The situation
Sealaska is the largest private landowner in Southeast Alaska, formed under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 and owned by more than 26, 000 people of primarily Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian descent.
The Board of Directors asked its shareholders to vote on a historic resolution. The result would directly affect every shareholder and be consequential indefinitely.
What was actually at stake
The resolution concerned enrolling descendants, the children and grandchildren born after 1971, who under the original Act had inherited nothing. But, to let them in, would mean lower dividends for everyone. Shareholders had been split on it for years, and the split ran through families which meant this was not a question people would resolve by reading more carefully.
What most people would have done
The resolution was not complicated. A thorough explanation has rarely changed minds.
What we did instead
What was proposed: Storytelling through transmedia and the heart of it all was a DVD, mailed to every shareholder, explaining the resolutions thoroughly.
Use a story the audience already knew. The advocacy video was built on the story of creation, The Box of Daylight, with the emotional climax placed where the story turns on sharing what you hold with the generation coming after. We did not invent that metaphor for the campaign. Most shareholders had known the story since childhood, and it already carried the argument the corporation was trying to make.
We did not have to persuade anyone of the principle. We had to remind them they already held it.
What happened
A DVD containing thirteen videos went to more than seventeen thousand shareholders ahead of the vote. The descendant enrollment resolution passed. The DVD went on to win a Telly Award, which mattered considerably less than the vote.
What it would mean for you
What transfers is the diagnosis: when people disagree about who they are, better information does not help. You have to find the story they already share and let it do the work.
That is the method operating under pressure, with a deadline and a vote at the end of it. How we think about this work →
He has a keen sense for identifying and capturing the things that matter most to people.
Joe Nelson, J.D., Vice Chancellor, University of Alaska Southeast
For ANCs & Tribes → · Finding the story behind the strategy →
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