Prof. Marshall Ganz, whiskered and looking like a kindly grandpa, stepped to center stage and told his story to a packed auditorium; we all sat riveted by the power of his words and the depth of his insight. The son of a rabbi who cut his teeth in the civil rights struggles in Mississippi, Ganz refined his community organizing skills with Cesar Chavez before teaching it to California politicians in the 1980s. His life's work culminated in 2008 when he helped "a skinny kid with a funny name" craft a message that elevated Barack Obama from relative obscurity to the presidency. From Ganz I learned important lessons that became the playbook for the three successful Kickstarter campaigns that fueled my company, Fortified Bicycle.

You see, Kickstarter and crowdfunding campaigns that fail usually don't tell a story, and Ganz teaches storytelling techniques that are perfectly suited for Kickstarter projects. Rather than saying, "Here's our new widget, it has these features, please support us," I realized that a Kickstarter is like a political campaign; you're telling a story that gets a bunch of people who've never heard of you or your product to contribute money, and trust that you'll deliver that product. This means, to quote Ganz, crafting a story "to figure out how to break through the inertia of habit to get people to pay attention." But, I thought, "how the hell do I get people to care about a bike light?" It's a unique bike light, unbreakable and unstealable, but it's still just a bike light.

I realized that if I applied Ganz's frameworkto tell our Fortified Bicycle story, invited people to gain insight into our values that our company would connect with people. We told our story this way, telling it with Ganz's structural principles guiding us:

1. The Story of Self: What event "called you to take action?" How do you take a singular event and make it resonate? By making yourself the central character in the narrative that experiences an event and is called to take action. In our case, we were called to take action after a friend of ours had his bike light stolen. Riding home that night, he was hit by a car. Which leads to:

2. The Story of Us: Why is this story bigger than you? How do your shared values and experiences apply to your audience? Our shared experience was a frustration with the status quo: crap product design that all city cyclists have experienced. We said, "It's not just thieves who steal from us. When big companies thoughtlessly design products, they steal from us too." Once we connect with the audience around a shared experience, we must create a sense of urgency to get them to take action as well. Also known as:

3. The Story of Now: Why must we act now. We said, "Why are we throwing away our money on cheap gear that needs to be replaced?" The message was clear: by backing this project you'll be sending a message that bike gear should be built for life.