Example story format
This is the shape a story takes.
A published story runs through five parts in a fixed order.
This page shows that structure with each part describing what it holds, so the template can be reviewed before there is a real story to put in it.
Read this first
Not a customer case study.
No organization is described here, named or unnamed.
There is no deployment, no objective, no metric, and no outcome on this page — only descriptions of what each section would contain if there were.
Part one
Organization context.
A real story opens by establishing what kind of member network this is: a university, a national fraternity or sorority, a professional association, an affinity group, or an enterprise network.
It gives enough scale and structure for a reader to judge whether their own organization is comparable, and names the teams the network actually serves.
Part two
The dormant-data challenge.
The second part describes the starting position: what records the organization held, which systems held them, and how current they were.
Crucially it sets out what those records could not answer — who members knew, what they could contribute, and who was positioned to help with a specific goal.
Part three
The activation approach.
The third part documents how the network was actually activated, including the work that fell to the organization rather than to Trailblaze.
- 01
What the records were
Where the starting data came from and what condition it was in.
- 02
How members were reached
How the invitation went out and what members were asked to confirm.
- 03
What members contributed
Which affiliations, experience, and offers of help came back through verified profiles.
- 04
What the team did
The effort the organization's own staff put in, stated plainly rather than minimised.
Part four
The Scout workflow.
The fourth part follows one objective end to end, so the reader sees how a goal became an action rather than a dashboard.
- 01The objective
What the team set out to accomplish, in the terms they used.
- 02What Scout surfaced
Which members and relationship paths came back, and the reasoning attached to them.
- 03Who acted
How a recommendation reached the person who could act on it.
- 04What followed
The introduction, the follow-up, and where the thread went next.
Part five
Outcomes.
The final part records what changed, in the organization's own terms and published only with its approval.
It is the section most likely to be shortened, and never the section that gets embellished.
- What the organization can now see that it could not before.
- What its teams do differently as a result.
- What it would tell another organization considering the same thing.
The real version needs a real network.
Stories get written after activations happen.
If you want to see what yours would look like, start with a working session.