public relations Archives - Clapperton Media

Why Internal Storytelling Doesn’t Always Travel

One of the challenges many PR professionals face is persuading clients that not every internal update makes a good media story. Announcements such as a new director of sales, a departmental restructure, or the launch of a new division can feel highly significant to those inside the organisation. But the wider world doesn’t always share that perspective.

If you’re writing for a niche trade publication, where readers may directly interact with the new team or product, storytelling like that may well resonate. In broader contexts, however, it’s often less compelling.

That’s why we encourage clients to use what we call the “window exercise.” Imagine standing by your office window and looking out onto the street. Internally, the announcement may feel vital. But if you were to stop a passer-by and explain it, why should they care? Too often, the honest answer is that they wouldn’t. Their reaction would likely be a shrug.

The Reverse Window Exercise: Finding Hidden Gems

This exercise isn’t just about tempering client enthusiasm. It’s also about uncovering stories that organisations overlook because they’re too close to their own work. Many businesses assume their day-to-day activities are routine or unremarkable. In fact, they may be sitting on powerful stories that only need reframing to shine.

A Case Study: Turning Dry Tech into a Tangible Narrative

Years ago, we worked with a company specialising in data compression – at a time when information had to be stored locally on devices rather than in the cloud. When asked about potential stories, the company insisted they had none. They could cite impressive compression ratios and technical statistics, but saw nothing newsworthy.

On further probing, however, they revealed that one of their largest clients was the US Navy. Their technology had enabled the Navy to take all ship blueprints and manuals – previously cumbersome, paper-based, and slow to access – and make them searchable on handheld devices.

This was a game-changer. Instead of crawling in and out of hazardous, hard-to-reach spaces multiple times to check instructions, engineers could carry everything with them. It saved hours, reduced risks, and made naval operations more efficient.

What the company saw as “just another contract” was, in reality, a story of innovation that saved time, money, and even lives. It was all in the storytelling – they assumed it was pretty routine. We didn’t.

Why PR Professionals Play a Crucial Role

This example underlines the value PR professionals bring when they step back and ask the right questions. Clients may fixate on what matters internally, but skilled communicators can spot the external hook – the part that connects to wider audiences and makes journalists sit up.

The window exercise works both ways:

Outward-facing: It helps curb unrealistic expectations when clients want coverage for something only meaningful inside their business.
Inward-facing: It helps uncover hidden gems – stories that clients assume are mundane but can be framed as innovative, impactful, or human-centred.

Top 3 Tips for PR Professionals

Use the Window Exercise Regularly
Ask: would a passer-by care about this story? If the answer is no, you may need to reframe it or accept it’s an internal comms piece.
Dig Beneath the Routine
Clients often undersell themselves. Probe gently with questions like: “Who benefits from this?” or “What’s the biggest change it has enabled?” The real story often emerges from impact, not process.
Translate Features into Human Benefits
Statistics and technical achievements may impress internally, but journalists and readers connect with outcomes. Always ask: how does this save time, money, or improve lives?

Final Thought

Every organisation has stories worth telling – but they’re not always the ones clients expect. As PR professionals, your role is to help them distinguish between internal milestones and external impact. By applying simple perspective-shifting exercises, you can guide them to craft narratives that resonate, inspire, and land with journalists.

The next time a client insists that a new hire or internal restructure deserves front-page coverage, invite them to look out the window – and then look inward. They may just find that their most compelling story is the one they never thought to tell.

The picture for this post is not an iceberg. Well, it’s not a complete iceberg. The fact is that icebergs are largely underwater so you can’t see them without the proper equipment. What we’ve got here is the tip of the iceberg. About one tenth of one.

You probably knew that but you will be thinking, never mind the pedantry and detail, that’s an iceberg. You’d be right. And yet loads of people still think that when they’re explaining things to the press, the thing to do is to explain all the detail they can. And the result is a confused journalist.

This is very frustrating if you work in PR. You spend ages pitching a story to journalists (maybe even after doing one of our courses, he hinted), you pare it down so it attracts attention and then your client does the human thing of trying to help with all the information they possibly can.

This is where that information can become garbled. The journalist may be a specialist in the client’s field but they may not (and even if they are, their skill will be in writing about it rather than being a practitioner). Their real specialism is in getting stories out of people and constructing a narrative.

So if your client has been working in their field for 20 years and the journalist asks them something, their instinct can be to try to impart everything they’ve learned in those two decades. This is actually going to be a lot for the recipient, who will be doing other interviews too, to take in and assimilate.

Pare it down

In our media training sessions we try help your client to cut down on what they deliver to journalists, podcasters and other stakeholders. If they can start with what sort of headline they’d like to see and work their way backwards from there, they are more likely to offer the important bits rather than every last detail.

Going into too much depth can come from a good place, it’s the client trying to be helpful. It’s just that when you’re talking to someone whose job is to report what’s happening in a condensed amount of words, keeping it simple and cutting out the unnecessary stuff is actually more use than the detailed version.

Basically we all know we can only see about ten per cent of an iceberg above the surface but if someone asks you to show them a picture of an iceberg you’ll show them something like the image we’ve used here. We can help get your clients to do the same – just show the journalist the iceberg.

You’re a public relations professional and you’ve secured some coverage for your client. They are going to meet a journalist but they don’t appear willing to practice for the interview. Here’s a strategy that might help.

Clapperton Media Training is proud to announce that founder, chief executive and tea maker Guy Clapperton has been named among the inaugural Independent Impact 50, which aims to showcase the influence, commitment and contribution of the UK’s independent PR sector.

“It’s great to be able to share in this long-overdue celebration of an independent practitioner community that been ignored for too long,” says Guy. “It is so refreshing to see independent practitioners being truly celebrated and showcased for the value what they do, not who they work for”

As Guy says in the video, this was a particular pleasure because he and his colleagues are trainers rather than pure-play PR practitioners which makes this sort of recognition very special.

The winners aren’t ranked, just listed. PRovokeMedia has the full story here.