How We Tell One Story to Every Audience

Most organizations we work with have more than one audience, and those audiences rarely want the same thing. The Birmingham-Jefferson County Port Authority had a story that had to land in four different rooms.

Legislators needed a reason to fund it. Manufacturers and site selectors needed a reason to locate near it. Residents needed to see what it meant for their neighborhoods, and grant agencies needed evidence it would pay off.

The subject was complex: an inland port with a century of history and a lot of logistics behind it. Our answer was a flagship video designed from the start to be broken into audience-specific versions, each one clear enough to make the case on its own.

Choosing who tells the story

On a topic this dense, who’s talking matters as much as what they say. So, we left the narration up to the people who can tell the story best: six current and former city, county and port leaders, including Birmingham Mayor Randall L. Woodfin and two of the mayors who came before him, Dr. Richard Arrington Jr. and William Bell.

Their tenures stretch back more than 40 years. When leaders from different eras make the same argument, viewers hear agreement that no single spokesperson could manufacture.

Six voices can also turn into a parade of talking heads. We edited to avoid that. In one sequence, three mayors trade off on a single moment in the city’s history, each one picking up where the last left off, until Arrington finishes the thought himself. By that point the viewer has stopped keeping score of who’s speaking and is simply following the story.

Planning audience-specific cutdowns before the shoot

Thirty seconds is not much time to persuade anyone. If a short version is going to stand on its own, the material has to be captured with that purpose in mind.

Trimming a long video after the fact rarely gets you there. That’s why we organized the interviews into four chapters, each shaped around what a particular audience cares about. One sets up the big picture. One gives policymakers and grant reviewers a proof point they can repeat. One speaks to businesses about cost and access, and one talks to residents about jobs and family.

That planning let us cut a version for each audience later without scheduling a second shoot. It also forced a discipline we apply to every complex subject: find the sentence that does the work of a slide deck. BJCPA’s executive director, David Russell, gave us one. He could have walked through rail lines, interstates and waterways. Instead, he said, “Start in Birmingham, you can go anywhere in the world.” A site selector remembers that line long after the spec sheet is forgotten.

Turning one interview into a lasting content package

From the full interview we produced four 30-second cutdowns, each formatted for social, web and presentations, so BJCPA has the right version ready for whoever is across the table. We favored moments that won’t go stale, and we kept the time-sensitive facts in spots where they’re easy to swap out later.

A companion blog carries the leaders’ words into written form, where people can search for them and send them along. The video and the blog both live on bjcportauthority.com, which Markstein also developed, along with BJCPA’s messaging toolkit and refreshed visual identity. You can read more about that partnership in our BJCPA case study. Each piece reinforces the others.

Dr. Arrington put it plainly on camera: “Birmingham’s got a story to tell.” We’d only add that it helps to have four versions ready. If your organization has a story that needs to reach more than one audience, let’s talk.