Graphic Recording — Not That Kind!

Storyboarding My Storytelling Presentation

Last Friday I had the pleasure of being the keynote, luncheon speaker for the CPRS-Vancouver Island’s bi-annual professional development conference “Beyond the Hype” held at Royal Roads University in Victoria British Columbia.

My keynote was “Storytellers & their stories: Lessons learned from Behavioural Sciences”. It’s a presentation that I have given most recently at Dublin City University and the Public Relations Institute of Ireland, while I was in Dublin during my research leave this fall. I enjoy giving this presentation as it mixes the findings from my Institute for Public Relations (Behavioral Insights Research Center) funded research on narrative persuasion and spokesperson credibility with a very personal story about the name Mavourneen.

I start my presentation with an introduction to the word Mavourneen (it is the English version of Mo mhuirnín — which is Irish for ‘my darling’) and then take the audience through a childhood journey that stops with a loud knock on the door. I then transition into the science of storytelling and the key characteristics of effective storytellers.

The difference in this presentation was that Tara Shanks from Pondering Turtles was graphically recording or representing my presentation into a graphical storyboard.

Tara, in real time, pulled the key themes from my presentation and graphically represented them in this visualization.