Story-Driven Copywriting

Forging facts & data into powerful stories

Charts don’t win us over . . .

Story (the way we make sense of the world) gives facts meaning. By resonating with our lives and experiences, stories can make us believe new things. Your brand’s story must tap into your audience’s stories so that they feel why the facts matter to them.

I turn facts into stories . . .

No one hears you unless they feel heard – unless you speak to what they care about. My 20 years of experience with storytelling (first academically, studying the biological foundations of stories; then professionally, working as a developmental editor) has given me clear insights into the inner workings of how stories win us over.

A Case Study

There weren’t enough organ donors in Brazil . . .

Thousands were dying needlessly . . .

How do you get people to donate their organs to save lives?

Nobody wanted to be told what to do. Facts weren’t working.

So how do you get people to change their minds? How do you find the right STORY?

Don’t focus on the change you want to make.

Focus on the people you want to change.

In this case, Brazilians have a fiery passion for football – it’s embedded in their identity. So that’s what the Ogilvy agency tapped into. Their campaign for one of Brazil’s biggest football clubs, encouraging fans to become organ donors, led to a huge rise in transplants. Waiting lists for organs dropped to nearly zero.

So what was the campaign?

What was the STORY?

I use storytelling to

win people over.

change how we see the world.

Like the creatives behind the Immortal Fans campaign, I create bold new stories that tap into people’s existing stories about themselves. Having spent 20 years analyzing what makes a story resonate, I’ve learned that it has less to do with style or plot, and everything to do with how the things that happen to a person affect their beliefs, changing them from within so that they see the world differently.

Your brand’s goal is to change how your audience sees the world.

My goal is to make it happen.

Creative Brief 

THE FIRST STEP is for you to provide me with a creative brief—a short document listing all the info I will need to complete the project, such as:

  • The target audience

  • The next action you want the target audience to take

  • Any secondary actions you want the target audience to take

  • The benefit to the target audience

  • The business objective (why you want this piece created)

  • The tone of voice (e.g., friendly, urgent, educational, promotional, etc.)

  • The deliverables (i.e., What am I specifically expected to produce?)

  • A list of competitors (if applicable) doing something similar. This can help me learn from any successes and failures by seeing what works and what doesn’t.

Project Fee

My copywriting rate of 1,000 Kč per hour is a pricing benchmark to help us determine the fixed project fee, which allows us both (client and copywriter) to be in agreement of the project’s expectations from the outset—that way, you will know the end-cost of the project prior to completion, and you can calculate the expected return in advance.