Transforming Impact Through Storytelling: Building Equity, Inclusion, and a Better Future
Impact investors: don’t forget to invest in stories, not just operations. That pays some of greatest dividends.
If you want to keep focus on an issue, the storytelling has to continue.
Megan Tuck at The Bliss Group supports organizations that are making the world cleaner, safer, or more equitable. Enjoyed our conversation about storytelling and making impact.
She shares her insights into what impact orgs need to do in today’s climate to get their story out.
One key tip: social media is now news. Getting your thoughts out, in articles on LinkedIn can be a really easy start to understanding your voice in your narrative and having a space to practice speaking to audiences.
Podcast Transcript
Jacob: [00:00:00] Welcome to Impact Stories. I’m here with Megan Tuck. Please introduce yourself.
Megan: I’m Megan Tuck. I’m a senior vice president and co-lead of Bliss Impact at The Bliss Group. Bliss Impact is a practice group within a marketing communications agency, totally focused on working with clients that do good in the world. Specifically on making the world cleaner, safer, or more equitable.
Jacob: Tell me about that moment in your career when you decided you’re going to shift your focus towards impact.
Megan: The first part of my career was focused on financial services. And I’ve always had a passion for really understanding wealth inequalities. I was a sociology major in undergrad and my specialty in that sociology major was about how wealth disparities are purposely built into a lot of our societal systems and how it encourages people to behave in certain ways. And it locks certain people out of making change.
I saw one stat that really opened up my world, me coming from kind of a low [00:01:00] income and going to this private school. A professor there showed this chart that said, if you’re in the bottom left corner, you’re like the lowest of low incomes. And if you’re in the top right corner, you’re in the highest. The chances of you even making it from this box to one step higher, not the top, not the highest box, but just one more step higher are really low, less than 20%. It kind of opened up my eyes about the opportunities that I was afforded and what the difference access will make in terms of economic opportunity for historically underrepresented populations.
And so I went into financial services focusing on work with retail banks or investment banks. Then 2020 happened, right? Then the global pandemic hit, then the United States went through what we would like to call a racial reckoning. It felt like there was this pause for everyone at that time to really look at the systems that were in play and really talk about economic equity, talk about inclusion in a different [00:02:00] way.
At that point is when my career really pivoted hard from financial services to financial services as a means of equitable wealth distribution in this country. And giving people opportunity to grow wealth is one of the ways that you give people an opportunity to have better lives in a capitalist society. And so it was a hard pivot. And I think one that was really, really, popular at the time and has since gone down in popularity. And part of my work has been, how do we continue to tell stories when society has moved on from an issue, from a concern. But the concern or the issue remains a true issue and there are still people doing the good work to kind of knock down those systems that have been in play for hundreds of years.
And so in the past four years, I’ve gotten a lot of different types of projects under my belt that are less focused on selling a product and a service and more focused on the idea of how we could do better as a society [00:03:00] by the populations who have been historically underrepresented, underserved, underinvested in, undervalued by the economic systems at play.
And in that work, I’ve gotten to work with a lot of different organizations that are on the ground doing work to invest in small businesses to invest in communities to invest in housing to really put money where it’s going to matter versus hoarding the most for yourself and thinking about how is the best way to get a return on my money. That is a prevailing theory in a capitalist society, right?
Of course, but I think there’s proof also that the more people who can participate in an economy, the better that economy does as a whole. And so really putting the business case behind why it makes sense to invest in underrepresented communities has been at the heart of everything that I do.
Jacob: So tell me, how does the Bliss Group go about making a difference in the world?
Megan: We are focused on working with brands that want to make the world cleaner, safer or more equitable. And so when we think about cleaner and [00:04:00] safer, sometimes that’s, that’s a sustainability lens making sure stories are told of the clean tech startups, the sustainability startups that are out there trying to create groundswell around a new way of doing any part of your life that will make the world better from an environmental standpoint.
And then my passion area really being more equitable. It’s working with impact investors. It’s working with nonprofit associations that are saying we’re going to put our money where our mouth is and us being able to tell their story. And build a narrative, keep a narrative going that this work is important and that this work makes a difference.
Oftentimes we’re really only met with negative news when it comes to equity, inclusion, sustainability topics. And so part of it is, there are lots of people and organizations doing amazing work and making a real measurable difference in these spaces, and we can help tell their stories and reach out across spaces that maybe they didn’t even know were possible.
But we [00:05:00] never want to take the foot off the pedal. Our society swings with the things that we care about and we want to make sure that these really important things remain top of mind and they’re pressing the issue. And they’re not letting things like inclusion and equity fall into the background because we’ve had a Supreme Court Decision on affirmative action that kind of took us back years, right? This is still an important issue and we want to make sure those stories are being amplified and there’s not a fear-based or forgetful-based approach to what matters when it comes to social issues.
Jacob: What are the range of services that your communication firm offers?
Megan: We’re a fully integrated marketing and communication services agency. We offer everything under the spectrum from marketing strategy to execution on social and paid and earned media on digital channels, on print channels, on website development anything you can think of. What we really try to do is customize the work that we do and make sure that it’s driving particular audiences to take particular [00:06:00] behaviors.
I think it’s really fun to think of the content, right? Think of this new format, this new website, this new content piece that we’re going to publish, but it really has to drive some sort of change. That’s the goal. And so as a marketing communications agency, and especially in our Bliss Impact Group, where we’re trying to, tell stories that spur change. And to spur change you have to know where your audiences are. And so where we really live and breathe is in research and analytics that speak to particular audiences, then we customize our programs from there to deliver the content on the right channels with the right stories that will move those audiences.
Jacob: What are the most common mistakes you tend to see those in impact make when telling their story?
Megan: That’s a really good question. You know, one of the biggest mistakes that we see is that storytelling is always on, right? Sometimes you get one really good story told. The reporter, the writer nailed it. The audience loved it and sometimes it [00:07:00] stops there. One of the things that we know is that if you want to keep focus on an issue, the storytelling has to always continue. And the way it continues can be different, but if storytelling stops, then we’ve lost the entire plot. And I think that sometimes happens out of fear out of change or how our society is reacting to certain stories.
We see now a lot of stories not being told around inclusion or not being told around very specific populations like black women because of a fear of the reaction to telling that story. And what we’ve seen happen in the financial and public sphere when you’re talking about inclusion in 2024. I think it’s a mistake to react out of fear and to stop storytelling and to remove language that represents your morals and your values from your stories. I think your end users see right through that and it’s so reactionary and isn’t necessarily the best thing long term. I think a lot of people will think about it as risk management, but we think like [00:08:00] risk management includes telling those stories, and not telling those stories is not proper risk management.
Jacob: Give me some case studies of what a successful campaign might look like or a successful engagement.
Megan: One of our most successful engagements, what it does best, is it gathers multiple voices within a story. So
with a marketing communications program, I think traditionally you’ll have one voice or one organization that stands out, but I think the strongest stories include multiple voices, multiple organizations. And those organizations working together to amplify a story.
What it looks like when it’s done, many voices coming together to say this is important and say this is important on an ongoing basis versus one voice at one moment in time.
One of the things we heard at EFG was movements, not moments. And so if you really want to create a movement, you have to get your neighbors involved. You have to get your peers involved. You have to put other voices front and center that can help tell your story versus your own. And so the most [00:09:00] successful engagements know that and are more than open to bringing in other voices. Kind of creating a coalition of voices that can work together to amplify a story and to tell a story that really surrounds an issue versus one point of view.
Jacob: Did you have any specific case studies you could share?
Megan: We’re working with a private foundation who is spending more than half of their time with us, not actually amplifying their own voice, but putting their resources toward us helping smaller organizations who do not have internal communications teams who typically don’t have the bandwidth to take on storytelling and having us come in and say, part of your engagement with this private foundation, part of their investment in you is investing in your story is told well. And so we’re coming in as part of their team to help you do that. And this could be for organizations that have maybe three to four people on staff.
They’re doing what they can to actually solve the issue and what we do is take the storytelling portion off their [00:10:00] plate. What it means is many, many more stories get told than if we were just focused on one voice or one organization. That’s the best use of how impact investors or foundations and nonprofits invest in other organizations, investing in their operations also means investing in their stories being told.
Jacob: What advice do you have for those in social impact or impact investing? What are some easy wins or things to start, to see some traction or results?
Megan: What’s interesting about the time that we currently live in is that there’s so much information at our fingertips and so much access to platforms. One of the things that we sometimes say is everyone is a journalist, and we don’t mean to say that because everyone is literally a journalist. But there are so many platforms for which your voice can be heard that are easy to access. And I think it might feel overwhelming to figure out the right platform and how much do you do? But what we find is once people get started, they realize it can be a lot simpler to keep that engine going than they think it is. So [00:11:00] getting your thoughts out in articles on LinkedIn can be a really easy start to understanding your voice in your narrative and having a space to practice speaking to audiences in a professional setting. That’s one of the easiest ways to get started because social media is news now.
So I would say not ignoring social media. I know it can be overwhelming, but it is your space to test to learn, and to get your voice starting to be heard. Even if you don’t have a robust marketing program in place, having somewhere where people can come to find you and hear from you is important, especially if you want to grow. People often validate who you are based on your online presence. And so having some presence on a platform like LinkedIn where you know that the space is fairly professional is a really, really great place to start.
Jacob: What is it that you’re most looking for right now?
Megan: Collaborators. Storytelling is a collaborative coalition-led effort when you’re surrounding issues like economic equity and I’m always looking for more people who want to tell stories like that. Whether you’re a news [00:12:00] organization, whether you’re a storyteller yourself, whether you need help storytelling.
I’m always looking for people who want to partner with me in getting more stories told about the populations that are underserved and under-invested in, in this country and want to amplify those stories and the solutions to those stories on a greater level.
Jacob: And if someone wanted to learn more about the Bliss Group, do you have a newsletter, blog, what resources would you point them to?
Megan: If you go to our website, the bliss group. com, that’s theblissgrp.com we have blogs, we have a podcast that we publish on an ongoing basis with our managing partner and CEO. On my LinkedIn, you can find my personal newsletter called power and purpose where we really go into what’s moving stories right now around things like economic equity and inclusion and cleaner, safer worlds and what we’re thinking about when it comes to storytelling. And then, of course, I love to just link with like-minded individuals. So anyone who wants to [00:13:00] just talk to me and say, Hey, I think we could, I think we get along. I’m open to connecting especially on LinkedIn.
Jacob: Fantastic. Megan, thank you so much for sharing your expertise and insight, and keep up the good work. I’m looking forward to seeing the great things that you help bring about in the world.
Megan: Thank you for having me.
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