The Folkloric Key to Telling a Community’s Story

My former field of community marketing is storytelling that involves weaving the history and culture as well as the inherent and distinctive traits and values of a place into a coherent narrative.

The objective is to safeguard a community’s unique sense of place by giving it prominence while helping prospective visitors, which includes more than 8-in-10 newcomers and relocating executives decide if it is a good fit for them while secretly shopping a community.

The trick is not just to be appealing but appealing to the right prospects.  There are several reasons a grasp of folklore comes in handy.

Folklore involves much more than legends and myths.  It begins orally but a good deal of folklore eventually makes it into news stories and sometimes even contaminates any official record before being re-injected back into folklore once again.

This process may be the result of our need as humans to, adapting the words of journalist Bill Moyer, harmonize or re-harmonize our lives from time to time with our stories.

Shaping a community’s story requires not only understanding this process but then relentlessly drilling down through layers of modifications and contemporized revisions to get at the most authentic roots of the story of a particular place, an almost temporal strain.

At about 10 p.m. on October 27th, a mutual friend emailed me with the news that former Durham City Council member, Chuck Grubb, had passed away unexpectedly a few hours earlier.

Chuck and I were only eight months apart in age in 1989 when he was elected to office a few months after I came here to jump start the community’s official marketing organization.

We continued to work on projects from time to time for another two decades during which he repeatedly made me promise that one day I would tell the real story of how Durham saved the Bulls.  More recently, our contact was via social media.

I could never find a time that was right but it will have to come soon.

Now there are only two of us left who really know how much that narrative has been truncated over the years, who know the full story first hand.

Over the years, It always gnawed at him when accounts including those in news reports would neglect to mention this essential piece of the story or when some who were only later involved would have so much to say.

But we also knew that, in part, we were to blame.

Once the turnaround had been achieved, the three of us agreed that first and foremost, it was vital to moving forward for us to help people save face.

Each of the three of us took an assigned role and mine was to absorb any fallout or retribution but we didn’t realize that wouldn’t be entirely possible or how long those resentments would last.

Keeping my promise to Chuck is for another essay.

Patti Sanchez, who graduated from college about that same time, has spent the last 25 years helping organizations such as Apple, Adobe and Oracle tell their stories.

Last summer, she blogged on Harvard Business Review that like the storytelling organizations I led on behalf of three different communities, all businesses and organizations need a designated folklorist on staff.

She describes folklore “in a cultural sense” as “the sum total of anecdotes, artifacts, and rituals that unite a group of people – the common language that creates shared meaning.”

As you can tell, I am not much of a storyteller myself but during my now-concluded career, I led organizations officially tasked with that mission and I had a knack for how to ferret out a community’s story.

In January of 1972, I took an upper level English course in folkloric research at BYU where I studied, in depth, and documented a specific seven month period in 1969 and 1970 and how variations of a story had flowed through a society in the west, even migrating into news reports and back again.

It also works the other way around.  When editors establish a premise before assigning a reporter, even when the facts don’t seem to fit, the story and subsequent headline will still echo the original premise leaving only the few consumers who read in-depth to ferret out the full story.

When I studied folklore, I had my sights on being a lawyer, but it is a course I would highly recommend for anyone who by intent or serendipity finds themselves in a career in community marketing as I did.

There are many ways an understanding of folklore is useful in that career besides finding the common threads that tie contemporary community traits back to their distinctive roots.

One example where understanding folklore came in handy in Durham was unwrapping image issues driven by word of mouth in rival communities or water-cooler myths dispensed by commuters.

These people were literally hijacking Durham’s story and holding it hostage.

A decade before I took that course, a folklore researcher named William Hugh Jansen coined the term “Esoteric-Exoteric” factor.

Esoteric refers to the mystical, subjective conception we have of ourselves [or our community] vs. the exoteric or objective, external conception we have of others.

Another influence in that class were some writings by Joseph Campbell who was just then retiring from Sarah Lawrence College and would continue until his death the year before I came to Durham to write about mythology, the human impulse to create stories.

By the way, last summer Sanchez posted a series of interviews with Christopher Vogler, the author of The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structures for Writers and Memo from the Story Dept.

He is a Hollywood veteran and disciple of Campbell who lectures and consults on organizational stories.  The videos are approximately 2 to 6 minutes each and a great introduction to consistent elements in folklore.

Sanchez would probably point to a documentary commemorating the 10th anniversary of the adaptive re-use of the old Lucky Strike Factory in Durham, which aired last week on the Raleigh TV station owned by the same company.

It is an excellent example of a firm that fully understands the importance of folklore.

I am amused now from the vantage point of retirement as I read or hear of things that happened long before being repurposed and attributed to contemporary actors, events or developments.

It is very natural for people to reweave narratives to fit current perceptions.  An example is when the story of Yankee soldiers writing back for resupplies of the tobacco they had used while waiting for the culmination of the surrender here that effectively ended the Civil War.

The story about the letters was later rewoven into the story of a person who later came to prominence.  That is an example of one generation reweaving a legend to give contemporary meaning to events and people.

The era we’re in now isn’t the first time this has happened during the course of Durham’s history, nor will it be the last.  But I remember how confusing it could make distilling the community’s narrative.

Maybe that’s why, occasionally with these essays, I try to leave “bread crumbs” for future Durham generations trying to drill down through these conflicting narratives for a longer view.

Perceiving Sense of Place - Part 2

This essay picks up where I left off yesterday with mention of a pivotal event at the root of Anchorage, Alaska’s unusual sense of urgency about sense of place, something missing from so many much longer established destinations.

But first, for readers new to sense of place, let me try in layman’s terms to explain what that phrase means to me in few paragraphs.

It involves numerous characteristics, that when woven together, reinforce the feel of a particular place.  This is, collectively, what is meant by the term “sense of place.”

Barely a quarter of the way into my four decade career as a community destination marketing exec, I read a new essay by Wallace Stegner that began to connect a lot of dots for me.

But I remain a student and explorer even now in retirement and learn something new about it nearly every day.

The more temporal elements of the sense of a particular place are its soil, geology, terrain, light patterns, wildlife and native vegetation that took shape long before human settlement, even aboriginal.

Long before the nomenclature of place is applied.

Along the continuum of place these are the most real and authentic elements followed by the heritage, culture and values of human inhabitants and then the architecture of the dwellings and buildings being at the more superficial end.

These characteristics need not be entirely unique for it is how distinctively they are manifest when woven together that gives a particular spot a sense of place.

When not the destroyer of sense of place, it is the “built” ingredient that often distinguishes it, not, to paraphrase my favorite architectural author Witold Rybczynski, to “be nostalgic or because history has all the answers.”

But because “freedom from history is no freedom at all.”

Mutual respect by the “built” characteristics across each of the other elements of place, “while linking the past with the present, and seeing the old anew,”  is acknowledgement that “they belong.” That is what  weaves the “sense to a particular place.”

Most visitors, including newcomers, sense it and are drawn to it.  “Stayers” treasure it.  Some people never get it, exposed by their constant dismissiveness of the importance of place.

Anchorage celebrates its first century being designated by that name next year.  It had barely turned 60 when I arrived there.

But what immediately signaled it as a place worthy of love and visitation was that the first public edifice erected was not for performing arts or sports or conventions.

It was a museum to celebrate its local history, values and art.  Erected 10 years before my arrival, it was, in part, to honor the hundredth anniversary of America’s purchase of Alaska from Russia, barely 50 years before that community’s first permanent settlers.

Shown here, its architecture illustrates that lacking the historic architecture of Durham, NC where I have worked/lived ever since, Anchorage’s “built” aspect of sense of place, seeks instead to both open up to and reflect the expansiveness of its setting.

“Stayers” there had first formed an organization as means to preserve artifacts barely forty years after the first settlement, grasping that they tell stories, connect people, capture moments and mark changes.

Anchorage figured all of this out much earlier than most.

In the words of Elaine Gurian, formerly the overseer of what was then all 14 Smithsonian museums, “These objects are the touchstones to bring memories and meanings to life.”

Not coincidentally, a part of the Smithsonian is now embedded in the Anchorage Museum, conducting ongoing research as well as bringing home priceless exhibitions of Alaska artifacts, art and history.

On average, most communities figure out this piece by the time they are 60 years old.  That’s about the stage when the founding generation here in Durham began to treasure and preserve its history.

But it took Durham twice as long as Anchorage to recognize the wisdom of a local history museum, an ambition that is still unfulfilled, or at best, piecemeal.

Instead, despite unparalleled public support for a local history museum over any other cultural facility, for nearly eight more decades in Durham, we’ve left priceless symbols and stories of Durham’s history at risk of being lost forever, while leapfrogging that important step with fantasy and amusement instead.

In the meantime, the Anchorage Museum has already completed its third expansion, two since my decade promoting that community.

What makes that museum even more significant is that it opened just four years after Anchorage was nearly destroyed by a massive earthquake that dropped one side of its main street ten feet lower than the other, liquefying much of a popular neighborhood and closing the International Airport.

At the time, Alaska had only been a state for five years.

This signature natural event sparked a sense of urgency to preserve and tell the Anchorage story so lacking in other much longer established communities.

It also quickened concern across all aspects of sense of place there.

Several weeks before I arrived there in 1978, Nellie Brown died.  In 1912, she and her husband, an American Forest Service ranger, had been dropped off as the first permanent settlers of Anchorage.

Nellie was an Eyak from the Copper River Delta area, east across Prince William Sound around Cordova.  Alaska natives were not given U.S. citizenship for another twelve years, five years after the Anchorage area was withdrawn from the national forest.

Of course, before the Brown’s, there had been humans temporarily inhabiting Anchorage for 6,000 years including seasonal Dena’ina fish camps.  A few Russians had transited by the early 1800s, then by the late 1800s by a handful of transient traders, surveyors and gold miners.

But Nellie’s passing helped me realize just how much had been done to preserve Anchorage’s sense of place in such a short span including the first efforts to set aside park land little more than a decade after settlement.

About 30 years after the first setters, this playful map was created, and by then, Anchorage had already started on what would become four protected forested greenbelts stretching along streams running the Chugach Mountains down to the sea some connecting to a later trail along the coast.

These stretches are home to 200-300 Moose who live year round in the most populated area, joined by another 800-900 during the winter.  Altogether, Anchorage has set aside nearly 14,000 acres this way.

But Moose in the summer are just one of the 52 kinds of mammals including bear, wolves, beaver and Dall sheep.

Anchorage is also home to five salmon species and 230 bird species as well as Marine mammals, including beluga whales, all highly regarded by more than 80% of residents and to visitors as part of the community’s sense of place.

Anchorage was heavily forested before settlement compared to just 30% of Alaska.  Today, 59% of Anchorage remains forested, ranging from nearly 78% in Chugach State Park to 68% overall in other parks.

The canopy in populated areas ranges from 35% overall to 38% in residential areas and just below 10% in commercial areas. Overall the most populated area has lost 50% of its tree cover.

But similar to here in Durham, 97% of Anchorage residents “strongly agree” that forests are important to the community’s quality as a place, more so than any other infrastructure, even education.

Until recently, like Durham, local government there paid attention only to street trees and the property it owns.

But unlike Durham, thanks to grants, Anchorage has completed a comprehensive tree inventory, assessment and management plan covering the entire Municipality.

It notes that it is impossible for municipalities to reach forest canopy objectives let alone preserve this pivotal aspect of sense of place by planting on city property alone.

Anchorage residents are energized in other aspects about preserving its sense of place.  Corridors leading north and south along the Municipality are now parts of two state/national scenic byways

Not only is the community home to a repository of historic aircraft, but citizens have worked hard there to preserve and adaptively reuse a signature part of its more recent past.

When I lived in Durham, I would frequently encounter remnants of two of the three Nike Surface to Air Missile sites deployed during the Cold War.

One in walking distance from my first house when I lived there had been conveyed to Anchorage and converted to Kincaid Park, a heavily forested peninsula that points into Cook Inlet, dividing it into Knik and Turnagain Arms.

One of the bunkers for the missile site there had been converted to an alpine ski chalet.  Another that wasn’t taken out of service until the year after I arrived was visible when silhouetted by moonlight high on a peak in the Chugach Mountains behind Anchorage.

Now it is being preserved as a historical site called Nike Site Summit.

In conclusion, one aspect of Anchorage’s sense of places is art, not just because many artists live there but because its sense of place is so often the subject of their creations, perhaps spurred by the unique patterns of light there.

None has been more prolific than Byron Birdsall, who just created a print to commemorate the Centennial for Anchorage next year (as shown above in this essay.)  I treasure an original watercolor he and Tennys Owens presented me on behalf of the community as I left.

Tennys’ delightful eastern North Carolina accent would be more familiar to me now.  She had founded Artique Ltd. several years before I arrived and became a governing board member of mine, good friend and one of our biggest supporters.

The watercolor they gave me features a beloved old Porsche of mine, which a friend totaled shortly after I arrived in Durham, sitting on the Anchorage shoreline with Cook Inlet and the Alaska Range as as a backdrop.

We had worked with the gallery and with many other local artists over the years to feature their works on the covers of annual Anchorage Visitor Guides which were also framed and given to me that night.

This two-part essay and memoir has been useful, I hope, to those trying to get their heads around the sense of place where they live, if it hasn’t already become extinct that is and accessible only to archeologists.

Sense of Place, once woven, is also extremely fragile.

Weaving and Reweaving the Anchorage Story – Part 1

When writing about “sense of place,” I often focus on the “built” aspect because to those for whom the concept remains illusive, it is just the easiest to illustrate.

At dinner a short while ago, a friend who visited Alaska recently asked me to describe “sense of place” there, particularly around Anchorage, from the almost-decade I lived and worked there in community marketing.

His description is “expansive,” a very astute observation because he otherwise seems to view destinations more through the filter of activities and events.

But even for visitors seeking entertainment, the destination is the first consideration with activities falling fifth.  For those seeking recreation, the destination is first and activities second.

But studies of activity/attractions visitors show that three-fourths prefer real or authentic experiences to themed or fantasy experiences.

Even among the latter, say theme parks or casinos, 7-in-10 prefer real or authentic experiences.

But people who are into fantasy such as Disney are often disappointed in Alaska because they expect the vegetation to be lush and towering like the coastal Pacific Northwest or the mountains to be densely carpeted like the Rockies.

Parts of Alaska, including Anchorage, have those attributes too, but they take a backseat to how incredibly expansive the view shed is.

From Anchorage, in any direction, the views are of towering mountains, including ranges and active volcanoes hundreds of miles away, yet they seem to loom so close.  I never grew habituated to it during my near decade of community marketing there.

And it never leaves you.

When I was recruited there in early 1978 my challenge, though, was to flesh out other equally distinct aspects of Anchorage’s sense of place and weave or reweave them into a more inclusive yet ever-evolving story.

These included the quality of the light there, geology, values, history including built and natural, vegetation and wildlife, as well as the work of simplifying logistics for visitors to be able to explore all of the above.

But different than Durham a decade later where a deep and broadly embraced sense of pride was under external threat from jealous rivals, in Anchorage we had to enlist many Anchorage residents there by giving voice to the passionate corps that already felt that way.

As a legacy theme, the CLIO-winning campaign, “Wild About Anchorage” is still in use today.

Anchorage at the time was slightly larger than Spokane, WA where I had been stationed before, but 74,000 people larger at the time than Durham, NC where I would go next, even 24,000 larger at the time than North Carolina’s capital and second largest city, Raleigh.

But at the time, the population of Anchorage represented more than 40% of all Alaskans.

However, half of the population of Anchorage had lived there only six year or less and 20% less than two years.  Only 8%, whom I quickly sought out, had lived there 25 years or more.

About 17% at the time had come there from other parts of Alaska, 30% from the West coast and 14% from the Plains or Rockies.  But 18% had come from the South or border states and 13% from the Northeast including the upper Ohio Valley.

I was among the first to realize this transience when someone made sure I was among the first to receive a copy of new report published in the first few weeks after my arrival there by researchers for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

Many moving there seemed either a bit condescending about Anchorage and Alaska’s scenery and sense of place or uncomfortable with their expansiveness. Some 25,000 were projected to move out the year arrived while 32,000 would move there like I did.

My arrival came within months of the first oil to flow down the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and only a few years after other transformative changes including unification of the City of Anchorage, then less than 40% of the surrounding Borough’s (akin to a county) population, along with other smaller towns into the Municipality of Anchorage.

It was also only a few years after settlement of Alaska Native claims along with a vote to move the State Capital from remote Juneau to Willow, about 80 miles northwest of Anchorage, which was made moot when four years after my arrival voters rejected the cost.

When I arrived, it had also been less than a decade since the oil discoveries at Prudhoe Bay and just two since its discovery down Cook Inlet to the south and west of Anchorage.

But in 1978, Alaskans were bracing for a loss in population from departing pipeline workers only to be saved by the revolution in Iran the following year and skyrocketing oil prices.

I was just turning 30 years old as I landed there but selected in part to complete start up of Anchorage’s community marketing organization.

But also because my sensibilities were as much or more to integrate tourism into Anchorage’s sense of place as it was to complete the integration of Anchorage into tourism.

Of course, not everyone was a boomer or raider or saw themselves as a transient migrant.

I fell in with a core “stayers” and long-time residents, who in small bands, were already hard at work there preserving historic buildings, local history and culture, open space and trails, nature areas, tree canopy and beautification.

I realize now that when it came to sense of place they were catapulting Anchorage far in advance even today of much older and more established communities in North Carolina where I live in retirement.

My job was to work with these groups to be visitor-ready and weave all of these elements into a coherent Anchorage story that yet preserved other historical identities prior to unification.

Many were rightfully suspicious of tourism interests as being narrow, superficial, stereotypical, short-sighted and overly commercial, which most were and still are across America.

The groundwork laid prior to my arrival, while expert, had largely reinforced this perception.

Bridging those two perspectives is a role far too many DMOs fail to grasp or accept even today.

As was customary at the time, if at all, many in Anchorage only traced sense of place there to establishment of a 1915 tent camp erected by speculators for railroad construction workers less than three years after a couple working for the US Forest Service became the first permanent settlers.

There was both curiosity and disbelief when our fledgling organization quickly enriched the story of Anchorage to include earlier periods.

Dena’ina people who numbered 3,000 there as early as 1650 long before contact with Russian missionaries in the 1830s or even when Captain James Cook’s ship sailed to what is now Anchorage, two hundred years to the month before my arrival.

Soon a historical park organized around a 1830s log Russian Orthodox Church and the colorful Dena’ina burial spirit houses north of downtown, joined midway with the Alaska Native Heritage Center envisioned by several of us during my tenure.

I smiled when just before I retired in Durham, Anchorage officials named a new civic and convention center there after the Dena’ina, a northern relative of the Navaho and the only such group who lived along the coast.

The symbols of Anchorage’s earlier history were still being revealed as we began an inventory, including the still-producing 1896 Crow Creek Mine, dating to when there were only two hundred or fewer Americans beyond southeast Alaska.

For nearly a decade after my arrival, Cynthia Toohey, an emergency room nurse and transplanted New Yorker who eventually became head of my governing board and one of our biggest fans, began an ongoing restoration with her family.

I was astonished at its significance and how little known it had been prior to being added to the National Registry of Historic Places a few weeks after my arrival.

All we had to do was be attentive, curious and willing to reweave it into the emerging Anchorage story.

The illustrated  map shown above as an image in this post dates to 1945.  It was brought back from Alaska by the father of a Durham journalist friend of mine in 1948, the year I was born.

Possibly a place mat used in restaurants, it is precious because it captures the names of the businesses along the bluff above Ship Creek at a time when there were fewer than 30,000 residents.

It also marks a time a decade before Congress would grant Alaska statehood which had been finalized less than two decades before my arrival there in 1978.

It had only been a little more than a decade since the legislature had even organized eight portions of the state into boroughs.

In only the fifth year of my career, less than three since being minted a destination marketing executive, I was too green to realize at the time that our task of illuminating sense of place and weaving a story around what had become Anchorage was as fresh in concept as the new organization we were still polishing as its guardian.

Equidistant during that span since statehood and my arrival would occur a natural event of such magnitude that it would forever shape Anchorage’s sense of urgency about sense of place giving it a unique perspective on what is historical, both long past and near past.

More on that in tomorrow’s post.

More Powerful Than Just Storytelling

No occupation has lost a greater proportion of jobs than advertising and public relations, a decline of 56% in just the past 10 years alone.  An exception is the swelling number of jobs in community destination marketing (DMOs,) a visitor-centric form of economic development.

This isn’t due to the great recession or technology.  Studies have measured the decline over nearly four decades now.  The effectiveness of advertising also plummeted 56% in the last decade of my career alone.  The return on advertising is now just 1/10th of what it costs.

The decline is self-inflicted because the industry has tolerated obsolete and desecrating bottom-feeders such as roadside billboards while over-advertising to the tune of 10,000 ads per person per day.  Lacking credibility because ads are self-proclaimed, consumers have simply tuned out.

Community DMOs are thriving because while they involve skill sets in all areas of marketing, many have eschewed advertising in favor of other types of marketing.  A DMO’s job is to tell a community’s story but to be truly successful they must be good at “storydoing,” a term coined by Ty Montague, co-founder of C: Connect and author of the new book True Story.

Montague’s research shows that if a DMO can use the core story of their community as an organizing principle they will spend far fewer dollars on paid media or advertising and be far more effective.  An example would be what what the DMO in Durham, North Carolina did when it was formed in 1989.

It organized around the core principal of being “the heart, soul, and energy of Durham as a destination…the defender of Durham’s image and brand and guardian of its unique sense of place.”

This energized a phenomenal grass-roots community-wide energy that was “storydoing” vs. just storytelling.  This unifying core principal enabled Durham’s DMO to leapfrog more established and better funded communities.

It also enabled the Durham DMO to achieve a level of endearment among community stakeholders many times higher than the benchmark.

Too often, even given a core principal, organizations fall into activity traps and lose focus over time.  That is why equally important was the way the Durham DMO handled CEO succession at the dawn of its third decade.

According to Montague, blogging recently on Harvard Business Review, the key factor in identifying a successor is that person’s ability to understand and perpetuate the organization’s—and in a DMO’s case—the community’s story.

It helped that Durham’s DMO was one of the few with a well-defined “best practice” succession plan and process, but the action, e.g. the selection of a new leader, was based on her grasp of the central story.

Communities lose the power of their story when during DMO succession they become infatuated with high-powered resumes rather than whether or not candidates have a grasp of their community’s story, their core brand and personality.

It is an ego trip for some communities to see what resumes they can attract, but all too often these will be people who move from community to community, far more committed to their profession than any one community and far too prone to generic “plug and play” destination marketing approaches.

It is harder with a community’s DMO than a private company because its internal stakeholders include each and every resident.  It is easier if the DMO has taken time to identify and organize around the story including values and traits important to those stakeholders.

But the key will be selecting leadership in tune with that core, organizing principle at the heart of storydoing for a community.  This may be why good succession plans often call for recruiting and growing potential CEOs years in advance.

Take time to read the six attributes of storydoing organizations.  If you represent a community DMO or are interested in that career path, think of them in terms of both the community as a whole and the DMO organization at the heart and sole of its brand.

In essence, good marketing today is about what you do, not what you say.