Guest Post by Elissa Leif, CEO, MiniMatters, LLC

As Jill wrote in a recent post, getting emotional with your audience is a good strategy, as emotional connection with your organization leads to more engagement and spending.

At MiniMatters Video + Marketing, our prime area is video, which provides many opportunities for building this sort of emotional connection with audiences.

Having done this work for many years, we’ve come to see that the interview portion of video making is critical to drawing out video clips that can make this emotional connection. In particular, carefully crafted storytelling interview questions help.

If an interviewee is asked about why they support a particular nonprofit organization or buy a certain product, there is a huge difference in emotional punch between a rambling answer that covers several different reasons and one that focuses on one powerful thing.

Here’s our free primer on Storytelling Interview Questions, from which you can download a free PDF with our “Top 7 Interview Questions for Storytelling.”

Your subjects will appreciate a good interview because the resulting story, whether in print or video, will make them look and sound better. It will also serve as more effective advocacy for your cause or product. And it helps your viewer connect on an emotional level with what you’re promoting.