finding the storyInside the data.
Golin’s people already knew how to tell a compelling story. A Campfire Method Workshop gave its strategy, measurement and analytics teams a shared way to find one in every client report.
- Client
- Golin (now Golin Ketchum), one of the most respected and award-winning agencies in public relations
- Program
- Campfire Method Workshop
- The moment
- Recurring performance reports for clients
- In the room
- Strategy, planning, measurement and analytics teams
the story was there.The slides buried it.
At Golin, getting to the point is the craft. This is an agency known for award-winning work, and its people know how to tell a compelling story when they pitch new business.
Campaign performance reports were another matter. Golin’s strategy, planning, measurement and analytics teams produce a steady stream of them, built on templates that keep the data accurate and on time. Every client’s results had a story to tell, but it was getting lost in the slides. Golin wanted storytelling to become part of the regular rhythm of client reporting, so every review would leave clients clear on what happened, why it mattered and what to do next.
What we dida shared language,Practiced as a team.
GatherRound brought a Campfire Method Workshop to Golin’s office and built it around the team’s own reporting. Together, they worked through the Science of Story, how to see a presentation from the client’s side and how to give the data a narrative structure. Then they practiced it the same way, writing on the walls and working through it in small groups.
“It was very collaborative. Not talking at us, but with us.”Danny Litwak, VP, Director – Strategic Planning
The tool that clicked for the whole team was the Movie Trailer. As a preamble, it gives clients a reason to care before the detail. As the bones of a presentation, it shapes the whole story: the client’s world, the tension and the solution. Everyone left with the same structure for starting a presentation and for building one, and the same understanding of why it works.
Danny LitwakVP, Director – Strategic Planning, Golin
a clearer testFor what belongs.
Within two months, Golin’s teams were telling more succinct stories with fewer slides, rewriting headlines and organizing the data around the takeaway. The narrative became the test: if a slide doesn’t set up the world, the tension or the solution, it goes.
Once we feel we’re getting outside the narrative structure, we delete it because it’s not assisting in setting up the world, setting, tension or solution.
Clients noticed. They told Golin the presentations were getting to the point faster and the takeaway was easier to understand, which makes it easier to carry the story to their own stakeholders.
What enduresa frameworkWith somewhere to go.
The shared language is spreading past the workshop. A Golin leader is now walking an account team through the Movie Trailer, bringing more of the agency into the same way of finding the story.
Campfire Method Workshop
A hands-on day for leadership teams to build the stories that move their ideas forward.
