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Storytelling is a powerful tool: even just going to see a movie or turning on the television can provide a sense of escapism, boost our empathy for fellow humans and change the way we see the world. Apply that to fundraising and you’ve got a winning strategy in which donors are even more compelled to give to your organization.
Sharing anecdotes and wins during Giving Season is a helpful way to meet fundraising goals, so we’ve outlined some of the best practices to help you know where to start.
Stories evoke emotions and create a personal connection, which is exactly why they are so important for donors. When someone can see the exact impact of their dollar—whether it’s witnessing the healing of a child whose chemotherapy was funded by donations or the success of a student whose academic journey was supported by generous alumni—they are far more likely to want to gift again.
Storytelling can also set a nonprofit apart from its competitors by offering a true look into operations and impact. Your employees are likely aligned on and aware of your company mission, and your potential donors should be, too. When people are emotionally connected to the outcome of a business, the stakes feel higher in priority; according to a study by the Harvard Business Review, “ Fully connected customers are 52% more valuable, on average, than those who are just highly satisfied.”
MORE: How to optimize peer-to-peer fundraising during Giving Season
Telling stories is not a one-size-fits-all approach, though. It’s important to understand your specific donors and what they expect to see from their donations. For instance, if an academic institution receives 60% of its funding from alumni who were heavily involved in athletics at the school, they will want to show how the sports teams are benefiting from fundraising efforts.
That doesn’t mean, though, that every email about new improvements should be geared toward former athletes. Storytelling should be personally crafted so that the remaining 40% of donors to the university are able to see how their money impacted programs they care about, too, like new arts buildings or more scholarships for international students. This way, everyone feels like their money is leaving a positive mark and accomplishing what they hoped it would.
It’s not exactly easy to distill each donor down to a specific category like the above example. In fact, many donors will care about a whole host of goals and might be less likely to share their exact visions for the institution. It’s up to the fundraising and outreach teams to garner what they think donors will want to hear about—that’s why prospect research is an incredibly important part of storytelling.
One of the best ways to perform donor research is by crafting profiles, using third-party vendors like Nexis for Development Professionals, which will generate full reports and update them as donor behaviors change. For instance, if a major donor who seemed less politically active suddenly gives a great sum of money to a candidate, your nonprofit can get a better understanding of that donor’s stance on important topics.
MORE: How to make the most out of your nonprofit fundraising efforts
Once donor research has been executed and your nonprofit has a good understanding of the types of causes that your donors care about, it’s time to craft the larger organization story. Think of this almost like an elevator pitch, in which you tell prospective donors and recurring ones alike the abridged version of how you are making a difference in the world.
The three elements of any good story are a protagonist, conflict, and a resolution. Any movie, book or television show has all three of those factors, and your organization’s story should, too. Consider the protagonist to be the cause or beneficiary—i.e., women with breast cancer, immigrants in need of legal help, local neighbors who cannot afford food. The conflict or challenge is the issue that the nonprofit is addressing—the cost of cancer research, exorbitant court fees, poverty and high cost of living.
The resolution is then what the nonprofit hopes to make happen: finding a cure, funding lawyers so they can serve pro-bono, providing funds for a food bank so it can feed more people each mealtime. Focusing on the solutions being found, and how your nonprofit is positively impacting the demographic that you’ve identified, will show donors why your institution is worthy of their money.
Of course, storytelling is only powerful when it is authentic and transparent. Hyperbolic statements like “We are going to eliminate poverty” will feel disingenuous, so you should instead focus on the zoomed-in strategy. Nobody would expect for one nonprofit to fix every issue their target demographic faces, but they would want to see the anecdotal evidence of how a handful of lives were changed.
Being authentic can also mean asking for permission to share photographs, personal details, and quotes so that donors can get a real understanding of who the nonprofit is serving and put faces to the statistics.
MORE: Attracting a new generation of donors
After crafting the story you want to tell, it might be hard to decide where to tell it. While it’d be ideal to be able to simply stand up on a soapbox and speak to all your donors at once, we all know that the attention economy makes it difficult to get people’s attention.
There are a few options for finding the proper medium for storytelling, and they can of course be combined into one larger strategy. Here are the four main ways to reach donors today:
Within each of those four channels, it’s important to tailor the message so that it fits the general use of the medium. For instance, you wouldn’t want to post 2,000 words about a recent gala onto social media—Instagram posts should be more visual and less word-y. At the same time, you can’t exactly print out a video and send it in an envelope, so including more descriptive stories is the best way to get attention via direct mail.
In our recent e-book about fundraising and storytelling, we identified a few ways to amp up the storytelling factors in donor communication. One significant strategy is to harness the power of current events. When everyone is already tuned into a specific topic and curious to read more, you can jump into the conversation and seamlessly tie it to your nonprofit.
Because storytelling is a more creative medium, it can be hard to know the exact impact of a story: rarely would you ask donors to rank how moved they were by a particular email or social media post. However, key performance indicators (KPIs) are still important to set and follow.
KPIs for storytelling could look like clicks to the “donation” page from a particular post, actual money donated on the day a story-forward campaign went live, or new followers gained from telling a particular story. You can also aim to get donor feedback by conducting anecdotal surveys and research, including asking “what prompted you to donate?” as an optional question on a donation page.
MORE: How donor prospecting technology can streamline your Giving Season workflow
During Giving Season and beyond, storytelling is a critical tool that can revolutionize the way nonprofits make money. Putting real anecdotes behind a nonprofit’s mission makes it more motivating to give, because donors can see what their money is capable of doing in the hands of that institution.
Using the above tips, like crafting a persuasive story and finding the proper media to share it, nonprofit workers can begin effective storytelling and monitor how it impacts their KPIs. Luckily, there are also tools within the Nexis For Nonprofits suite that help nonprofits actually understand the donors they are reaching out to, so they can develop a personalized strategy that will be all the more successful.