ized, what are we left with? Meaning disappears. Words lose their force, their precision, their resonance. 

Language should make distinctions, not erase them.

It requires an appreciation for language itself, and the energy and patience to find the words that do justice to the depth, consequence, and complexity of a life’s work.

It also takes — dare I say it? — an enormous investment of thought.

Maybe we could start there.

A strategic story has a job to do

Storytelling is having a moment. Anyone can tell a good story. But very few good stories are strategic.

A strategic story is not anecdotal. It is immediate, direct, and packs a punch. It is carefully chosen to accomplish a concrete objective.

Which means you start with the objective. The first question isn’t, What story should I tell? It’s What do I want this story to do?

Here’s the framework I work with.

1. I decide what I want the story to do.

I start with the result.

What do I want prospective clients to understand about what makes my approach different? Do I want donors to see why my work deserves their support? Do I want colleagues to have a compelling reason to recommend me?

“Building visibility” isn’t my objective. What do I want to become visible for? To whom? And why? I make myself get very, very specific.

2. I figure out who needs to hear it.

There is no universally useful story. A story designed to interest a journalist won’t necessarily persuade a donor. The story that establishes my expertise isn’t necessarily the one that gets me this client or that assignment. I have to know everything about exactly who I am marketing to and what each needs.

What do they need to understand about what I’m selling? How what I do will increase revenue, membership, or donor support?

3. Then I look for the evidence to back it up.

This is when I start looking for the story. Not the same client success story I’ve worked to death. I look for a story that’s about the impact my work has. I often find it in everyday work.

4. I build the story around what it proves.

It’s not about producing more forgettable, disposable content. I’m aiming to build strong, well-constructed strategic narratives that do the heavy lifting. Every part of the story has to serve the objective.

What happened? What was at stake? What did I do differently? What was its impact?

I burrow in, stripping away anything that doesn’t strengthen the point. I don’t assume the story speaks for itself. The connection between what happened and why it happened has to be explicit.

For me, strategic storytelling is a business imperative.

I’ve work hard at storytelling. Attention is hard to earn, differentiation is hard to establish, and all the normal and usual (and boring) claims about expertise, innovation, and quality are old, predictable, and ho-hum.

Strong strategic narratives work. They establish a competitive position. Demonstrate expertise. Fuel fundraising. Attract customers. Open doors.

Storytelling is not just another thing in my communications toolbox.

It is a core business utility.

The hardest part of selling expertise? Not giving it away.

Sarah Tucker called this out in The Wall Street Journal after discovering that a substantial speaking engagement she assumed was paid had been viewed by the organizers as an opportunity for “visibility, introductions and future opportunities.”

“Value unspoken is value undefined,” she writes. “If you do not define the value of your work clearly, someone else will define it for you. Often downward.”

There’s a version of this that consultants, writers, strategists, and other people who sell expertise encounter every day.

When it comes to selling our expertise, we are our own worst enemies. We give away what we’re trying to sell.

We research the prospect before the meeting. Study the competition. Diagnose the problem. Identify the reframing. We walk into the conversation ready to show how quickly we can see what others have missed.

And that’s precisely where demonstrating our value can turn into an inadvertent freebie.

We don’t just show them that we understand the problem. We start solving it.

The strategic idea. The story. The positioning. The language. Our own brilliance and singular value.

We’ve done the work before we have the work.

The problem is that thinking is difficult to sell without revealing some of it. A prospective client can’t inspect judgment, pattern recognition, synthesis, or strategic position before buying. We have to demonstrate concretely what we can do.

But demonstrating expertise and delivering it are not the same thing.

Baxter’s warning: “Never ever do substantial professional work without clarifying terms first. Not because people are wicked. Because ambiguity is expensive.”

The problem is that in trying to prove the value of our expertise, we can end up giving them the very expertise we’re trying to sell.

It begins in the pitch, the exploratory meeting, the “informal conversation,” the request to hear how you would approach the problem.

The job is to make the strength of your thinking unmistakable without handing over the thinking they should be paying for.

Show them that you see the problem. Show them why it matters. Show them how you would approach it.

Then stop.

The pitch should make them want the answer.

It shouldn’t give them the answer.

At a moment when AI can generate enormous amounts of perfectly competent copy in seconds, some of the companies closest to the AI revolution are paying extraordinary sums for human communications talent.

Take a look at this piece in Business Insider a few months back. Anthropic tripled the size of its communications team last year. OpenAI has advertised communications jobs paying more than $400,000. Netflix posted a director of product and technology communications position with a salary range reaching $775,000.

Microsoft even launched a print magazine, calling it an “antidote to the ephemeral nature of digital.”

So much for the death of the communications professional.

But the numbers themselves aren’t really what interests me. The contradiction does.

We now have technology capable of producing more written material, faster and more cheaply, than we could have imagined a few years ago. Emails, articles, press releases, speeches, website copy, donor appeals, LinkedIn posts, CEO pronouncements — you name it.

Give AI a reasonably good prompt, and you can have a reasonably good draft before you’ve finished your coffee.

Reasonably good?

We are rapidly removing scarcity from writing. Almost anyone can now produce something grammatical, polished, organized, and professional-looking.

Which sounds like progress. And in many ways, it is.

The trouble is that we’re also producing an extraordinary amount of writing that sounds remarkably like everything else. Smooth sentences. Transitions that work. Impeccable grammar. Right words in the right places.

But it’s all dead on arrival. Not a pulse anywhere in sight.

This isn’t really an argument against AI. I use AI. Increasingly, most people I know who write professionally use it in one way or another. It can be an extraordinarily useful thinking partner, researcher, critic, and editor.

But there is a substantial difference between using AI to help you communicate and asking AI to do the communicating for you.

That difference becomes more important as the technology improves.

For a long time, one measure of a good professional writer was simply the ability to produce good copy. That was a real skill, and it still is.

But what happens when millions of people suddenly have access to a tool that can produce competent copy on demand?

The premium shifts.

It moves straight to judgment.

The judgment to know what is important and what Business Insider calls “slopaganda.” To understand the difference between sounding good and actually having something to say. To recognize when the obvious approach is the forgettable one. And to understand the audience well enough to know what will earn their attention.

That is a much higher bar than producing good copy.

And it helps explain why, at the very moment when words have become astonishingly easy to produce, companies are willing to pay so much for people who know what to do with them.

Netflix doesn’t need someone who can write a competent press release. OpenAI doesn’t need someone who can generate a bunch of LinkedIn posts. Anthropic certainly doesn’t lack access to artificial intelligence.

They need people who can exercise strategic judgment about communication at a very high level. And the more words we generate, the more valuable that judgment may become.

There’s an interesting irony here. For years, we writers and comms folks have worried that AI would make our skills less valuable.

But I think it’s more complicated than that.

AI is making the mechanics of writing accessible to almost everyone. That’s a remarkable development.

But it is also exposing how much of good communication was never mechanical in the first place.

Producing the words is becoming the easy part. Knowing how to use them to change a perception, strengthen a position, or move someone to act is where the real value lies.

The Wall Street Journal reports that companies are “desperately seeking storytellers.”

That’s not hyperbole.

LinkedIn job postings mentioning “storyteller” doubled in a single year—to some 50,000 marketing jobs and more than 20,000 media and communications jobs. Google has a storytelling team. Microsoft is looking for a senior director overseeing narrative and storytelling. USAA is building a staff of storytellers. Notion has combined communications, social media, and influencer marketing into a single “storytelling team.”

Companies Are Desperately Seeking ‘Storytellers’ — The Wall Street Journal

This is more than giving an old job new spin.

It reflects a major shift in the job of communications itself.

For decades, much of corporate and institutional communications was built around getting other people to tell your story.

You developed relationships with reporters. Pitched stories. Issued press releases. Worked to generate coverage. The organization had a message; the media provided much of the means of getting it in front of an audience.

That world isn’t gone. But it doesn’t have the influence and power it once did.

Companies are becoming their own publishers.

Websites. LinkedIn. Instagram. YouTube. Podcasts. Newsletters. Substack. Video. Events. Executive communications. Customer stories. Donor communications. Thought leadership.

The number of ways an organization can communicate directly with the people it needs to reach has exploded.

And then there’s AI.

There is virtually no limit to the amount of content an organization can produce. Give AI a few prompts, and it can generate an article, a LinkedIn post, a newsletter, a case study, an email campaign, and six variations of each.

You might think all this technology would reduce the need for comms pros. But something much more interesting is happening: as AI makes content easier and cheaper to produce, the demand for skilled storytellers is rising.

Because the communications challenge is no longer simply producing enough content. It’s producing something worth reading, watching, hearing—and remembering.

What is the story?

What does this particular story tell people about the organization? Why is it important? Why should someone care? How does it connect to the larger narrative the organization is building about who it is, what it believes, what it does particularly well, and why someone should choose it, support it, join it, fund it, or pay attention to it?

That’s strategic storytelling.

And it has always been the foundation of great brands.

The strongest brands don’t simply repeat a collection of messages. They accumulate meaning. The stories they tell — about their beginnings, their customers, their people, their ideas, their successes and sometimes their failures — reinforce what we understand and believe about them.

That’s as true for a small nonprofit or school as it is for Nike or Apple.

Strategic storytelling requires choices.

A university has thousands of student stories. A hospital has thousands of patient stories. A nonprofit has stories about the people it serves, the people who support it, and the people doing the work. A company has customer stories, employee stories, founder stories, product stories, and stories about problems solved.

But having stories doesn’t make you a storyteller.

A skilled storyteller knows how to take the raw material — the people, events, details, contradictions, stakes — and shape it into a narrative someone actually wants to read, watch, or hear.

That takes more than good grammar and polished prose. It takes an ear for voice, an instinct for structure, an understanding of character and tension, knowing what to leave in and what to leave out, where the story really begins, and how to make the reader want to know what happens next.

In other words, it takes craft.

And that may be one of the great ironies of the AI era. We have never had more tools capable of producing perfectly competent words. But competent words aren’t the same thing as a story worth reading, worth telling — or worth remembering.

The craft is in listening carefully enough to recognize the detail everyone else has overlooked. Asking the question that changes the direction of an interview. Seeing the larger idea inside one person’s experience. Knowing that the story everyone in the room loves isn’t actually the one that will do the job.

As a television producer, I could come back with hours of terrific footage and still not have a story. The job was to find the narrative buried in all that material — and then know how to tell it so that someone would want to keep watching.

AI can give us more words, more images, and more content than we could ever use.

But finding the story is Job One. Knowing how to tell it is Job Two.

No wonder storytellers are having a moment.

A newsletter from a photographer I’ve worked with over the years, Jörg Meyer, jumped out of my inbox last week and got me thinking.

Great photographers are the unsung heroes of branding and marketing.

Because the best photographers aren’t simply photographers. They’re visual storytellers.

The best of these photographers bring two things to the table: an artist’s eye and a communicator’s understanding of what the image needs to say. Many, including Jörg, are accomplished fine-art photographers as well. That artistic sensibility is part of what makes their work so powerful in a marketing context.

Which is why the right photographer isn’t simply a vendor hired to produce images. The photographer is a strategic partner in telling the story of the organization, institution, product, or experience.

I’ve seen this firsthand. A good photographer doesn’t simply arrive with a camera and a shot list. She looks. She listens. She understands what you are trying to communicate and then finds the people, moments, expressions, and details that tell that story visually.

That ability has always mattered. I think it matters even more now.

And then there’s AI

AI can generate an extraordinarily beautiful, convincing image. And it’s getting better at it by the day.

But it can’t walk into a college classroom, a workplace, or a community and see what’s really there.

It can’t notice the student hanging back after class to continue a conversation with a professor. It can’t see the expression that passes between two people at precisely the right moment. It can’t discover the odd little detail in a laboratory, studio, office, or neighborhood that somehow tells you more about the place than the perfectly composed image you thought you wanted.

It can generate something that looks like those things.

But it wasn’t there.

And when photography is being used to communicate something true about an organization, that distinction matters.

Photography is not the decoration

We talk endlessly about messaging, positioning, copy, websites, and campaigns. We spend weeks — and sometimes months — deciding what we want to say.

And then, too often, when all the important decisions have been made, someone says, “Now we need some pictures.”

That’s backward.

A great photograph doesn’t simply illustrate what the copy says. It communicates something the copy cannot say.

Think about a college viewbook or website. A prospective student can read about small classes, close relationships with faculty, an engaged community, and a vibrant campus life. Every college can — and many do — say those things.

But show me the right photograph, and suddenly I can begin to imagine: What would it actually feel like to be a student here?

The same is true in fundraising.

A nonprofit can tell me how many people it serves, the importance of its mission, and the impact of my contribution. Those things matter.

But photography can take the mission out of the abstract. It can show me the people, the place, and the work. It can help me understand what my support makes possible on the ground, not in theory.

And in business marketing, photography can do something similar. It lets a prospective customer see a product being used, experience a place before walking through the door, or get a sense of the people they may be trusting with their business.

In each case, the photograph does far more than make the page pretty.

It is making a central part of the argument.

And this is why I think organizations need to stop thinking of the photographer as the person you call once the strategy, messaging, and creative decisions have already been made.

A great photographer is a strategic partner.

Bring the photographer into the conversation earlier. Let them understand what you are trying to communicate, whom you need to reach, what makes this place or organization different, and what you want people to understand or feel.

Then let the visual storyteller do what they do best: find the images that tell that story in ways the rest of us might never have seen.

That’s why Jörg’s description of his own work struck me when I read it:

“Working with real people to tell real stories — and creating images of people we can recognize, relate to, and identify with.”

Exactly.

Those words — real people, real stories — are especially important now.

The best photography isn’t decoration. It isn’t wallpaper. And it isn’t something you add after you’ve figured out the messaging.

It is visual storytelling. It is part of the messaging. And it should be doing the critical, often hardest, share of the work.

Jörg Meyer is a New York-based photographer whose work spans commercial, lifestyle, portrait, and fine-art photography.

Photo: @Jorg Meyer

I promised to get practical. In 10 minutes, we can put your homepage to the test.

You don’t need analytics. You don’t even need to know much about marketing.

All you need is your website, a few competitors’ websites, and the willingness to view them from the outside.

1. Read the first screen.

Start with the part of your homepage you see before you scroll.

Could this language belong to another organization?

Excellence, innovation, community, impact, transformative, committed.

These words aren’t necessarily wrong. I’m sure most of it is true. The problem is that other websites in your sector probably say exactly the same things.

If your competitors can make the same claims, you’ve lost your competitive edge.

And by competitors, I don’t just mean organizations that do exactly what you do. Your competitors are other organizations that ask the same people for the same finite resources—funding, attention, participation, membership, enrollment, volunteer time, talent, or support. A museum may be competing with a theater for an audience member’s Saturday night. A youth organization may be competing with an environmental organization for the same donor’s $1,000. A school may be competing with organizations that look nothing like it for a foundation’s grant dollars.

That’s the competitive landscape you need to understand.

Look at the language again. What, specifically, does it tell someone about your organization that another organization couldn’t claim? Is there a clear point of view? A particular strength? Something you do exceptionally well? A problem you are particularly well equipped to address?

If the answer is buried three screens down — or on the About page — you have a problem.

2. Look for the connection to your audience.

Organizations know an enormous amount about themselves. Their websites often reflect that.

Programs. Services. History. Mission. Credentials. Accomplishments. Strategic priorities.

All important. But the people coming to the website arrive with something else on their minds: their own priorities.

A prospective donor is deciding where to put limited philanthropic dollars. A family is choosing among schools. An audience member has dozens of ways to spend an evening. A potential member is deciding whether joining is worth it. A volunteer is deciding where to give time.

So read the homepage again and ask:

Does it connect what your organization does to something the people you need to reach actually want?

And then go one step further:

Does it give them a compelling reason to donate, enroll, attend, join, volunteer, or pay attention?

That’s a much tougher test than asking whether the website accurately describes the organization.

3. Check out the competition.

This may be the most useful part of the exercise.

Identify three or four organizations competing for the same funding, audiences, families, members, volunteers, or attention. Pull up their websites alongside yours.

Now compare their value propositions — the particular strength, advantage, or benefit each organization is putting forward.

What are they claiming? What are they emphasizing? What territory have they already staked out? Where is the turf you can own? 

And then look at the language itself.

Does everyone sound remarkably similar?

Could you swap their name for yours?

Would anyone even notice?

Businesses do this kind of research every day. They study competitors, customers, markets, pricing, products, and positioning because they understand that no business operates in isolation.

Nonprofits must be doing it, too.

Like it or not, you operate in a marketplace: competing for money, attention, participation, talent, and loyalty.

That doesn’t make a nonprofit less mission-focused. It means you understand the environment in which the mission must succeed.

Competitive research is just as relevant to a nonprofit, school, arts organization, or association as it is to a commercial business. 

You can’t fully understand your own position without understanding the alternatives available to the people you’re trying to reach.

Your website is your organization’s front door. It has to do more than explain what you do.

And it must give them a reason to act.

Recently, I’ve been hammering on about how various kinds of organizations — arts, schools, foundations — need to do a whole lot more than sit back and simply describe what they do. They need to make an active, compelling case for it.

But I’m realizing that simply telling you that you need to do this is a little like telling a kid to eat their broccoli because it’s good for them.

Enough with the finger-wagging. Let’s get really specific about how to get a jump-start on the process.

If you’re trying to figure out what your case actually is, here’s a great jumping off point:

What do the people you need to reach already believe?
Think donors, funders, families, audiences, members, volunteers. What do they believe about the problem, need, or opportunity your organization exists to address?

What problem of theirs do you solve?
Not what do you do. What changes for them — or for something they care deeply about — because you exist?

Why you?
Why should someone support, fund, attend, enroll, join, or advocate for your organization rather than another perfectly worthy one?

Where does that case show up now?
Look at your website, donor communications, grant proposals, admissions materials, newsletters. Are you actually answering those questions—or mostly describing programs, history, credentials, and accomplishments?

Where are the gaps?
Where are you expecting people to connect the dots for themselves?

That last question is usually where the real work begins.

You may already have all the ingredients of a powerful case. But are you actually using them to give people a reason to choose you, support you, or champion what you do?

Even if you think it’s all there, take another look.

Coming up next in this series: a simple test you can run on your own website.

A recent New York Times/Wirecutter piece about brands that let us down was really interesting and got me thinking.

In true Wirecutter style, dogged testers put their favorite brands through rigorous testing. Talenti gelato no longer tasted like the product one longtime customer remembered. Marc Jacobs Beauty returned after five years looking almost nothing like the sophisticated brand its customers had known. Kerrygold butter, meanwhile, has remained reassuringly Kerrygold.

These may be consumer products, but the underlying issue is relevant to almost every organization I know.

Every organization has a brand, whether it uses the word or not. That brand is an institutional asset. It carries recognition, reputation, expectations, and an understanding of what the organization does and why it matters.

And when an organization evolves, that asset needs to be managed strategically.

The question isn’t how to preserve everything that came before. It’s what to keep, what to strengthen, what to manage away—and what to build next.

Community Organizations: When Recognition Is an Asset

Community foundations and service organizations accumulate enormous amounts of recognition and trust over time.

People know what they do. They understand their role in the community. Donors support them. Volunteers give their time. Other organizations turn to them as partners.

Then things evolve.

Leadership turns over. Priorities expand. Programs come and go. The needs of the communities they serve move forward.

All of that can be healthy — even necessary.

But institutional evolution can weaken an organization when people can no longer connect what it is becoming with what they already know and value about it.

The strategic work is figuring out which parts of the organization’s identity continue to earn recognition and support, which need to be strengthened, and which no longer serve the organization it is becoming.

Get that right and evolution builds on the reputation you’ve already earned.

Get it wrong, and people may no longer understand what you do, why you matter, or why they should support you.

And that has consequences: for funding, partnerships, volunteers, referrals and community support.

Arts Organizations: What Do You Carry Forward?

Arts organizations face a particularly interesting version of this challenge.

Museums, theaters, orchestras and other cultural organizations have brands built over time through programming, reputation, audience experience, history and their particular place in a community.

At the same time, they are constantly evolving. They have to be.

The question is what that evolution should carry forward.

What about the institution has earned recognition, membership, attendance, philanthropy and community involvement? What should be strengthened? What has outlived its usefulness? What needs to be managed away? And what needs to be introduced to make the institution more compelling now?

Those aren’t cosmetic questions. They are strategic ones.

The stakes are whether people understand the institution’s relevance, recognize its importance, and have a reason to visit, join, donate, participate, and support what comes next.

Secondary Schools: Knowing What You’re Building On

Schools may offer the clearest example of all.

Every school has an identity that exists in the minds of students, parents, alumni, faculty, prospective families and the wider community. It has often been built over generations.

And that identity has real value.

It affects who applies. Who enrolls. Who stays involved. Who gives. Who recommends the school to another family.

But schools evolve, too.

A new head arrives. Programs expand. Admissions priorities evolve. Families want different things. The competitive landscape shifts.

A school cannot — and should not — remain frozen in time.

But neither should it treat everything it inherited as expendable.

Some elements of a school’s identity are critical institutional assets. They drive reputation, enrollment, alumni loyalty and philanthropy. Others may be holding the school back from making a compelling case for who it is today.

Knowing the difference is the work.

The Thread Between Past, Present and Future

Institutional evolution isn’t a choice between holding onto the past and embracing the future.

It’s a continuum.

The strongest organizations understand what they’ve already earned: recognition, reputation, loyalty, trust, history. They know which of those assets still have strategic value and which don’t. And they make deliberate choices about what to keep, what to strengthen, what to manage away, and what to build next.

Because the goal isn’t to remain recognizable by remaining the same.

It’s to create a clear thread between who you’ve been, who you are now, and where you’re going.