The 5 Principles and 10 Building Blocks of Persuasive Visual Storytelling
- By Cliff Atkinson
- 11/22/2018
- Introducing the BBP Story Template
- The Five Principles of Visual Storytelling
- Principle 1: Nail Down the Story Before the Slides
- Principle 2: Reformat Your Information for a Yes-No Decision
- Principle 3: Start with No to Get to Yes
- Principle 4: Always Keep the End In Mind
- Principle 5: Think Like a Storyboard
- The 10 Building Blocks of a Persuasive Storyboard
- Building Blocks 1-4: The Hook, The Relevance, The Challenge, and The Desire
- Building Blocks 5-7: The Map, The Anchors, and The Explanation
- Building Blocks 8-10: The Headlines, The Visuals, and The Flow
- Sketching the First Five Slides
- Sketching the Remaining Slides
- Applying Custom Layouts
- Adding Graphics to the First Five Slides
- Adding Graphics to the Remaining Slides
- Stepping Into the Screen
- Documenting the Experience
- Getting Started with the BBP Story Template
- Writing Headlines Using Three Ground Rules
Principle 2: Reformat Your Information for a Yes-No Decision
In addition to a classic story structure, your story template incorporates persuasive techniques that are useful for many types of presentations in different contexts. These include using Aristotle’s concept that to persuade, you must appeal to emotion, reason, and personal credibility. Even if you intend to simply inform an audience about something, you still must persuade them to pay attention. Why should they listen? What’s in it for them? Finding the persuasive heart of a presentation is particularly important because it reformats information from the way we understand it to the way that an audience finds important—often a completely different perspective. This becomes crucial when you aim to present your data in a way that persuades your boss to approve your proposal. When you look at your information like your boss, who wants to make an informed decision as efficiently as possible, your focus shifts to getting to the relevant points as quickly as possible.
When we tackle a new area of information, we usually start by gathering data, analyzing it, and finally distilling the story of the essence of what it means. Problems arise when we want to take our audiences through the same process we did when we learned the information (show the detail first, follow with the analysis, and finally, the story at the end). As described in Chapter 1, if we present too much information at the start, we quickly overwhelm the working memory of our audiences.
A persuasive story structure solves the problem by focusing information on a real-world decision the audience needs to make, which you’ll do in the next chapter. This focus on a “yes-no” decision from the audience will help you dramatically reduce what you could say to only what you must say to help your audiences decide something.