Have you been following the fortunes of “the world’s unluckiest penguins”? writes Lucy Stephens.
A story by BBC climate and science reporter Georgina Rannard a few weeks back caught my eye.
First of all, it was about penguins. Given I work at a company with the same name, I must admit I do tend to read anything about everyone’s favourite flightless bird (it’s genuinely true, we’ve never met anyone who actively dislikes penguins).
Secondly, it had a dramatic headline: “Penguin chicks survive tearaway iceberg”.
Listen, writing headlines can be hard. This one, I felt, had everything. Not just penguins, but young penguins, and in just five words, the prospect of a thrilling tale of survival.
Plus, I’m interested in everything to do with sustainability and climate change. I suspected this story might give me some valuable updates as to what the current state of play is with the Antarctic ice sheet.
I read the whole piece from beginning to end, and as I had thought, it was an interesting – if sobering – read.
These chicks were dubbed perhaps the “world’s unluckiest penguins” after a drifting iceberg came to a stop right outside their Halley Bay colony, shutting it off from the sea.
This unfortunate occurrence has severe consequences for the wee penguins whose mothers might not have been able to get back to them, having been hunting for food.
But scientists have breathed a huge – if temporary – sigh of relief, as the iceberg has now moved.
It’s about the little things
This piece wasn’t just a very well written story that kept my attention right until the end.
It perfectly illustrated what all good storytellers know, and what the best kind of PR will do very well: that to get a big message across, you often need to focus on something small.
That’s because good storytelling is about connection. In order to get people to read a story, it needs to be relatable in some way. We need to be made to care. And in today’s society filled with distraction, we need to be made to care extremely quickly.
By engaging our sympathy in the plight of penguin chicks – and doesn’t it help that they are simply adorable little balls of grey fluff – the writer has drawn us into a much wider tale: the fate of the Antarctic, and, indeed, the world itself.
The first half of the story tells us about the particular iceberg incident and how, for now, the chicks are safe.
Once we’re interested, the rest talks more broadly about the origins of this particular penguin colony, and how it has suffered a catastrophic decline due to the absence of sea ice, on which chicks rely for survival.
It’s only when you get nearly halfway down this story that the phrase ‘climate change’ is even mentioned.
It’s a phrase we’ve all heard a lot over the past decade or so, isn’t it? But in trying to convey the urgency of our warming climate, scientists and journalists have sometimes found it hard to get across something so huge, so all encompassing, so multi-faceted, and so important. Sometimes people have switched off. The whole topic is just too overwhelming.
Drip, drip, drip
But the message on climate change has become much more a part of today’s dialogue than it used to be.
Clearly, the mounting evidence we can all see in our mild winters, our increased rainfall, and baking hot Mediterranean summers, is hard to deny.
But the storytelling around this topic has also had a significant part to play, where it has focused on the fate of a few penguin chicks, rather than the whole of the Antarctic.
And the constant drip feeding of climate updates has also ensured these important messages have seeped into the public consciousness via years of work from dedicated writers and broadcasters.
Of course, there is no greater illustration of this subject matter, and the power of an individual story, than Lord David Attenborough’s work on Blue Planet II. Scientists and journalists had been trying to get across the problem of plastic pollution in the ocean for years. But the sight of one albatross dying from a plastic toothpick, of turtles trapped inside plastic nets, really hit home.
After that programme went out, thousands of people started clearing up plastic waste from beaches. A huge 88% of UK people surveyed after the programme said they had changed their behaviour since watching it, according to Rapid Transition Alliance.
The effect was simply huge.
And that’s what a good PR campaign can do. As storytellers, we know that focusing on something relatable will always help get a company’s message across, much better than plunging straight in with the big, key messages in the first paragraph.
If you’re a business which wants to tell a story about your brilliant apprenticeship scheme, for example, find one great apprentice to “front” your message.
Don’t be afraid to let that apprentice tell the story of where they are from, their aspirations at school, the twists and turns of their life, and how they came to work for you. You want readers to connect with the person, before you find a way of including in the story the information you want: how many apprenticeship schemes you run, how varied the opportunities are, the successful pathways that are possible. Once you’ve got a reader interested, they will keep going until the end. But turn them off in the first paragraph by bombarding them with information that they don’t connect with, and they won’t.
So I’ll keep looking out for stories about the world’s unluckiest penguins.
As I read, I know I will be learning a lot more, too.
