Case study best practices: Build a library that builds your brand
Case studies and impact stories are powerful multiuse tools that showcase an organization’s fruitful partner relationships and positive impact on the world. They boost credibility and anchor multiple PR and marketing strategies. Yet many enterprises struggle to develop a library of compelling case studies.
There are several reasons for this: they don’t want to “bother” their clients or customers, they don’t prioritize it, or they’re waiting for the perfect time. But there is no perfect time and the benefits of publishing case studies far outweigh the challenges of crafting them. Pulling together all the necessary elements and navigating sensitive client interactions to produce these documents can feel overwhelming, but following these case study best practices will streamline the process while ensuring the best result.
Determine which format best suits your needs. This should be your first step. Case studies present what your organization did to make a good thing happen. The structure should introduce the challenge, describe your solutions and highlight the results of your efforts. Impact stories are more narrative in style and focus on the relationship between the storyteller and their customer or client, along with the impact the organizations created together.
Build a template. Mapping out the structure will help you define what you want to showcase, identify the data you need to compile and inform your process for gathering information and conducting interviews. A template that defines standard sections and the type of content that goes into each one gives you an easily adaptable framework for writing future pieces. The most useful templates also include key questions to ask and answer in each case study section.
Develop a pipeline. Enterprises often don’t start thinking about case studies or impact stories until after projects are done—sometimes long after. You’ll be in a much better position to write strong case studies in a reasonable time frame if you develop a pipeline that streamlines future efforts. We urge clients to bake case study expectations into all new contracts and to capture as many necessary elements as possible—photos, starting statistics, and project goals to name a few—at the start of the relationship.
Track milestones and creative solutions. The initial information you gather is simply a baseline for measuring progress. It’s important to record metrics, feedback and problems solved throughout the course of your project or relationship so that you can tell a fulsome story. If you don’t track these details, it’s hard and time consuming to go back and get them.
Make your partners comfortable. Explain your goals and expectations for the final product, your writing and editing process; introduce your interviewer and determine the best person to speak for your customer’s team; and establish a schedule and review process. Assure subjects that they’ll get to sign off on the copy before it’s published.
Follow these case study best practices and you’ll make these credibility-building essentials easy for your customers to participate in and much easier for your team to produce.
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