Have you ever assembled a board report or designed a marketing campaign for your nonprofit that just felt like it was missing something?
Even with eye-catching statistics or compelling visuals, your efforts to engage your audience and drum up support for your mission will fall flat if you don't know how to tell captivating stories about your cause and your impact.
Nonprofit storytelling is an art form that every organization should master. This guide explores the power of nonprofit storytelling and best practices to try. We'll cover:
Sharing your organization's stories will help you breathe life into your communications, leaving your supporters inspired and eager to take action for your cause. Let's get started!
Nonprofit storytelling is the practice of sharing your organization's mission, vision, values, and impact through compelling narratives.
By telling stories, your organization can appeal to its supporters' emotions in memorable and meaningful ways, encouraging them to help you reach your goals.
Nonprofit stories may come from your organization's founders and team members, who can provide an insider's perspective on your work. But they may also come from beneficiaries whose lives have been changed by your services, dedicated volunteers who have given hundreds of hours to your cause, or donors whose support drives your mission forward.
And no matter their source, these stories can take a variety of forms, such as:
There are plenty of other forms your stories can take, from speeches at fundraising events to fundraising mailers during your year-end campaigns. Think of it this way: Whenever you communicate with your organization's audience, you have the opportunity to share engaging stories.
As you build your storytelling skillset and become adept at engaging your audience with narratives, your organization will experience several benefits. These include:
In addition to learning how to tell your own organization's stories, it can be helpful to get inspired by effective examples of storytelling by nonprofits in the wild. Here are some of our favorites:
MENTOR California is a nonprofit that strives to expand high-quality youth mentoring relationships in California. In the organization's recent report on the state of mentoring in California, the organization includes several stories.
First, MENTOR California shares its origin story and outlines its mission. Then it dives into its impact data, gathered and analyzed using the UpMetrics impact measurement and management (IMM) platform. The data helps to prove the claims the organization makes throughout the reports. These claims are further brought to life with evocative stories gathered from a beneficiary focus group and interviews about different mentoring programs across California.
The real star of the show in MENTOR California's storytelling efforts in the report is its impact data. Its quantitative and qualitative data provide tangible evidence of the importance of the organization's work and demonstrate the nonprofit's commitment to staying accountable to its community.
Interested in enriching your own storytelling efforts with impact data? UpMetrics can help!
World Wildlife Fund (WWF) works to protect the environment. In a recent blog article, WWF shared a story about Patagonian Indigenous communities diving to harvest a scarce type of seaweed used in cosmetics and food and their recent efforts to protect their diving waters from overharvesting.
The blog post features interviews with both experienced and new divers who share details about the harsh realities of a diver's life and hope for the future. The post also includes several descriptive details that paint a powerful mental picture for readers. For instance, exhausted returning divers are described as "dazed aquanauts" with "faces... shriveled like prunes."
In addition to great interviews and writing, the article features high-quality images of the divers at work and the seaweed that provides their livelihood. Overall, this is an excellent example of how a nonprofit can pull its audience in using the written word and compelling images.
The American Heart Association is dedicated to fighting heart disease and stroke. On the organization's YouTube channel, it features survivor stories from individuals affected by heart disease and other conditions.
Here is an example of one of the videos:
In this video, Megan Hilt shares her personal story of being diagnosed with heart failure at age 18 and having a heart transplant at age 19. She goes on to share that while her health doesn't permit her to carry her own child, her dream of becoming a mother is possible through working with a gestational surrogate.
Pictures of Megan, her family, and her hospital visits are shown throughout the video, illustrating her life story. And at the end, she shares a message for women everywhere: "Heart disease can happen to anyone at any age...We need to take care of ourselves so that we can take care of other people, but our health is just as important."
This candid interview and the other videos in the series puts a human face on the larger issue of heart health, personalizing the cause for the American Heart Association's audience.
Days for Girls' Podcast Episode
Days for Girls is on a mission to provide menstrual health education and increase access to menstrual products for girls and women around the world. The Days for Girls Podcast takes listeners behind the scenes of the nonprofit's operations and interviews thought leaders from around the world who work to empower women and girls.
On its most recent episode, "The Period Positive Workplace Initiative with Diana Nelson and Jess Strait," the show host and two Days for Girls team members discuss the story of how The Period Positive Workplace Initiative got started and explore why it matters for businesses and their employees.
The episode also gives listeners tips for encouraging their employers to join the program and how their workplaces can become Period Positive Workplace certified.
This podcast episode illustrates an important principle of nonprofit storytelling—the need to include a call to action. By providing information about a specific program and encouraging their audience to get involved, Days for Girls provides further education about a cause their supporters care about and doable suggestions for taking action.
Storytelling is both an art and a craft, one that can be honed through practice and learning. To become a talented storyteller, begin by reviewing the key elements reviewed in every story:
The character in a story is who or what the narrative is centered around. Depending on the nature of your nonprofit's work, your character(s) might be:
A good character is someone your audience can identify with and root for, whose background and traits they can relate to. Your character will experience some form of growth or transformation over the course of the story.
Setting is where your story takes place.
No matter the specific setting of your story, your job as a nonprofit storyteller is to make your audience feel like they are there by using descriptive language. Invite the audience to experience the sights, sounds, and smells of the setting so that they feel totally immersed in your narrative.
The plot of a story is simply the sequence of events that takes place.
Typically these events will follow this structure:
To get an idea of how the pieces of this structure work together, check out this example:
Conflict refers to the obstacle(s) a character faces in a story. There are different kinds of conflict, such as:
Your stories may have one or more different conflicts. The main thing to remember is that there will generally be one main conflict that your character faces, and that while the character will drive the action, you'll need to demonstrate how your organization actively helps the character to overcome that conflict.
If you're writing a more straightforward story about your organization or its history, you can be more general in how you present the conflict.
The resolution of a story is the final outcome of the narrative, the part of a story that wraps up all the remaining loose ends.
Though resolution was mentioned above as an important event in a story's plot, it's worth calling out more specifically as an essential story element because this is what your audience needs to get closure. They need to see your character(s) solve their problems, face their demons, and reach their goals.
For nonprofits, resolution helps to reinforce the importance of your work and connect the dots for your audience between your community's problems and the solutions your organization provides.
A satisfying resolution should also leave your audience feeling hopeful and optimistic.
Now that you know the basics of nonprofit storytelling, you're likely eager to begin sharing meaningful stories of your own. Follow these steps to get started:
There are several reasons you may want to share a story with your community. For instance, ask yourself the following:
Determine how storytelling fits into your larger goals for marketing and engagement. This will guide how you write your story and share it.
Depending on the story's purpose, you might be speaking to beneficiaries, donors, volunteers, funders, board members, or the general public.
As you write your story, keep your audience in mind and tailor it to their expectations. For instance, a story aimed at a grantmaking organization should focus on your nonprofit's needs and previous impact.
Sometimes the character(s) of a story will present themselves to you. Other times, you'll need to decide the perspective from which you want to tell your story.
For instance, a nonprofit focused on tutoring at-risk youth could tell a story from the point of view of a student, teacher, or parent. Each approach will make the story a little different, but each is compelling in its own way. Decide whose eyes you want to see your story from, taking your audience into consideration.
Also remember to not over-center your organization as the hero or savior in the story. Keep the emphasis on the real people driving the action.
Remember, stories can take a variety of different forms. Determine how you will share your story, whether that means:
Knowing what "genre" you're working within to share your story is important because it affects how you write your story.
For instance, how you tell a story in a podcast is going to be slightly different than how you would tell it in your impact report. The former calls for a more casual tone and perhaps some soundbites from the characters involved in the story. The impact report, though, may require a more formal tone and a few compelling visuals.
Using what you know about story structure, write your story down. Even if the finished product the story is going into doesn't involve the written word, writing the story down will help you ensure you include all the essential elements and give you the opportunity to revise it before you share it with the world.
Jump ahead for some tips to make your stories pop off the page!
Every story requires some editing before it can be shared. Read back over your story, checking for the essential elements, clarifying your main message, and double-checking the accuracy of your claims. Add in any extra details or context that you feel add to the story.
Once you feel like the story is finished, ask a trusted colleague to read it and provide feedback based on the goals you have for sharing the story.
Now it's time to share your story with the world in your chosen form. When you "publish" your story, be sure that you're encouraging your audience to act on what they've learned in some way.
Your call to action (more on these below) can take many forms, whether you want your supporters to donate, share the story with their personal networks, or even respond to it in a comment or message.
Once you have the basics down, start taking your storytelling efforts to the next level. Try these strategies:
Storytelling is an essential skill that every organization should master in order to better connect with its supporters, encourage action, and inspire hope for a better tomorrow.
Use the information in this guide to begin building your storytelling skillset, and remember to pay attention to the stories in the world around you to get inspired!
To learn more, check out these other resources from the UpMetrics team: