Addressing the Republican National Convention Thursday night, Ivanka Trump delivered for her dad. While all of Donald Trump’s children proved confident speakers, addressing the love and admiration they feel for their strong father, Ivanka stood out as the most effective communicator. Why? She dug down to include a superior level of detail, making her memories, well, memorable.
She recalled “playing on the floor by [her] father’s desk, constructing miniature buildings with Legos and Erector sets, while he did the same with concrete steel and glass.” As a listener, it’s easy to relate to that image—maybe your mind even goes to a memory of your own child playing with the building blocks while you were cooking dinner or tackling some other parental task. Because of the detail, you actually picture Ivanka playing beside her dad—and if you picture it, research shows you will remember it better.
Sign up: Click here to subscribe to the Broadsheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the world’s most powerful women.
Trump offered specific nuggets of fatherly advice to make the GOP nominee seem more relatable as a parent, remembering him telling her, “Ivanka, if you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big.” Delivered with a grin, that got a laugh from the audience.
Her storytelling provided supported Donald Trump’s populist messaging. She talked about how much she learned from walking through constructions sites as this side. These site were “incredible melting pots,” she said, assuring the crowd—and any undecided voters in the audience—that her dad is “color blind and gender neutral. He hires the best person for the job, period.”
She painted Donald as a caring man, remembering him tearing stories of people who’d fallen on hard times out of the newspaper. Trump noted how he’d grab his “signature black felt tip pen” and write a note calling them into his office to talk, often using his contacts to get them help. Again, a level of detail that made her stories both believable and memorable.
In my career as a communication coach it is difficult to get people to tell any personal story, let alone those with the kind of detail Trump used. But her performance on Thursday proves that struggle is worth it—telling detailed stories is a strategy worth copying.
