This is a guest blog.
Maria lives in a small, rural village, miles away from her only water source. Every time she and her children need to drink, they make the hours-long walk to a polluted river, risking their lives with every sip. This is the reality for Maria’s family and many others in her village, but it doesn’t have to be. By building a clean water well, Maria’s village can access safe drinking water and a brighter future.
Imagine reading the above story versus receiving a generic donation request from a nonprofit organization. Which would compel you to take action?
While your nonprofit may already have an arsenal of fundraising ideas or thoughtful recognition gifts to capture your supporters’ attention, there’s another strategy you can use right within your content: storytelling. Storytelling is a compelling strategy that can help your nonprofit get donations for fundraisers, reach new supporters, and share the impact of its work.
Let’s review four techniques your nonprofit can use to supercharge its content with impactful stories.
Align on a goal & overall message
Before constructing story-driven content, your nonprofit must first identify its storytelling goal. Allegiance Group + Pursuant describes goal-setting this way: “Outlining your goals before executing the campaign ensures each action you take is directly related to a target that furthers your mission.”
In other words, your goal will inform the overall message of your storytelling campaign, meaning it should represent your organization’s top needs and priorities.
The SMART framework, a commonly used method for setting goals, can help your nonprofit identify the aim of its storytelling campaign. For example, let’s say your nonprofit serves beneficiaries like Maria in the story from earlier:
Specific: Clearly define what your story should accomplish. This could include raising awareness about the lack of clean water and your nonprofit’s cause by reaching a larger audience with your content.
Measurable: Quantify your goal to track your progress over time. Perhaps you want your story to increase the number of users who follow your nonprofit’s social media accounts. With more eyes on your social media posts, the fundraising opportunities you share will gain even more traction. Then, you can track the donation trends following your storytelling campaign.
Achievable: Consider the milestones your nonprofit must reach to achieve your goal—are they reasonable? For example, a target of 100,000 social media followers is likely feasible if your accounts regularly achieve increasing follower growth rates.
Relevant: Determine how your story fits into your nonprofit’s overarching goals. Maria’s story could draw in a new audience and compel them to become committed donors, directly furthering your nonprofit’s work.
Time-bound: Set a deadline for hitting each milestone and accomplishing your goal. You might aim to gain 10,000 followers each week.
With a clear goal and consistent branding, your storytelling campaign will be cohesive, fostering long-term relationships with donors by building trust and credibility. Each piece of your story will contribute to your campaign’s goal and your nonprofit’s broader objectives.
Gather impactful stories
Real, authentic stories humanize the impact of your nonprofit’s work. To highlight the most powerful stories, you’ll first have to gather them from your beneficiaries.
A few ways your nonprofit can collect these stories include:
Reaching out to past program participants who had a good experience
Sharing anonymous surveys with current program participants
Asking for user-generated content via your website or social media channels
Collaborating with community leaders to identify instances of impact
When gathering stories for your content, remember to build out each of these essential elements of a powerful story:
Plot: The beneficiary’s journey from hardship to hope and transformation
Setting: The environment where the beneficiary faces their challenges
Characters: The main character, or the beneficiary, and all supporting characters, including your nonprofit’s leaders, donors, and volunteers
Conflict: The central challenge facing the beneficiary that your nonprofit hopes to address
Theme: The story’s broader message, which should align with your nonprofit’s mission and values
Gathering stories with these elements in mind will help ensure you construct powerful stories that build a strong nonprofit legacy. Balance your story-gathering techniques with ethical storytelling practices to avoid exploitation and properly present the perspectives you’ve collected. For example, using inclusive language ensures that your story respects the identity and background of beneficiaries, reflecting their genuine experiences.
Balance emotion and logic
You’ve likely heard that a good story pulls at the heartstrings of its audience. While the emotional component of your nonprofit’s stories will compel people to take action, it must be balanced with logic to appeal to a broad audience and accurately tell the story.
Ethos, pathos, and logos are key persuasive strategies that should be present in a well-rounded marketing campaign—and storytelling is no different. These strategies should have a place in your stories and in your nonprofit’s fundraising plan.
Let’s take a closer look at each and how you can incorporate them:
Ethos: This strategy involves boosting your organization’s credibility. For example, using expert endorsements from influencers or ambassadors to draw attention to your story can convey your nonprofit as a trustworthy source of change.
Pathos: This strategy appeals to the audience’s emotions. Focusing on a beneficiary’s personal challenges and triumphs can inspire empathy or compassion, motivating your audience to get involved.
Logos: This strategy appeals to reason and logic using facts, statistics, and clear explanations. Providing a logical perspective will ultimately convince your audience of your cause’s importance.
To balance each of these strategies, supplement the stories you’ve collected with measurable impact indicators, such as the number of beneficiaries you’ve served or the satisfaction levels of program participants. According to UpMetrics, combining this quantitative data with qualitative data (such as beneficiaries’ testimonials) can provide a fuller picture of your nonprofit’s impact.
Choose which impact metrics to track by considering your storytelling goal. This data should relate to the goal and show change over time without being twisted or manipulated to draw false conclusions.
Use a variety of communication channels & media
Omnichannel marketing, which leverages all of your nonprofit’s communication channels to provide consistent messaging across each touchpoint, holds distinctive benefits for both storytelling and fundraising. This approach opens the door for more touchpoints with supporters and shows that you care enough to contact them through their preferred channels.
For example, if you launch a direct mail fundraising campaign and promote your email newsletter, you’ll reach supporters who prefer traditional communication channels and those who engage with digital platforms.
Different media formats that can powerfully convey stories include:
Blog posts
Images
Infographics
Social media threads or stories
While it’s important to leverage all of your nonprofit’s channels, you’ll need to leverage them in different ways. Remember that each communication channel has different strengths, which you can capitalize on to tell your story in a way that resonates with your audience. Adapt your story to different formats by using large text to share powerful quotes in your blog posts, impactful data points in infographics, or compelling audio in the background of your videos.
For each of these strategies, remember to maintain consistency when representing your nonprofit’s brand and voice. Ultimately, your audience should experience an authentic story from your main character’s perspective, but it should be told through the lens of your nonprofit’s mission. This draws a correlation between the story and your organization’s work, compelling your audience to stay engaged, get involved, and help you make a lasting difference.