Keeping people interested

The key to getting your family or community members in the habit of interacting with the story bank is to interact with them.

1. Send emails with links to your latest uploads—but not too often. Send them once a week at the absolute most and monthly is usually best. Pay attention to how people respond to your emails to work out what they prefer. Or just ask them.
2. At the end of your posts and in captions on photos, ask people to comment on the and let you know what they think of them, if they remember anything similar
3. Tell them you need their help and would like to hear their anecdotes and memories, see any photos or videos they have, and know what sort of content they would like to see in the story bank.
4. Make sure you talk about your story bank in a way that makes it clear it belongs to the whole family or community.
5. Give people specific responsibilities to the story bank. For example, make it one person’s job to collect family recipes or to dig up photographs of a particular event from long ago. Give each person a deadline to create a sense of urgency.

As you go along, you will get to know how your individual family or community works best and how to motivate the people in it. Trust your instincts and come back to this list whenever you need a reminder.

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Image credit: For tea two by Glenn Gould under a Creative Commons Attribution licence

August 22nd, 2011 by Sarah Jansen
Filed in: For Community, For Family, How to
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