You’d think it would be onboarding 101. Everyone entering your organization should know the basic story of how it came to be. It’s the kind of lore that all employees should learn within their first few days on the job—if they didn’t already know it before. But that’s not always the case.
Sure, some longtime employees may know your organization’s well-worn stories and legends, but what about lesser-known history? Once you’ve exhausted the low-hanging fruit, it can be tough to find inspiration to feed the (very lovable) content beast your organization has created.
Question: where do you turn when you’re fresh out of ideas?
Answer: your archives.
So why use archives for storytelling? The assets and artifacts your company already owns are the unsung heroes of your organizational storytelling. There’s no need for exhausting ideation sessions when you have an archive as a source of endless inspiration.
Your Archives Are the Most Undervalued Asset in Your Arsenal
There’s a common thread in business history, regardless of industry: people and relationships are always at the center.
Think about Ford, Wrigley, Apple, or BlackRock. Even if you don’t know the details of how those companies started, you probably know who started them. And you might know a detail or two about the relationships those companies formed that helped get them where they are today.
But it’s not just the founders and their relationships that make a business’s history so rich. It’s the relationships with employees and loyal customers, too.
Unless you’re utilizing your archives to find and tell those stories, you’re only scratching the surface of what you can share about your business’s history—to your internal stakeholders, future employees, and customers.
These stories back up who you are as a company, what values you stand for, and how you’ve always done things your own unique way. And they help put a spotlight on the people and relationships that made it all happen. They also show how you respond, how you prepare, and how you forge ahead. A strategic focus on these themes can be critical in times of innovation, disruption, and change—especially when your stakeholders need to know where you stand.
The best part is that you already own these stories, lessons, and artifacts from your company’s heritage. But unless you unearth them and put them to good use, you’re letting a gold mine gather dust.
Why Archives Provide a Richer Foundation for Storytelling
Archives can give you real insight as to what happened—and then some.
However, not all archival programs are created equal. If you’re like many of the companies we start working with, your archives are likely relegated to a collection of cardboard boxes in a service closet with little to no organization—let alone metadata to help you search. But the contents of these boxes can prove to be a proverbial gold mine for those golden nuggets.
Say your organization has gone through an archival overhaul by professionals who have digitized those boxes and tagged your metadata. Someone within the organization who is searching for a story about a specific time in your company’s history can plug names and dates into your archives system and come up with quick, easy results. What you discover could be far more than you anticipated, thanks to the work of archivists.
A well-maintained archive with a great digital system can also pull up related visual artifacts that might show a new side to the story—you might find an old photograph, for example, or an original of what you once thought to be a lost document. Either way, what you find could add a whole new element to your objective.
When you leverage your archives to inspire or corroborate your storytelling (and know where to look and what connections to make), not only can you find artifacts that will help bring your story to life, but you also can find the actual piece of history that sparked the story in the first place. If that doesn’t make for a more interesting anecdote, we’re not sure what does.
So use your archives for storytelling. Use the visual assets that live within your archives to tell a richer story. Create a milestone celebration campaign from a single artifact with an incredible, unheard-of backstory.
Feature an employee whom you learn about in a newsletter from 1972 who had an idea that shaped the entire company for years to come.
Tell the story of your company’s collectible coin and what it stands for to inspire the new generation of employees who have only heard the legend secondhand.
Your archives contain multitudes of gems just like these with original and rare visual elements to spare. Your content’s shine is duller without them.
3 Ideas To Get Your Storytelling Started Using Your Company Archives
You’re sold on using your archives for storytelling. Great! But now what? Where do you start?
If you haven’t spent much time exploring what’s in your archives, you likely have little idea what’s waiting for you. Here are some ideas to get you started.
1. Learn from past challenges.
When your company is faced with a crisis, it’s a good time to look back on your history before you forge ahead. What did your past leaders say in similar situations? What actions did they take? Finding parallels between the past and the present can help you fill in the gaps.
For example, when COVID hit, companies that had been around for more than a century turned to their archives to find out what their leaders said during the 1918 influenza pandemic. What they found gave them not only a glimpse into how past leaders responded to crises but also insight into how to respond in 2020.
Look for: Notes about or from your leaders; written public addresses; and speeches.
2. Get a glimpse into company culture.
Company culture is huge. It’s what makes your employees stay loyal and attracts new hires. Has your company’s culture changed with the times or stayed the same?
Employee newsletters offer a unique view into organizational culture. They capture the moment in which they were written as well as the feelings, attitudes, and values of employees at the time.
You can learn what challenges employees were facing, what wins they were celebrating, and what new initiatives they helped launch.
Look for: Employee newsletters; employee communications; and internal communications.
3. Create buzzworthy social campaigns.
Thanks to social media, you already have some content inspiration in trends like Throwback Thursday or This Day in History. Content like this always gets people excited and talking because it’s fun and interesting—a break from the norm.
Go on a quest to find quirky, fun photos with unexpected backstories. And make a point of searching your archives regularly for fodder to save for a rainy day. Once you start exploring, you’ll come across plenty of ideas.
Look for: Odd or novelty objects with a unique story behind them; old photographs; old advertisements; and products that didn’t make it (and why!)—anything can be an inspiration for a social campaign if you have an open mind.
The Bottom Line
The never-ending content cycle is relentless. But you don’t have to work harder to keep up—just work smarter by using your archives as the jumping-off point for great storytelling.
The material is already there, available to you, and ready to be used. With the right system in place, it can be an invaluable resource that is rife with opportunities.
So go on, get your archives in order—and get creating.