Hello {{first_name}}. Earlier this week, I delivered a three-hour storytelling workshop to the wonderful team at PACT (Parents And Children Together). One of the final questions was: "How do you tell the same story on different platforms?"

That's what this edition is about. It's a longer one than usual, but worth the extra few minutes, particularly the AI prompt at the end. I think you'll find it very useful.

Join 3,544 other storytellers as we walk through it together.

Most organisations have one version of a story, and usually it's a case study.

That's where it starts. The case study gets written first, and everything after that comes out of it. The annual report gets three paragraphs of it. LinkedIn gets the opening and a link. The video gets the same words read aloud over footage. The funding application gets it squeezed into a box with a word count.

That isn't four versions. It's one version, damaged four ways.

A case study feels like neutral raw material. It isn't. It's already an adaptation, and it was built for one particular reader: a funder.

Look at the shape of it. Third person. Past tense. A problem, an intervention, an outcome, in that order. Nine months compressed into a paragraph, which no reader can picture, because nobody can picture a summary. Written about a person rather than by them. Most of the feeling sanded off, because feeling reads as pressure in a funding document.

That's a good format for that reader. It's the wrong thing to build everything else out of.

If the case study is your starting point, every version downstream inherits the shape of a funding document. Your LinkedIn post reads like a report because it is one. You shortened a report.

A founder told me earlier this year, about her own organisation:

She couldn't quite say why. She had extraordinary raw material and exactly one container to put it in, and the container was built for somebody who wasn't the audience she was trying to reach.

Upstream of the case study. With what the person actually said, in their words. With a scene somebody can picture. With the moment it turned, rather than the nine months either side of it.

That material is what every version should be built from, including the case study itself. The case study is one of the outputs. It has been sitting in the wrong place in the process, and because it's usually the first thing written, it quietly decides the shape of everything else.

Open your long version. Open the short one you made from it.

Look at the first line of each.

If they start the same way, you cut it down. You didn't adapt it. Adaptation changes where a story begins, because different channels need you to begin in different places, and the opening is the first thing that has to move.

I'd guess most organisations have never made two versions of anything that start differently. I know I went years without doing it.

Every channel takes something before you've written a word.

A social post takes away context and time. Nobody arrives knowing who you are or why they should care, and you have about a line and a half to fix that.

A short video takes away complexity. You get one idea. Try to carry three and the viewer keeps none.

A printed page takes away attention. People look, they don't read, and the caption does more work than the paragraph above it.

A funding application takes away your permission to feel. Emotional language reads as pressure to a funder, so the person has to survive inside the evidence rather than alongside it.

And a room takes away the edit. You can't go back and fix the sentence you got wrong, which is frightening, and it's also why being in a room is worth more than any of the others.

Once you know what a channel takes, you know what has to replace it. That's the whole move. The story doesn't change. The load-bearing part changes.

Earlier this year I wrote about telling one story to three different audiences, and how a funder, a donor and a member of the public are each asking a different question of the same material.

That's a real and separate problem, and it's about who. This is about where. You can get the audience exactly right and still publish something that doesn't work, because you put a version built for a page into a place that behaves nothing like a page.

Both have to be right. Most teams are only doing the first one, and usually by instinct.

I should also say that I've written before about a story being asked to do too many jobs at once. That edition has a line in it which I only now realise was the symptom of this: "Told the same way whether I had three minutes or thirty." Back then I read that as a problem of purpose. It was also a problem of form, and I missed it.

For the first five years of the Foundation I told our story the same way everywhere.

On live television at breakfast. In school halls. To civil servants at the Home Office and the Department for Education. On podcasts where nobody was watching the clock. Same shape, same order, same length, whatever the room was.

It worked in the places that happened to suit the shape I'd built, and it fell flat in the ones that didn't. I put that down to the audience, or to the day, or to me. It took me a long time to work out that the shape was the variable and I'd never once changed it.

That's not craft. That's luck, and luck is expensive when you only have one story you can bear to tell.

One more thing, because otherwise this reads as an argument for publishing everywhere.

One channel owns the story. One place where the full thing lives, where somebody is responsible for it, where you actually measure whether it did anything. A story spread evenly across six channels with nobody owning it is a story nobody owns.

The other versions aren't copies. They're adaptations pointing home. One place holds the full thing. Everywhere else carries the version that place can actually support, doing the job of getting somebody to the full thing, or of being enough on its own if that's all they'll ever see.

Same story. Different shape each time. One address.

Five channels, and what actually changes in each one. Take a single story into this, not your whole library.

First, the move that works almost everywhere.

Open on the most interesting moment. Not the background, not the set-up, not the year you were founded. The moment it turned, or the most surprising thing somebody said, goes in the first sentence of the post, the first three seconds of the video, the first line on the page.

Then take them back and walk them through it. Once somebody is hooked they'll follow you anywhere, including through the context they'd never have read cold, and you can take them where you actually wanted them to end up.

In Edition 8 I argued for leading with the transformation, and I'd still say that. This is a slight sharpening of it. The most interesting moment isn't always the outcome. Sometimes it's the sentence somebody said in the middle. Sometimes it's the point it nearly went wrong. Lead with whatever would make a stranger stop, and let the transformation arrive when they're already in.

What changes below is how much room each channel gives you to do it.

1. A post on LinkedIn

Nobody arrives knowing who you are, and you get about a line and a half before they keep scrolling.

So start later than feels comfortable. In the middle of a moment, with a person doing something. The background can come further down, or not at all. A reader who cares will stay for it, and a reader who doesn't was never getting to your second paragraph anyway.

Do this today: take the post you were about to publish and delete its first sentence. Nine times out of ten it was throat-clearing, and the real opening was sitting underneath it all along.

2. A short video

You get one idea. Try to carry three and people keep none of them.

So decide what single thing you want somebody to remember before you film anything, then cut whatever isn't getting them there, including the parts you're fondest of. This is the channel where being precious costs you most.

Do this today: say the one thing out loud, in one sentence, to somebody else on your team. If you can't, the video isn't ready to be made, and no amount of editing will rescue that afterwards.

3. A printed page or an annual report

People look at a page. They don't read it. The eye goes to the picture, then the caption, and only then, sometimes, to your paragraph.

So the caption is carrying your story whether you meant it to or not. Most charity captions describe what's in the photograph, which the reader can already see, and spend the most-read words on the page saying nothing.

Do this today: rewrite one caption as though it's the only thing anybody will read. Then hand the page to somebody who doesn't know the story and ask them what they think happened.

4. A funding application, or a case study

Emotional language reads as pressure to a funder, so anything reaching for a feeling works against you here.

That doesn't mean the person disappears. It means the feeling has to arrive through one specific detail that could only be true of them. Not an adjective. A fact, sitting in the evidence, doing its work quietly. The funder meets a human without being asked to have a feeling about one.

Do this today: find the most concrete detail in your story and move it into the evidence section, out of the introduction where it's probably being used as decoration.

5. A room

You can't go back and fix the sentence you got wrong. That's why speaking frightens people, and it's also the whole of its power: a room is the only place where the audience watches you decide what to tell them.

So don't spend that on a recital. The pauses, the sentence you start again, the thing you visibly choose to say, are what no other channel can give you.

Do this today: if you're speaking somewhere soon, put the written version away and work out what you'd say if it didn't exist. Keep the pauses in.

Then run the diagnostic. Take the last story you published in more than one place and name what each channel took from you. If you can't name it for a version that underperformed, there's your answer. You weren't adapting to that channel. You were posting into it.

Open the case study you'd normally start from. Three steps, twenty minutes, one story.

That's it. And if step 2 feels impossible, it's almost never because you're bad at openings. It's because step 1 is still missing.

This one takes a story you already have and rebuilds it for the channels you name, rather than shortening it four times.

It has three limits built in. If the only thing you give it is a case study, it stops and asks you what the person actually said, because it knows the case study has already had that taken out. It won't add anything you didn't tell it, which matters because the usual failure of tools like this is quietly inventing a detail that makes the short version land better. And it won't draft for broadcast or national press without stopping you first, because a story you can pull back from your own website in an hour is not the same as one you can never pull back at all, and the consent conversation for those two is not the same conversation.

Paste the whole thing in cold. You don't need to prepare anything.

Don't rebuild everything you've ever published. You'll open the folder, see the size of it, and close it again.

Take the last story you put in more than one place. Put the two versions side by side and read the first lines.

If they're the same, you've just found the cheapest improvement available to you this month, and it costs twenty minutes rather than a production budget.

Until next week, please take care.

Warm regards,

Matt Mahmood-Ogston
Award-winning impact storyteller, photographer and charity CEO.
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