Communicating Your History

The stories we tell about the past shape our vision of the future. How we tell these stories depends on the audience and the medium for communication. Sometimes, we want to celebrate or be inspired. At other times, we want to learn history’s hard lessons. To successfully communicate the story of the past, organizations need to understand their purpose and intent as well as their audience. At Vantage Point, we know that history is both a discipline and a point of view. We help clarify the goals of the project and make them transparent to the organization’s stakeholders and customers. We work with clients to share their histories with customers, shareholders, employees, policymakers, and communities in a way that inspires and motivates people to action.

Books & Publications

Narrative histories help readers understand the past as a coherent story that they can hold in their hands. Vantage Point clients have a range of options when it comes to books. Short, illustrated soft-cover books can be given to clients and employees to help them understand corporate identity as a product of experience. Full-length, academic-style books explore organizational history in the context of success and failure and deeper trends in society. These books help managers appreciate the complexity of the organization’s efforts in the past. They can become case studies for students and faculty in business schools.

Multimedia

To the digital generation media is the primary vehicle for telling history. Images from different historical periods mixed with audio and video from interviews with past leaders and constituents bring the past to life. Delivered on the web, closed-circuit televison, or in employee orientation sessions, these programs help employees and stakeholders understand an organization’s history and values.

Maryland-based Instructional Resources Corp. hired Eric Abrahamson to find and write captions for more than 1,000 images related to California history. Abrahamson also wrote the narrative overviews that introduced each section of this educational multimedia product.

Exhibitions

Exhibitions invite a collective encounter with the past that is different from reading a book. Real artifacts and documents connect us to moments in time. They help us see our own lives and work in a larger historical dimension. That encounter can inspire and temper us in our daily efforts. It can also promote teamwork and create a sense of community. Mixing objects, media, quotes and images, Vantage Point brings more than fifteen years experience to the process of developing exhibition concepts and content.

Working with exhibit designers IQ Magicand Lewellen & Best, Vantage Point was hired to develop the interpretive content for a new visitor’s center at Donner Memorial State Park in California.

Web Sites

History on the web gives potential customers ready access to an organization’s track record. It also gives employees an easy way to reference important dates in an institution’s history. Using images, multi-media, and text history of the web creates a dynamic sense of the past.