But in the wake of the initial shock and fear, we’ve seen a new trend–the desire to help.  We’ve seen numerous grassroots efforts to find, donate to, and even sew protective masks for healthcare professionals.  Online, offers to help older or otherwise at-risk neighbors with their shopping and other errands abound.  These heartwarming efforts are important, not just because they help reduce or ameliorate the damage caused by the coronavirus pandemic, but because they provide volunteers with an essential resource that is in short supply, even in good times: meaning.

The coronavirus looks likely to be devastating; even if we manage to prevent the kind of death toll that characterized the 1918 flu epidemic, the economic fallout will probably push the world into a global recession.  Yet paradoxically, negative experiences can play an important role in finding meaning in our lives. Recent behavioral research has found that when people experience disruption in their lives, they actively seek to find meaning by bonding with others, re-embracing their values, and incorporating the disruption into the story they tell themselves about their life.

The coronavirus presents a double-whammy: Not only has it disrupted our lives, but it has forced us into physical isolation at a time when we would normally seek comfort in the company of others.  Social isolation is associated with reduced meaning, lower well-being, and higher rates of morbidity. In contrast, helping others promotes personal well-being and a sense of mattering.

The research aligns with what we sense from the actions taken by those in our communities.  People want to do something about the coronavirus, but that energy is unfocused. Without the right guidelines, that energy might be wasted. After 9/11, blood donations surged to nearly 500,000 units…but only 258 units were actually needed to treat survivors of the attack, and since blood is only good for 42 days, nearly all of it was simply thrown away.

Toward our search for meaning, here are some simple guidelines, based on research, that will help you channel your desire to help, in a way that increases your positive impact and your well-being:

• Find a way to help that taps into your own idiosyncratic resources.  All of us have basic resources to offer: Money, Time, and Voice.  But while anyone can write a check, only you can offer your unique blend of assets. For example, NBA star Stephen Curry and entrepreneur Ayesha Curry are multi-millionaires who can (and have) donated money, but have also found ways to leverage their idiosyncratic resources toward good.  For example their charity, Eat. Learn. Play., is enlisting hundreds of workers from now-shuttered NBA arenas around the country to distribute millions of meals to people in need. They are leveraging Instagram Live to curate discussions with experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to educate an audience of over 50,000 (including former President Barack Obama) on how to collectively combat Covid-19.
• Focus on a concrete action, not just good intentions.  Researchers found that when people set out to help others, those who pursued abstract goals tended to burn out after failing to see timely results, while those who adopted concrete, achievable goals were happier and found their efforts more sustainable.
• Involve others in your journey.  In an age of social distancing, we all need to get better at distant socializing.  Bringing people together around an effort to have a positive impact during this crisis is quite possibly the best socializing you could participate in right now. Four design principles that drive action: Make it easy to take immediate action.  Make it fun. Tailor the options to people’s own idiosyncratic resources.  And finally, build an open movement, where no one has to ask permission to act.

You probably aren’t one of the brave people on the front lines of the fight against the coronavirus, but that doesn’t mean the only thing you can contribute to that fight is to stay home and watch Netflix.  All of us should find ways to make our own unique contributions, drive towards concrete impact, and enable others to do the same – with you. Not only will this help our great shared effort, but it will allow you to make the days ahead more meaningful.  When you look back on this period, and tell the story of your life, you will know and be proud of the part you played.

(This post was a collaboration with my friend and fellow Silicon Guild member, Chris Yeh. Thanks Chris!)

What is the Single Focused Goal of the Story?

It is important that before your company roll out the launch, it is very clear why people should care. Show in a fantastic way how your product or service will make your customer’s lives better. This can be as comparatively simple as a campaign that donates a pair of Tom’s shoes for every purchase, or the elaborate launch of the new BMW Z series a James Bond movie.

Why Would Someone Pay Attention?

Launching a product or service should create a sense of surprise. The story surrounding your product should invoke a “have to be there” feeling. Demonstrate the impact with a protagonist and a challenge. Steve Jobs did this successfully when introducing the iPod, “The coolest thing about iPod is you can take your entire music library with you right in your pocket.”

Why Would the Audience Care About It?

When your launch is a multi-faceted story that invokes senses, emotion and desire, you will engage the customer at their core. Make the story something that the customer wants to be a part of. This could be through grass-roots events leading to a climax, guest speakers or a cause they believe in and cannot miss being a part of. The effect of an incomplete launch is an untrusting, disingenuous feeling, much like Phillip Morris changing to the Altria Group amidst tobacco lawsuits.

Why Would Someone Share It?

Your story is a success when it is retold again and again. Amplifying your story via word of mouth, between friends is the best way to get messages out and to evangelize your brand. This could be as ornate as a high budget video with a celebrity or as simple as a photo graphic that followers could share. You can build virality into your business with a mechanism that requires sharing in the product or service model. For example, jeweler Tiffany & Co. shares different definitions of love and invites customers to share their perspectives and personal stories.

Based on material from the book, The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways To Use Social Media to Drive Social Change. Jennifer Aaker covers use of story in business in her new Stanford Innovation & Entrepreneurship course, The Power of Stories to Fuel Innovation. Learn more about bringing the power of story to your business.

Disclaimer: My son, Cooper is the biggest basketball fan of all time. Coop donated his 11th birthday to the malaria-fighting Nothing But Nets campaign. I don’t recall redirecting my presents to save kids in Africa at his age. It was pretty amazing when Coop got a shout out on national TV and then a video thank-you from Golden State’s Stephen Curry himself (during the playoffs!). Coop had no doubts before, but now he’s completely certain that doing good feels great. Cooper and Chris Helfrich, the Director of the UN Foundation’s Nothing But Nets campaign collaborated on the below for The Huffington Post. –– Andy

As director of Nothing But Nets, I get to meet a lot of inspiring Americans doing amazing things to save lives by sending $10 nets to prevent malaria, a disease that still kills a child in Africa every 60 seconds. I’ve met a 13-year old Boy Scout who hiked 100 miles to raise money and awareness, an 8-year old who became the youngest girl to ever swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco in order to raise money to send hundreds of nets, and a fashion designer who has created a line of net-inspired accessories to send nets and save lives. In fact, since 2006 hundreds of thousands of people have joined our movement and raised $45 million to send over 7 million nets to keep families safe from this deadly disease. But an 11-year old boy challenging a basketball superstar to a fundraising contest? That’s a new one for me.

I was copied on a letter below that 11-year old Cooper sent to his idol, Stephen Curry, that demonstrates the fun spirit of the Nothing But Nets campaign and the fact that anyone can be a champion in the fight against malaria, whether you’re a 5th grader or the best basketball shooter on the planet. NBA Cares is a founding partner of Nothing But Nets and has been getting its fans and players excited about fighting malaria since the campaign was launched almost seven years ago. This is a perfect example of the power of this partnership in action.

Dear Stephen,

You are amazing. I hope you nail a bunch of three-pointers in the playoffs and help save a lot of lives.

I heard about your contribution to something called Nothing But Nets — for every three pointer you sink, you donate three nets to a family in Africa to keep them safe from malaria. So I looked Nothing But Nets up on the web, and found out about how a kid still dies from malaria in Africa every 60 seconds. But it takes just 10 dollars to save a life! So, during my birthday last week, all my friends donated to Nothing but Nets. And we raised more money to help over 210 families protect themselves from mosquitoes! When you go to Tanzania this summer to help distribute nets, we’ll give you cards that we wrote for the kids over there to deliver along with our nets.

Can you do me a favor and sink a lot of three pointers in the playoff games? I promise I’ll raise a lot of money for Nothing But Nets if you do. Even more than you!

I may not be able to beat you on the court (yet!), but I bet I can beat you at raising money for Nothing But Nets. Game On, Steph.

1. Test Your Giver Quotient

We often live in a feedback vacuum, deprived of knowledge about how our actions affect others. To track your impact and assess your self-awareness, visit giveandtake.com. Along with filling out your own survey, you can invite people in your network to rate your style, and you’ll receive data on how often you’re seen as a giver, taker, and matcher.

2. Run a Reciprocity Ring.

What could be achieved in your organization—and what giving norms would develop—if groups of people got together weekly for twenty minutes to make requests and help one another fulfill them? For more information on how to start a Reciprocity Ring in your organization, visit Cheryl and Wayne Baker’s company, Humax, which offers a suite of social networking tools for individuals and organizations. They’ve created materials to run a Reciprocity Ring in person and a Ripple Effect tool for running it online. People typically come together in groups of fifteen to thirty. Each person presents a request to the group members, who make contributions: they use their knowledge, resources, and connections to help fulfill the request.

3. Help Other People Craft Their Jobs—or Craft Yours to Incorporate More Giving.

People often end up working on tasks that aren’t perfectly aligned with their interests and skills. A powerful way to give is to help others craft their jobs to work on tasks that are more interesting, meaningful, or developmental. Job crafting, a concept introduced by Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton, involves innovating around a job description, creatively adding and customizing tasks and responsibilities to match personal interests and values. A natural concern is that people might craft their jobs in ways that fail to contribute to their organizations. To address this question, Amy, Justin Berg, and I partnered with Jennifer Kurkoski and Brian Welle, who run a people and innovation lab at Google. In a study across the United States and Europe, we randomly assigned Google employees working in sales, finance, operations, accounting, marketing, and human resources to a job crafting workshop. The employees created a map of how they’d like to modify their tasks, crafting a more ideal but still realistic vision of their jobs that aligned with their interests and values.

Six weeks later, their managers and coworkers rated them as significantly happier and more effective. Many Google employees found ways to spend more time on tasks that they found interesting or meaningful; some delegated unpleasant tasks; and others were able to customize their jobs to incorporate new knowledge and skills that they wanted to develop. All told, Google employees found their work more enjoyable and were motivated to perform better, and in some cases, these gains lasted for six months.

To help people craft their jobs, Justin, Amy, and Jane have developed a tool called the Job Crafting Exercise. It’s what we used to conduct the Google workshops, and it involves creating a “before sketch” of how you currently allocate your time and energy, and then developing a visual “after diagram” of how you’d like to modify your job. The booklets can be ordered online (jobcrafting.org) and completed in teams or individually to help friends and colleagues make meaningful modifications to their jobs.

4. Start a Love Machine.

In many organizations, givers go unrecognized. To combat this problem, organizations are introducing peer recognition programs to reward people for giving in ways that leaders and managers rarely see. A Mercer study found that in 2001, about 25 percent of large companies had peer recognition programs, and by 2006, this number had grown to 35 percent—including celebrated companies like Google, Southwest Airlines, and Zappos. A fascinating approach called the Love Machine was developed at Linden Lab, the company behind the virtual world Second Life. In a high-technology company, many employees aim to protect their time for themselves and guard information closely, instead of sharing their time and knowledge with colleagues. The Love Machine was designed to overcome this tendency by enabling employees to send a Love message when they appreciated help from a colleague. The Love messages were visible to others, rewarding and recognizing giving by linking it to status and reputations. One insider viewed it as a way to get “tech geeks to compete to see who could be the most helpful.” Love helped to “boost awareness of people who did tasks that were sometimes overlooked. Our support staff, for instance, often received the most Love,” says Chris Colosi, a former Linden manager. “Once you introduce a certain percentage of takers into your system, you need to think about what effect an incentive will have, but I enjoyed the idea of Love for tasks that were outside of someone’s job description or requirements.”

To try out the Love Machine in your organization, look up a new electronic tool called SendLove. It’s available from LoveMachine, a new start-up that asks you to start by choosing a recognition period. Team members can send each other short messages recognizing giving, and the messages are all publicly visible.

Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from Give and Take by Adam Grant. Copyright © 2013 by Adam Grant

Jennifer is among today’s participants at Fast Company’s Innovation Uncensored.

She’s talking about something we all want to achieve: happiness. First of all she shows that happiness matters, particularly in the workplace. Happy environments are associated with reduced job turnover and absenteeism, greater customer service and better individual job performance.

But more than a how-to session, Jennifer dives into the meaning of happiness, and how it changes over the course of our lives and the lives of those around us. And how while a straight-line pursuit of happiness itself may be futile, a focus on the cultivation of meaning, allowing people to feel part of something worthwhile that is bigger than themselves leads to sustained long-term human, social and financial benefits.

If you missed seeing her speak, I hope you said hello. If you missed seeing her, please accept this slideshare in consolation.

The following guest post is by Adam Tratt of Haiku Deck, the new iPad app that makes it easy to create great-looking presentations. You can reach him at founders@haikudeck.com or on Twitter at @adamtr.

When we first connected with the Dragonfly Effect team, we found that we have a number of shared passions, from design thinking to powerful storytelling.

We were also inspired by their crisp, memorable model–so much so that we created this Haiku Deck to illustrate the key Dragonfly Effect principles.

As we kicked ideas back and forth, it occurred to us that like The Dragonfly Effect itself, in the hands of a determined person, our app will help anyone who wants to get a compelling story airborne. Here’s our take on how Haiku Deck supports Dragonfly’s four wings.

FOCUS 
Most presentation experts recommend focusing on one idea per slide, and Haiku Deck helps you do just that. Each slide you create has a maximum of two lines of text, forcing you to distill your message down to a handful of high-impact words. Focusing attention on a single concept instead of cramming slides full of bullets helps each idea stand out. Because when everything’s important, nothing’s important.

GRAB ATTENTION
Brain research and real human experience show that images grab our attention, speak to our emotions, and make meaning real more than plain text or data. Happily, there’s a treasure trove of over 35 million beautiful, Creative Commons licensed images out there, which we’ve made easily searchable right from the app. Our intent is to help you find the perfect backdrop for your words to really bring your stories to life.

ENGAGE
We believe that visual presentations (like the ones Jennifer and Andy do) allow you to be less scripted and more authentic, freeing up the underlying story in your deck for a more meaningful connection with your audience. We also love how the iPad with its portability and beautiful screen allows you to create and share stories in a less formal, more spontaneous way.

TAKE ACTION
Like the Dragonfly Effect team, we want to help your great ideas and stories fly into action! And when you tell your story well, the people who see it will want to not just sign up, but sign on and help drive your effort forward. Fast, easy sharing via email, social networks, and blog embedding helps stories spread, and we believe Haiku Deck can complement these channels to make your calls to action more memorable and thus more powerful. Here’s ours:

After all, we do need your help–we’re really trying to change the way people feel about creating, giving, and listening to presentations. We’d love for you to give Haiku Deck a try, use it to tell your story, and above all, let us know what you think and how we can make it better. Just drop us a line any time at founders@haikudeck.com. If we can help your ideas take flight, we’re doing what we set out to do.

For more inspiration and updates, you can visit our website, join our Facebook community, and find us on Twitter (@HaikuDeck). And big thanks to Andy and Jennifer for inviting us to guest post!

As he created HopeMob.org, the Internet-based non-profit “where generous strangers unite,” techno-humanitarian, Shaun King asked himself: “If Dr. Martin Luther King were alive today, how would he do things differently — for the same effect?” A 32-year-old graduate of Atlanta’s Morehouse College, Shaun King is a former pastor himself. He had America’s most revered reverend at the center of his thinking as he considered both the stands HopeMob should take and the tools to use to align with Dr. King’s teachings and actions.

The following guest post is by Jay Jaboneta, Co-Founder of the Yellow Boat of Hope Foundation and TEDx speaker. Reach him at jay@yellowboat.org or follow JayJaboneta on Twitter.

The Yellow Boat Project is like a boat that grew wings and learned to fly like a dragonfly.  It started when I heard the story of the children of Zamboanga City. These children had to swim or wade through bodies of water just to get to school. I learned the Children in Layag-Layag had to wade and swim for 2 kilometers and walk another half a kilometer to the local Talon-Talon Elementary School. In the afternoon on their way back home, the kids walked 2.5 kilometers through mud during low tide.

I was moved to share the kids story on my Facebook page. Little did I know then that my Facebook status would spawn the launch of hundreds of yellow boats throughout the Philippines because, as we soon learned, Zamboanga was not the only area with swimming kids.

To-date, the Yellow Boat of Hope Foundation has built 150 yellow boats in three communities, a school in Masbate, a day-care center in Zamboanga and has raised over $30,000 in the last year through our online efforts.

The Dragonfly Effect played an important role in shaping The Yellow Boat Project, helping us define our goals, develop an action plan and chart our progress toward achieving them. Below is The Yellow Boat Project as seen through the eyes of The Dragonfly. 

FOCUS
Right from the start of the project, my co-founder, Anton Lim, stressed that we should focus on the Yellow Boat as the symbol of our project and that we should first focus on helping children and communities who need boats to go to school.  And I believe we’ve immensely benefited from that strategy because it made the goal very simple and easy to understand.  Many individuals and organizations sent in help and we are now helping 6 communities around the Philippines.

GRAB ATTENTION
Since the Yellow Boat is very distinct in color and in its project goals, media organizations easily picked up our story for its uniqueness and originality.  The yellow boat (or boats) in the deep blue sea really stands out and we are lucky that it also symbolized a marine version of the yellow school bus and so people could easily relate to its purpose. 

ENGAGE
One of the things that we do differently in the Yellow Boat Project is that we really seek out local community leaders who will be responsible for helping their respective areas.  I believe we have greatly benefited from partnering with various individuals and organizations on the ground that are passionate about helping children get to school.  We also used social media extensively especially Facebook – each time creating a separate Facebook Group for every community we are helping.  In that way, local people are tapped to support the project and how the funds are received and implemented are quite transparent.

To my right, sits my wife and Dragonfly Effect partner Jennifer Aaker, distinguished Stanford marketing and behavioral psychology researcher.

We are frequently honored to have her Dad, Dave, join us at the head of the table. David Aaker, a Berkeley Haas School professor emeritus is the author of countless books including Building Strong Brands, Brand Relevance and Brand Portfolio Strategy. Though he’d never say it himself, he’s the clear academic father of modern Brand Strategy.

When I can get a word in edgewise (and it is a challenge) I contribute what academics refer to (with an occasional lip-curl) as a “practitioner” point of view from my work at Intel, Dolby and a score of startups.

We have not taken to recording the dinners yet, so I can’t quite share the actual experience. Among other things, we’re waiting for such a time when our kids’ table manners catch up with HD videography. Until the events are accurately documented, I will allow my friend to believe it is akin to the Algonquin Round Table (at least to those who live and breathe marketing and branding). The interaction is, however, unique and while it’s not over a table, you can get a good idea of the banter that takes place in this Stanford lecture series video.

A sustained toast to all the fathers out there, may they all inspire greatness, humor and humility in their kids the way Jennifer’s Dad Dave has.

[Photo courtesy of Flickr photographer Global X]