5 Ways Storify Can Amplify Your Event

Update: RIP Storify, which was shut down in 2018. Though social media channels have made updates (like Twitter’s “threads”) that serve similar purposes, I have not seen a good replacement that did everything Storify did well.

Storify is a great tool because it's free, easy to use, and allows you to pull in content from other social media channels like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, and Instagram. 

Whether you are the organizer for a global conference or the digital media go-to for a small nonprofit, there are a few reasons you may want to consider working Storify into your event communications strategy. (And the good news is that you don't have to maintain Storify like a blog or Facebook -- just use it when it's useful for you.)

Storify

Here are 5 ways that Storify can amplify your event:

  1. Highlight the top moments: Hopefully there will be a lot of online conversation happening around your event. You can use Storify to feature the best updates, summarize the conversation, and distill the noise into a tidy visual summary.

  2. Record the event: Refer back to specific stories throughout the year and share them with donors, sponsors, or potential speakers so that they can get the flavor of your event. You can also use the story to promote next year's event.

  3. Diversify voices: A lot of the online participation around events comes from people who aren't on stage or official spokespeople. Use Storify to bring in the broader community and feature ideas and perspectives from the audience. This allows you to paint the community picture of an event. This is valuable for everyone -- even for people who were in the audience because they were likely paying attention to the speakers and not staring at their screens.

  4. Expand your reach: Let's be real: conferences are expensive. This is especially true for global conferences. But even if they're not on the other side of the world, conferences usually involve some travel. Whether it's airfare or gas, hotels or airbnb, cost can be a barrier for attending events. Summarizing the conversation around your event allows people who aren't there in person to get the information they need to participate online. And it helps that conversation continue beyond the closing ceremony.

  5. Scale it up or down: It doesn't matter what size your event is; Storify can be helpful for small and large events (or anything in between). Whether you're hosting a Tweetchat (like this one I summarized for FP2020) or organizing a massive global conference (like the International Conference on Family Planning, which I reported on), Storify helps you tell the stories of your event and your community. 

Tips to do it right:

  • Organize it into sections, like a Top 10 moments or by the questions of a Twitter chat

  • Try to show a variety of perspectives; don't just keep featuring the same people or organization

  • Curate well and keep it concise -- you can't include everyone and every good point

  • Choose visual materials to break up the text, like images from Instagram or tweets that include a photo

  • Use the tools in Storify to organize your story, like the horizontal rule between sections and various headline formatting

Good Examples:

P.S. Here's a quick "How to use Storify" post if you're a beginner.