The 43North Foundation created Series B[uffalo] as a civic storytelling engine to drive a coordinated message about Buffalo’s economic future.
After a quarter’s worth of great stories, we’re proud to say this initiative is yielding encouraging results.
Numerous Series B articles have achieved strong traction, and several of them took flight with thousands of active users spending significant time reading to the end.
Our website is averaging about a story per day, and we recently zoomed past the 1,000 mark in both LinkedIn followers and newsletter subscribers.
We recapped this work, featuring, yes, a natal metaphor, in this article which also includes our five most popular stories by website traffic. We’re proud of being a venue for authentic stories in Buffalo. Our message has a current. It moves.
Series B is part of an emerging recognition that storytelling is a crucial element in economic development.
To explore this idea further, we turned to Christopher Wink, the cofounder and CEO of Technical.ly and one of the leaders of this new paradigm,. Wink’s company is well-known for its high-quality, local tech journalism in markets that span from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh to Baton Rouge.
Founded in 2009, Technical.ly initially sustained itself on a traditional events-and-advertising revenue stream, opening new markets as the cool kids of local tech journalism. That momentum came to a screeching halt during the pandemic, and since then its business model has evolved significantly. Technical.ly's media surface has not changed much, but its funders are now largely economic development agencies.
This is a fascinating pivot in all kinds of ways, but for our purposes, it means Technical.ly must showcase the value of storytelling to the place itself.
“Technical.ly is a communications strategy for place-based economic development, and we do that with a journalistic lens,” he said. “We have pretty good data that shows places with a dedicated storytelling strategy grow at a faster rate than peer regions without one.”
We asked Wink why he believes that’s the case. Why does storytelling lead to better tangible outcomes?
He pointed out that he’s often asked to differentiate Technical.ly’s value from static branding campaigns around innovation.
“The mistake economic development entities make is they come out with a campaign that says, ‘We are Silicon Buffalo Wings. We make the most advanced’ and people are like, ‘What?’ It falls apart because it doesn't connect to anything real ,” Wink said. “What we’ve found is that local stories shape how people in that place feel about their home. And in turn, those are the same people who shape outside attitudes.”
For instance, if Pittsburgh (now home to major Google and Uber operations hubs, the headquarters of Duolingo and numerous other thriving AI and robotics startups) wants to stop being a post-industrial steel town, the very first thing that must change is belief. That's exactly the journey Pittsburgh took as it started to turn its natural advantages into durable economic strength.
“We are trying to attract a very discerning group of people – skeptical entrepreneurs, investors, scientists, etc.,” Wink said. “In my experience, they’re not interested in fluff. They’re interested in an honest discourse about their home. They already love their home. They want it to be a better version of itself.”
