Heekya is a Washington DC-based startup that is revolutionizing the way people create, share, and discover stories. The name Heekya, which is derived from the Swahili word for “story”, demonstrates our fundamental belief that first, everybody has a story, and second, that a story can intersect along many points. We offer a storytelling platform that can be integrated with any service, to unlock the potential of your users to tell powerful digital stories, and to share them more effectively.

We started Heekya because we believe that storytelling is broken online: although it exists in different silos (photo sharing, video sharing, blogging), there is no comprehensive tool that captures storytelling at its core — a base need and expression of humanity. For thousands of years, storytelling has been at the core of our human existence, and most recently, the storytelling channels and medium have lived in separate silos: a book is a book and a movie a movie. Heekya is unlocking that platform — by interweaving mediums — so anyone, anywhere, can share their story — and change the world.

Heekya offers a simple, fun and easy solution to organize and add all of your digital media (videos, photos, blogs, music and audio) through importing, uploading, embedding, and searching. Heekya features an easy to use What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) drag and drop story editor. Users can then share their stories through e-mail and instant message, or publish their stories to any of their online identities — a personal blog like Wordpress or Blogger, a social network like Facebook or Myspace, or a personal website created at Weebly. Users can then copy and re-tell stories from seperate vantage points — much like the way they happened in real life. Lastly, Heekya then unlocks the potential to discover interesting stories that take place around you — by people, maps, and themes.

In addition to your comment about audiences that are willing to come prepared, I believe that educational settings and many non-for-profit entities have a mindset closer to the courtroom and surgical arenas you mention.

Tufte’s issues with the low resolution of a screen versus the amount of data you can print on a page may change with improvements in technology. For now, I’d rather read lots of data on paper (or NOT!) than suffer through 25 slides of bulletpointed text. But the main reason I suggest breaking a report out from a presentation is to help slay the two-headed hydra, the dreaded “Slideument.”

I have done handouts as a takeaway for a long time, (who hasn’t?) but only recently have tried to work with the email-forward-your-report idea. I did hear this past month from a banking executive who tried sending her report prior to a board meeting that her pre-meeting report received a positive response. I hope it was more than the current financial crisis that made the meeting attendees willing to look at a document before coming into the room!

The best effect it had was to help her prepare her in-person presentation to have better visual impact by separating the storytelling from the research data, which was my goal.

Getting the story down, as you say, with real analysis, calls-to-action, and, above all, emotional engagement, wins hands down. Otherwise, we wouldn’t hold meetings hoping for an engaging speaker at all.

I’ll try to report on other successful pre-prep’s: I suspect visual impact will play a major factor in those cases as well.

Thanks so much for including THE BACK OF THE NAPKIN in your list; yours is a great (and wonderfully comprehensive) visual thinking list and it’s an honor to be a part.

Quick comment, especially on the Tufte side of things: in my 25 years of business meetings and consulting, I’m hard-pressed to come up with even one example of a pre-distributed document — especially one that contains the data details of a particular issue — being read and digested by the participants in advance.

I know this is Tufte’s approach as well (I know because he and I discussed it several years back) but as much as I hate to admit it, in my experience it simply doesn’t work. It’s a shame, because we’d all hope that the people running the world’s business would see the value of coming into a meeting well-read and prepared, but other than a courtroom or surgery, I don’t see it. (Hank Paulsen comes to mind recently, as to the heads of the Big 3 auto companies in their first idiotic congressional plea.)

What I do see happen is that meeting attendees typically come into the room *expecting* to be told what they need to know. “After all,” they think, “isn’t that why we’re having the meeting?” It’s backwards, but it’s real.

That’s why I focus on getting the presenter to get their story down simply and quickly *before* stepping into the room. If their audience “gets it” and is thus inspired, they’ll be ready for more detail. If not… well, the meeting probably wasn’t going anywhere anyway.

I’m not negative on this at all; it’s simply the reality I’ve seen. If you’ve seen the pre-prep approach work, please share!

Thanks,
Dan

author, THE BACK OF THE NAPKIN