Storyscout values

Earn (and keep) trust

✅ Trust is sacrosanct.

✅ Clarity strengthens trust.

✅ Sustain trust with integrity.

✅ Surprise with thoughtful gestures.

Earn (and keep) respect

✅ Create and honour boundaries.

✅ Balance generosity with self-respect.

✅ Listen with empathy and reflect with mindful presence.

✅ Build comprehension and shared meaning together.

Lead mutually respectful sales conversations.

✅ Treat a sales conversation as a collaborative discussion to distill a problem.

❌ Never treat a prospect as an adversary to be ‘won over’, persuaded or compelled to act.

❌ Don’t withold meaningful information that will help them make an informed and empowered decision.

✅ Offer flexibility with interest-free payment plans to make the investment in my services easier. Don’t penalise people for needing to access financial support.

Honour conscious, self-determined decision-making.

✅ Respect their self-determination. Make a no as safe as a yes.

✅ Help the prospect make the right decision that will genuinely help them — even if that means not investing with me.

❌ Don’t diminish or invalidate prospects’ needs, hesitations or concerns.

✅ When a project isn’t the right fit, connect the person with a high-integrity copywriter who I respect and trust to do a spectacular job for them.

Audience research

✅ Listen attentively with curiosity and without judgement. Give the interviewee my undivided attention.

✅ Clarify and help the interviewee verbal process their own experience. Seek to understand the interviewee’s perceptual world and frame of reference as they see and experience it.

✅ Be patient, gracious and accommodating. Hold space for people to unravel and explore their thoughts at their own pace.

✅ Create a comfortable, emotionally safe environment for interviewees where they feel validated and safe to share.

❌ Be cautious of leading, loaded or suggestive questions that can lead to blindspots in the data.

❌ Avoid ambiguous questions, ‘double-barrelled’ questions (two or more questions in one), and questions containing double negatives.

❌ Don’t impose my own views or judgements. Avoid the temptation to respond from my own frame of reference, especially when that risks perpetuating stereotypes, destructive social constructs and unjust profiting from poverty.

Brand voice

✅ Honour the client’s brand voice by providing clarity on their unique way of showing up, rather than imposing my own style.

✅ Illuminate what’s genuinely working well and provide actionable advice to amplify these strengths.

✅ Help the client get the most out of their brand voice guide investment.

✅ Critique, don’t tear down. Critique weaknesses with kindness and point out ways to improve.

✅ Edit brand voice with consideration for the prospect’s goals and values.

✅ Encourage brands to demonstrate their brand values through clear and consistent action.

❌ Avoid vague abstractions. Be clear, specific, tangible and action-focused.

Quizzes & list-building

✅ Trust is sacrosanct. Be very transparent in my sign-up box that ticking the box means they agree to receive emails from me.

✅ Fully dislose the quiz’s purpose and what the email list will be used for: to trade ideas for attention so I can build relationships with people and secure new clients (this insight I credit to Kelly Diels).

❌ Don’t frame the lead magnet as a ‘free gift’. Subvert the norm of abusing Cialdini’s Reciprocity Principle.

✅ Honour choice without scrimping on value. Give the option to receive the quiz result without needing to sign up to my email list.

Emails

✅ Use a double opt-in for better engagement and open rates, lower unsubscribe rates and better deliverability.

✅ Segment my email list so I can write thoughtful, relevant and personalised love letters that are genuinely helpful to my audience.

✅ Renew consent once every three months.

✅ Give prior warning about upcoming promotions and the opportunity to opt out.

✅ Make unsubscribing easy.

✅ Cultivate sustainable financial freedom so I can help lift up other women and help them prosper (idea credited to Rachel Rodgers).

✅ Proactively support and partner with businesses focused on making the world more equitable for all, especially those owned by underrepresented people and BIPOC women who are doing the work to fight systematic oppression.

✅ Treat my business as a self-development journey to become a better human.

✅ Always refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle and upcycle within my business.

✅ Treat everyone I encounter with the respect. Be kind and respectful toward humans of all races, religions, gender expressions (she, he, they, and all the wonderful in-betweens), sexualities, abilities, socio-economic statuses, body types, physical appearances and neuro(a)typicalities.

✅ Pay the people I hire professional rates that honour their expertise.

✅ Grow my resilience against harmful social norms. Continue to ask questions and analyse the hows and whys of the inequitable system we live in.

✅ Reject artifice (except when it’s for play and fun). Take genuine interest in people and give sincere compliments.