Your company’s past plays a central role in the way your employees and customers view it in the present. Highlighting your company’s milestones over the years allows you to appeal to those stakeholders and shape their understanding of your company and its accomplishments. Creating a dynamic and informative record of your company’s milestones is one powerful way to highlight both your company’s past achievements and its ongoing work. Your corporation or institution’s story plays a significant role in how people perceive it and the work that it does. A well-curated company history that highlights your company’s milestones increases the value of your company by showcasing its unique identity and achievements. The storytelling experts at History Associates Inc. (HAI) can partner with you to pinpoint your company’s milestones and find the best ways to showcase them so that they add value to corporate brands. HAI historians are skilled at partnering with companies to create compelling, informative corporate histories that add value to your company.
The Art of Corporate Storytelling
At HAI, we see storytelling as an art. It requires creativity combined with careful study. A good corporate history can meld seemingly unrelated events into a seamless narrative with dramatic appeal. A company timeline is one representation of a corporate history that blends visual media and text to create this kind of narrative. A timeline is much more than a series of unrelated events lined up in order. Instead, a well-curated corporate timeline adds value to your company brand by highlighting its unique contributions, thereby distinguishing it from other brands. A compelling company origin story for your company can even attract talented new employees, who can use it to determine how well their values align with their potential employers’. Your company’s story can also help produce brand loyalty in customers and potential employees.
In any context, good storytelling is motivated by forging an emotional connection. Successful brands create a unique narrative that forges an emotional connection with customers. Effective corporate branding presents a story that produces an emotional response in your stakeholders. A corporate history that sticks to “just the facts” will not produce this result. Instead, a carefully curated process that includes time-tested and deliberate steps can help your company produce a timeline that highlights your corporate milestones in a way that creates emotional connection. HAI itself was faced with the challenging task of walking this fine line when it produced its own interactive, online timeline. HAI experts have partnered with many clients as they navigate the process of building a corporate timeline, and can anticipate the questions and decisions that your company will have to make in the process of telling your story. At HAI, we have developed a set of best practices for building effective timelines.
One crucial aspect of this process is goal-setting. If your company partners with HAI, we can help you track the goals you’ve designed the timeline to serve and ensure that timeline events are distributed thematically and chronologically. We have many years of experience helping companies to ensure that each event included in a timeline stays on message and contributes to the overarching story your company wants to tell about itself. HAI experts know what events and visuals to include, and how to frame them in service of your corporate brand.
Use A Timeline to Enhance Your Corporate Brand
A timeline is a visual and textual representation of your company’s history. A well-crafted timeline contributes to your corporate brand identity by sharing your story with employees, owners, and customers. A history that your stakeholders hold in common becomes a foundation for your corporate brand. HAI helps companies to create multidimensional, interactive timelines that emphasize the important developments and events in a company’s history. The timeline format is more engaging than a long written document, and it allows your company to highlight the events that you see as most significant. Digital timelines utilize Web technologies to create a visually stimulating interactive experience for users, who learn more about your company and create associations with the images and video featured in your timeline. Users can also determine their level of engagement with your company’s timeline; they can scan the most significant events, or continue clicking to find more highly detailed information. Because timelines tend to include visual media, this allows your company to further emphasize the visual identity of your corporate brand.
HAI’s storytelling experts can help your company determine who is the primary audience for your timeline, and create one (or more) best suited to that audience. Experts at HAI can consult with you to create compelling and informative timelines crafted for specific audiences. For example, perhaps your shareholders would benefit from learning more about your company’s financial history, whereas potential customers want a deeper understanding of your company’s charitable giving over the years. Potential investors may be most compelled by yet different information. HAI’s storytelling experts understand how to craft timelines that add value to your company’s brand by highlighting the events in your corporate history that specific audiences most need to learn about.
Highlight History While Looking to the Future
A milestone is a key event or action in a project or your business journey that marks a significant stage of progress. The events listed on your company timeline, in this way, create a narrative that tracks your company’s movement from the past into the present. A well-curated timeline can both highlight the ways your company distinguished itself in the past, as well as indicate how it continues to innovate and plan for the future. Sources for information about these milestones can be found in the company archives, state and federal records, and local history organizations. HAI experts can help you find creative ways to uncover significant information about your company’s history, as well as images that complement the textual elements of your timeline and make it visually appealing. An expert corporate storyteller can help you showcase your corporate history while making it evident that your brand is not stuck in the past.
It is crucial that, once your company has developed a timeline, there is a plan for maintaining it. Certainly, your timeline should be consistently updated with the most recent accomplishments and milestones your team has accomplished. These updates will include not only inputting more information into your timeline, but also ensuring that the technology platform you have selected on which to create your timeline is updated and running well. HAI historians are familiar with the variety of platforms available, and can help your company utilize these platforms effectively. The consultants at HAI can help get you started both writing and developing your company’s story as well as selecting the technology that adds most value to your corporate brand.
In any format, a well-curated corporate history will maximize the value of storytelling to further develop the identity of your brand. Contact HAI corporate storytelling professionals to help you tap into existing research about your company and its wealth of past events. We will help your company develop a diverse mix of projects that can increase its visibility and enhance its reputation.
