Because I recently purchased a digital recording with Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition software, I am currently on the mailing list of their e-mail newsletter. About halfway down today’s long and text-heavy (even after I enabled the pictures which are automatically disabled by my e-mail reader) issue I found the following item:

The reaction this piece inspired in me?

And that’s a shame, because they have the raw material to tell a really compelling story, but they waste the opportunity by focusing on the process. One of their winners was recognized for a life-changing use of their product? Why is that not the top headline of the entire newsletter? Why isn’t his story told here? That would compel me to keep reading to find out how his life was changed and then to read the new product features (the headline story that I skipped) to see if any of them could help me transform my life. Instead, the reader is asked to do too much work to get to the interesting stuff, and I just stopped.

At Prospero, we work with our clients to identify the human interest in everything they do and to make the most of it — whether it’s helping make an organizational change process relevant for people’s everyday lives or telling the story of how a company’s or industry’s products are trying to make the world a better place. Can we help you connect and compel people?