I love telling student success stories. For me, there are few other mediums that allow us to tell complete and compelling stories about our colleges and the profound impact they can have on people’s lives. Suffice it to say, there is no better form of social proof than a real student success story.
But despite being an essential part of every community college’s marketing playbook, most student profiles are rather boring.
First, calling them “Student Profiles” doesn’t help us. I know it seems semantic, but the problem is the word “profile” suggests something cold and static. More importantly, it obscures what we need to do. Instead, I like “Student Success Stories.” It’s a small difference, but it reminds us that what we really need to do is tell a good story.
The other reason most student stories are boring is because they focus too much on student success. I know that sounds funny, but failure is actually the key ingredient to a great student story, not success.
If you think about what a student story is trying to do, it is trying to showcase a student’s success so the reader can begin to imagine their own. But its ulterior motive is to position the college as the mechanism and medium for that success. Which is to say, if you don’t feature failure, you won’t be able to feature how you helped the student overcome it.
Now to be clear, when I say failure, what I’m really talking about are the difficult parts of a story we often try to avoid—the parts where the student ended up homeless, or lost a job, or dropped out.
As writers, we often gloss over these struggles because we think our job is to highlight success. We also worry that getting too specific will make our story unrelatable.
Both of these assumptions are mistakes. The truth is, readers need those difficult details because success is meaningless without the failure and struggle that precede it.
The other truth is that the more specific we can be about those struggles, the more universal our story will become. As the great Lorraine Hansberry wrote, “I believe that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from the truthful identity of what is.”
Here’s a simple outline to help you understand the different parts of a student story and how “struggle” fits within it.
Beginning: What the student wants and what stands in the way.
Middle: The obstacles they encounter, the failures they endure, and how the college helps them overcome them.
End: What the student achieved, and what they hope to achieve next.
If you follow this structure and have the courage to tell stories filled with difficult choices and obstacles, you’ll discover something powerful—the best story you can tell focuses NOT on how you helped a student succeed, but on how you helped a student come back from failure.
Telling student success stories is an important part of any college’s marketing and public relations efforts. They provide proof of the promise your college is making. But that promise is never all roses, and your students stories shouldn’t be either.
Instead, fill them with failure so your readers can truly see how your college supports success.
