Esther Choy, Author at Leadership Story Lab

Are You Squandering Your GivingTuesday Campaign?

Picture this. It’s early Tuesday morning after Thanksgiving. You are thankful that you didn’t overeat during the holiday, and you eagerly open your email inbox to welcome an avalanche of solicitation emails that are part of every organization’s GivingTuesday campaign. Credit card ready, you can’t wait to read through each message carefully and let the…

3 Similarities Of All Effective GivingTuesday Campaigns

In my most recent Forbes article, I went over the five pitfalls to avoid in GivingTuesday campaigns. In this article, I will go over three “must-dos” instead. Here are three things the most effective GivingTuesday campaigns do. 1. They speak to the donor’s identity What makes donors, volunteers and participants feel like insiders in your…

Using Metaphors? Beware Of The Drawbacks

Part 2 in a series on using metaphors to explain complex ideas. Like every powerful tool (PowerPoint anyone?), metaphors can be misused and abused. First, it’s important to consider your audience. What metaphors will resonate? For instance, I love Charles Wheelan’s Lebron James metaphor: “The Central Limit Theorem is the Lebron James of statistics–if Lebron…

The Secret to Clarifying Complex Ideas

“CRM is like your birth control,” I remember Brittany Hodak, co-founder of The Superfan Company, saying on stage. Perplexed but very intrigued, I listened on. I could sense the ballroom, filled with nearly four hundred attendees at the most recent Brand Manage Camp, wondering the same question. How on earth is CRM like birth control?!…

How To Write Emails People Will Want To Read

I’m often asked how I define a story. Is presentation a story? Is a business pitch a story? While defining a story, especially in a modern world, would take an entirely separate article, I know when a story works. It works when your audience sees themselves in your story and wants to do something about…

Write Subject Lines That Hook Your Audience Every Time

Knowing that the first few lines of an email have to catch the audience’s attention, Michelle Garza, Manager of Diagnostic Imaging and CT at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, set out to intrigue her email audience. “On July 1, 2017,” she wrote, “Lurie Children’s Hospital implemented a new policy on PSL. PSL doesn’t stand for…

Persuading Audiences That Think They Know Everything

Let’s do a word association game. I say “story” and you say…? “Telling!” Indeed, most people would say “telling.” After all, storytelling is everywhere now. There’s a big caveat though. A wise person once said, “to become a great storyteller, one must first become a great story collector.” In other words, you have to prompt…

3 Painless Ways to Take a Conversation Beyond Small Talk

“So… how was your vacation?” Summer has finally arrived in Chicago; tourists are pouring onto the magnificent miles, the museums, ballparks… everywhere. The sight of crowded downtown streets is reminding me of answering this frequently asked summer question: So, how was your vacation? When people ask questions like this, it’s tempting to rush, thinking of…

Summer Reading: Leisure or Leadership-building?

Immersed in careers and often balancing jobs and families, busy, working parents often feel that they have little time to read, even in the summer. But if we want to be better storytellers, we need to do some summer reading, so no matter how little time we think we have, we must make time! This…

What Your Audience Wants From Presentations

A manager walks into yet another presentation. It’s the third in a row of the day, and he’s dreading it. Experience tells him he will see rows and rows of numbers: concepts he feels like he should know but doesn’t and is too embarrassed to ask, and most importantly, he has no idea why…