Daniel Pink, author of Drive, writes, “Right-brain dominance is the new source of competitive advantage.” Tapping the right side of the brain allows for deeper engagement by uniting an idea with an emotion. The best way to do this? Tell a compelling story.

Before you craft your story, ask yourself: “Who is my audience and what is my goal in engaging them?” Are you persuading someone to invest in your company? Are you trying to sell an idea to your co-workers? Do you want to inspire people to help a cause or save someone’s life? Start with a deep understanding of your audience, and ensure your story has a clear and powerful meaning — to them. Then you can set to work honing it for maximum impact.

While the reason you are telling a business story may be quite different from the reason you tell a story at a party, the same techniques apply. Too often, company stories come across as dry and flat because they fall prey to these seven deadly sins:

1. Chronology

Unless you’re telling the story about the proper assembly of an IKEA bookshelf, your story probably shouldn’t begin at the beginning. Chronology matters much less than having your story follow an interesting arc. Events need to build, one after the other. Your story should describe increasing risk and increasing consequences until the final, inevitable conclusion, but not necessarily in the exact way that the audience expects.

In practice: Does your marketing campaign build on ideas, feelings and passion, or does it feel disjointed and disparate? Tie each marketing event together as an outcome of the previous effort. Connect your brand with a story that is exciting to be a part of.

2. Telling

Show, don’t tell, is the most fundamental maxim of storytelling, and for a good reason. Your audience should see a picture, feel the conflict, and become more involved with the story — they’re not receptacles for a series of facts. If you tell a story as though you were not there, it distances your listeners. Describe what is happening as if it were in front of you. As Mark Twain said, “Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.”

In practice: Go to the page on your company’s website where you describe what you do. Does your “About Us” section include only lists and categories? Is the information purely factual or are you using stories to help illustrate who you are?

3. Jargon

Filling a story with technical terms, acronyms and superfluous words will only serve to lose or bore your audience. Hippocrates (medicine’s oath of ethics author) wrote: “The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.”

In practice: Visit a website in another country in a similar market that has to be translated by your browser. This is an experiment to show which terms and phrases lose translation across language. Try another experiment with a visit to a business targeted at an age bracket above and below your own. Notice the languages and settings of the stories they tell to their audience.

4. Pulse-free

People connect with other people, so make sure you focus on the real-life characters of your story. It doesn’t matter if your organization designs computer hardware or sells medical devices, human beings are still driving the action. So concentrate on the people involved. Personalize the protagonist of your story, making him seem real enough so that the audience feels a stake in what happens next.

In practice: Who is the face of your company? People connect with people they see as real and can relate to. If your company does not have a face, find one. Introduce him or her with a bio, experiences, a role and a challenge.

5. Fabrication

Your story needs to be authentic. A major cancer center in Washington asked a customer named Audrey, who happens to be a triathlete, if they could use her photo in a cancer awareness campaign. When the bus and magazine ads appeared, much to Audrey’s surprise (and her large network of friends, family and fellow athletes), she was positioned as a cancer survivor. How much more powerful would this campaign have been if the featured image was that of an actual cancer survivor? For everyone who knows Audrey (or heard her story), this reputable institution now has tarnished credibility. The power of appealing to emotion is detailed in Wharton professor Deborah Small’s groundbreaking research. She shows how the use of statistics by non-profits, as opposed to a vivid “identifiable victim,” results in lower giving. People want to hear and be moved by real stories.

In practice: Make stories a part of your organizational culture. For example, insist that staff meetings start with a story instead of a progress report. When a story is built for your business, evaluate it as if you were the person the story is about. Does it convey your story accurately?

6. Bulletproof

Engaging stories do not chronicle a straight line to success. Imagine if Rocky won every fight… yawn. Hone in on your protagonist’s problems or barriers to achieving her goal. What is standing in her way? By incorporating moments of vulnerability or doubt, you create empathy and lend authenticity to the story.

In practice: Tell stories that don’t always have the optimal ending. This is tied closely with sin 1: Chronology. Not every story ends perfectly, but it sets the stage for the next chapter that will bring it to a climax.

7. Proprietary

Companies with a stranglehold on what the corporate story is, and who can tell it, miss a world of opportunities, especially at a time when social media makes it easier than ever to connect and share. Stories told by employees and by customers are significant assets. Recognize the value in stories from internal and external sources, design ways to collect them, and allow your customers, advocates, and employees to also be storytellers.

In practice: Create an internal story bank, or database of stories, where employees and even customers can write and submit stories complete with titles. These stories can be keyworded, so that people looking for stories can easily find them. Employees searching for stories can reach out to the authors. Nike, Apple and eBay harness stories as tools to crowdsource ideas, such as what consumers are really passionate about. They do this as a way to give employees language and initiative to tell personal stories of meaning, and to amplify and distribute brand initiatives in story form.

In conjunction with her new Stanford Innovation & Entrepreneurship course launch, Jennifer Aaker, Stanford University Professor, Graduate School of Business, is hosting a webinar with David Hornik on June 14. Learn more at create.stanford.edu.

This article is based on material from the book, The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways To Use Social Media to Drive Social Change

Cooper Smith, Boy

Disclaimer: My son, Cooper is the biggest basketball fan of all time. Coop donated his 11th birthday to the malaria-fighting Nothing But Nets campaign. I don’t recall redirecting my presents to save kids in Africa at his age. It was pretty amazing when Coop got a shout out on national TV and then a video thank-you from Golden State’s Stephen Curry himself (during the playoffs!). Coop had no doubts before, but now he’s completely certain that doing good feels great. Cooper and Chris Helfrich, the Director of the UN Foundation’s Nothing But Nets campaign collaborated on the below for The Huffington Post. -- Andy

Chris Helfrich, Director of Nothing But Nets

As director of Nothing But Nets, I get to meet a lot of inspiring Americans doing amazing things to save lives by sending $10 nets to prevent malaria, a disease that still kills a child in Africa every 60 seconds. I’ve met a 13-year old Boy Scout who hiked 100 miles to raise money and awareness, an 8-year old who became the youngest girl to ever swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco in order to raise money to send hundreds of nets, and a fashion designer who has created a line of net-inspired accessories to send nets and save lives. In fact, since 2006 hundreds of thousands of people have joined our movement and raised $45 million to send over 7 million nets to keep families safe from this deadly disease. But an 11-year old boy challenging a basketball superstar to a fundraising contest? That’s a new one for me.

I was copied on a letter below that 11-year old Cooper sent to his idol, Stephen Curry, that demonstrates the fun spirit of the Nothing But Nets campaign and the fact that anyone can be a champion in the fight against malaria, whether you’re a 5th grader or the best basketball shooter on the planet. NBA Cares is a founding partner of Nothing But Nets and has been getting its fans and players excited about fighting malaria since the campaign was launched almost seven years ago. This is a perfect example of the power of this partnership in action.

Dear Stephen,

You are amazing. I hope you nail a bunch of three-pointers in the playoffs and help save a lot of lives.

I heard about your contribution to something called Nothing But Nets — for every three pointer you sink, you donate three nets to a family in Africa to keep them safe from malaria. So I looked Nothing But Nets up on the web, and found out about how a kid still dies from malaria in Africa every 60 seconds. But it takes just 10 dollars to save a life! So, during my birthday last week, all my friends donated to Nothing but Nets. And we raised more money to help over 210 families protect themselves from mosquitoes! When you go to Tanzania this summer to help distribute nets, we’ll give you cards that we wrote for the kids over there to deliver along with our nets.

Can you do me a favor and sink a lot of three pointers in the playoff games? I promise I’ll raise a lot of money for Nothing But Nets if you do. Even more than you!

I may not be able to beat you on the court (yet!), but I bet I can beat you at raising money for Nothing But Nets. Game On, Steph.

In his new book, Give and Take, our friend Adam Grant presents surprising stories about how we underestimate the success of givers—people who consistently help others without expecting anything in return. Adam’s an academic, behind his stories are data, so you can dig in, understand and replicate his results. Here’s an excerpt from Give and Take that Adam and I hand-picked for Dragonfly readers. It covers actions for impact: practical steps for increasing your contributions to others.

1. Test Your Giver Quotient

We often live in a feedback vacuum, deprived of knowledge about how our actions affect others. To track your impact and assess your self-awareness, visit giveandtake.com. Along with filling out your own survey, you can invite people in your network to rate your style, and you’ll receive data on how often you’re seen as a giver, taker, and matcher.

2. Run a Reciprocity Ring.

What could be achieved in your organization—and what giving norms would develop—if groups of people got together weekly for twenty minutes to make requests and help one another fulfill them? For more information on how to start a Reciprocity Ring in your organization, visit Cheryl and Wayne Baker’s company, Humax, which offers a suite of social networking tools for individuals and organizations. They’ve created materials to run a Reciprocity Ring in person and a Ripple Effect tool for running it online. People typically come together in groups of fifteen to thirty. Each person presents a request to the group members, who make contributions: they use their knowledge, resources, and connections to help fulfill the request.

3. Help Other People Craft Their Jobs—or Craft Yours to Incorporate More Giving.

People often end up working on tasks that aren’t perfectly aligned with their interests and skills. A powerful way to give is to help others craft their jobs to work on tasks that are more interesting, meaningful, or developmental. Job crafting, a concept introduced by Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton, involves innovating around a job description, creatively adding and customizing tasks and responsibilities to match personal interests and values. A natural concern is that people might craft their jobs in ways that fail to contribute to their organizations. To address this question, Amy, Justin Berg, and I partnered with Jennifer Kurkoski and Brian Welle, who run a people and innovation lab at Google. In a study across the United States and Europe, we randomly assigned Google employees working in sales, finance, operations, accounting, marketing, and human resources to a job crafting workshop. The employees created a map of how they’d like to modify their tasks, crafting a more ideal but still realistic vision of their jobs that aligned with their interests and values.

Six weeks later, their managers and coworkers rated them as significantly happier and more effective. Many Google employees found ways to spend more time on tasks that they found interesting or meaningful; some delegated unpleasant tasks; and others were able to customize their jobs to incorporate new knowledge and skills that they wanted to develop. All told, Google employees found their work more enjoyable and were motivated to perform better, and in some cases, these gains lasted for six months.

To help people craft their jobs, Justin, Amy, and Jane have developed a tool called the Job Crafting Exercise. It’s what we used to conduct the Google workshops, and it involves creating a “before sketch” of how you currently allocate your time and energy, and then developing a visual “after diagram” of how you’d like to modify your job. The booklets can be ordered online (jobcrafting.org) and completed in teams or individually to help friends and colleagues make meaningful modifications to their jobs.

4. Start a Love Machine.

In many organizations, givers go unrecognized. To combat this problem, organizations are introducing peer recognition programs to reward people for giving in ways that leaders and managers rarely see. A Mercer study found that in 2001, about 25 percent of large companies had peer recognition programs, and by 2006, this number had grown to 35 percent—including celebrated companies like Google, Southwest Airlines, and Zappos. A fascinating approach called the Love Machine was developed at Linden Lab, the company behind the virtual world Second Life. In a high-technology company, many employees aim to protect their time for themselves and guard information closely, instead of sharing their time and knowledge with colleagues. The Love Machine was designed to overcome this tendency by enabling employees to send a Love message when they appreciated help from a colleague. The Love messages were visible to others, rewarding and recognizing giving by linking it to status and reputations. One insider viewed it as a way to get “tech geeks to compete to see who could be the most helpful.” Love helped to “boost awareness of people who did tasks that were sometimes overlooked. Our support staff, for instance, often received the most Love,” says Chris Colosi, a former Linden manager. “Once you introduce a certain percentage of takers into your system, you need to think about what effect an incentive will have, but I enjoyed the idea of Love for tasks that were outside of someone’s job description or requirements.”

Adam Grant

To try out the Love Machine in your organization, look up a new electronic tool called SendLove. It’s available from LoveMachine, a new start-up that asks you to start by choosing a recognition period. Team members can send each other short messages recognizing giving, and the messages are all publicly visible.

Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from Give and Take by Adam Grant. Copyright © 2013 by Adam Grant

Jennifer is among today’s participants at Fast Company’s Innovation Uncensored.

She’s talking about something we all want to achieve: happiness. First of all she shows that happiness matters, particularly in the workplace. Happy environments are associated with reduced job turnover and absenteeism, greater customer service and better individual job performance.

But more than a how-to session, Jennifer dives into the meaning of happiness, and how it changes over the course of our lives and the lives of those around us. And how while a straight-line pursuit of happiness itself may be futile, a focus on the cultivation of meaning, allowing people to feel part of something worthwhile that is bigger than themselves leads to sustained long-term human, social and financial benefits.

If you missed seeing her speak, I hope you said hello. If you missed seeing her, please accept this slideshare in consolation.

Jennifer is among today’s participants at Fast Company’s Innovation Uncensored.

She’s talking about something we all want to achieve: happiness. First of all she shows that happiness matters, particularly in the workplace. Happy environments are associated with reduced job turnover and absenteeism, greater customer service and better individual job performance.

But more than a how-to session, Jennifer dives into the meaning of happiness, and how it changes over the course of our lives and the lives of those around us. And how while a straight-line pursuit of happiness itself may be futile, a focus on the cultivation of meaning, allowing people to feel part of something worthwhile that is bigger than themselves leads to sustained long-term human, social and financial benefits.

If you missed seeing her speak, I hope you said hello. If you missed seeing her, please accept this slideshare in consolation.

The following guest post is by Adam Tratt of Haiku Deck, the new iPad app that makes it easy to create great-looking presentations. You can reach him at founders@haikudeck.com or on Twitter at @adamtr.

When we first connected with the Dragonfly Effect team, we found that we have a number of shared passions, from design thinking to powerful storytelling.

We were also inspired by their crisp, memorable model–so much so that we created this Haiku Deck to illustrate the key Dragonfly Effect principles.

Click to view this Haiku Deck

As we kicked ideas back and forth, it occurred to us that like The Dragonfly Effect itself, in the hands of a determined person, our app will help anyone who wants to get a compelling story airborne. Here’s our take on how Haiku Deck supports Dragonfly’s four wings.

FOCUS 
Most presentation experts recommend focusing on one idea per slide, and Haiku Deck helps you do just that. Each slide you create has a maximum of two lines of text, forcing you to distill your message down to a handful of high-impact words. Focusing attention on a single concept instead of cramming slides full of bullets helps each idea stand out. Because when everything’s important, nothing’s important.

GRAB ATTENTION
Brain research and real human experience show that images grab our attention, speak to our emotions, and make meaning real more than plain text or data. Happily, there’s a treasure trove of over 35 million beautiful, Creative Commons licensed images out there, which we’ve made easily searchable right from the app. Our intent is to help you find the perfect backdrop for your words to really bring your stories to life.

ENGAGE
We believe that visual presentations (like the ones Jennifer and Andy do) allow you to be less scripted and more authentic, freeing up the underlying story in your deck for a more meaningful connection with your audience. We also love how the iPad with its portability and beautiful screen allows you to create and share stories in a less formal, more spontaneous way.

TAKE ACTION
Like the Dragonfly Effect team, we want to help your great ideas and stories fly into action! And when you tell your story well, the people who see it will want to not just sign up, but sign on and help drive your effort forward. Fast, easy sharing via email, social networks, and blog embedding helps stories spread, and we believe Haiku Deck can complement these channels to make your calls to action more memorable and thus more powerful. Here’s ours:

Click to view this Haiku Deck

After all, we do need your help–we’re really trying to change the way people feel about creating, giving, and listening to presentations. We’d love for you to give Haiku Deck a try, use it to tell your story, and above all, let us know what you think and how we can make it better. Just drop us a line any time at founders@haikudeck.com. If we can help your ideas take flight, we’re doing what we set out to do.

For more inspiration and updates, you can visit our website, join our Facebook community, and find us on Twitter (@HaikuDeck). And big thanks to Andy and Jennifer for inviting us to guest post!

The following guest post is by Adam Tratt of Haiku Deck, the new iPad app that makes it easy to create great-looking presentations. You can reach him at founders@haikudeck.com or on Twitter at @adamtr.

When we first connected with the Dragonfly Effect team, we found that we have a number of shared passions, from design thinking to powerful storytelling.

We were also inspired by their crisp, memorable model–so much so that we created this Haiku Deck to illustrate the key Dragonfly Effect principles.

Click to view this Haiku Deck

As we kicked ideas back and forth, it occurred to us that like The Dragonfly Effect itself, in the hands of a determined person, our app will help anyone who wants to get a compelling story airborne. Here’s our take on how Haiku Deck supports Dragonfly’s four wings.

FOCUS 
Most presentation experts recommend focusing on one idea per slide, and Haiku Deck helps you do just that. Each slide you create has a maximum of two lines of text, forcing you to distill your message down to a handful of high-impact words. Focusing attention on a single concept instead of cramming slides full of bullets helps each idea stand out. Because when everything’s important, nothing’s important.

GRAB ATTENTION
Brain research and real human experience show that images grab our attention, speak to our emotions, and make meaning real more than plain text or data. Happily, there’s a treasure trove of over 35 million beautiful, Creative Commons licensed images out there, which we’ve made easily searchable right from the app. Our intent is to help you find the perfect backdrop for your words to really bring your stories to life.

ENGAGE
We believe that visual presentations (like the ones Jennifer and Andy do) allow you to be less scripted and more authentic, freeing up the underlying story in your deck for a more meaningful connection with your audience. We also love how the iPad with its portability and beautiful screen allows you to create and share stories in a less formal, more spontaneous way.

TAKE ACTION
Like the Dragonfly Effect team, we want to help your great ideas and stories fly into action! And when you tell your story well, the people who see it will want to not just sign up, but sign on and help drive your effort forward. Fast, easy sharing via email, social networks, and blog embedding helps stories spread, and we believe Haiku Deck can complement these channels to make your calls to action more memorable and thus more powerful. Here’s ours:

Click to view this Haiku Deck

After all, we do need your help–we’re really trying to change the way people feel about creating, giving, and listening to presentations. We’d love for you to give Haiku Deck a try, use it to tell your story, and above all, let us know what you think and how we can make it better. Just drop us a line any time at founders@haikudeck.com. If we can help your ideas take flight, we’re doing what we set out to do.

For more inspiration and updates, you can visit our website, join our Facebook community, and find us on Twitter (@HaikuDeck). And big thanks to Andy and Jennifer for inviting us to guest post!

How does Kiva, a revolutionary marketplace for microfinance lending to entrepreneurs, successfully empower so many to give back? Kiva is one of the quintessential examples of an organization that has mastered the power of The Dragonfly, focusing their goal to provide loans to entrepreneurs in the third world, grabbing the attention of others through powerful storytelling, engaging others to get involved, and empowering them to take action.

In 2005, its first year, Kiva, one of the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending enterprises, distributed more than $500,000 to entrepreneurs. Since Kiva’s inception, more than 631,345 people have loaned over $111 million.  And though the numbers are impressive, Kiva is about much more than that. It’s about replacing daunting statistics on global poverty with compelling individual stories, and enabling personal connections; it’s about establishing a bond between lenders and entrepeneurs that feels meaningful; it’s about making a difference in the world, one small and easy donation at a time. And in four years, Kiva is well on their way to achieving these goals, enhancing the lives of 217,000 entrepreneurs in 49 countries through small loans online.

In The Dragonfly Effect, we explore the many aspects of Kiva that have made it such a huge success.

They know the power of a story. Kiva’s founders and staff are committed to sharing stories that earn respect instead of evoking pity. “When I see a picture of a woman on our site and it shows all the information about her, I begin to call her an entrepreneur,” says founder Jessica Jackley. “She’s not just a nameless face. She lives in a particular place. She has a business name. She has a nickname, Lizzie, and she needs $900. She has plans and a story.”

From the founding of Kiva, Jackley’s goal was to engage people by making them feel a positive emotional connection. She wanted to offer an alternative to what her generation had seen growing up—ads to alleviate poverty where “the message was to feel bad for these people and then to act.”  Kiva’s engagement strategy has never been to make you feel bad about the money you just spent on a double latte, which if you were a good person, you would instead have used to feed a starving child in the developing world. Instead, Kiva strikes a fine balance between sharing compelling information and overwhelming potential lenders with too much information.

They are authentic. Being authentic is as simple as being genuine. Much of Kiva’s success is due to its authenticity. Kiva’s philosophy and culture was built upon trust and what its founders call “radical transparency.” The model is based on disseminating real information about the entrepreneurs—not marketing them. “The entrepreneurs on Kiva are not promotional material,” says Jackley. “They are real people who have real challenges and dreams.” This authenticity engages users and keeps them coming back – knowing they are part of an organization that is genuine in their goal to make a difference in the lives of people around the world.

Shaun King

As he created HopeMob.org, the Internet-based non-profit “where generous strangers unite,” techno-humanitarian, Shaun King asked himself: “If Dr. Martin Luther King were alive today, how would he do things differently — for the same effect?” A 32-year-old graduate of Atlanta’s Morehouse College, Shaun King is a former pastor himself. He had America’s most revered reverend at the center of his thinking as he considered both the stands HopeMob should take and the tools to use to align with Dr. King’s teachings and actions.

Shaun King

As he created HopeMob.org, the Internet-based non-profit “where generous strangers unite,” techno-humanitarian, Shaun King asked himself: “If Dr. Martin Luther King were alive today, how would he do things differently — for the same effect?” A 32-year-old graduate of Atlanta’s Morehouse College, Shaun King is a former pastor himself. He had America’s most revered reverend at the center of his thinking as he considered both the stands HopeMob should take and the tools to use to align with Dr. King’s teachings and actions.