Community-Building 101: How to Use Storytelling to Build Community Awareness of Your Nonprofit
The ability to tell stories can make all the difference for your organization and those you serve. To build community awareness of your nonprofit and successfully fundraise, you must convince your audience that your cause is worth following and investing in. One of the most effective ways to achieve this kind of community-building is through well-told stories. A great story not only informs your readers or followers, it also inserts them into the story and inspires them to take action!
In this blog, we’ll cover the key elements of a good story and cover how you can create a story that’ll raise community awareness of the important work you do.
First, why storytelling?
Awareness
Storytelling is important for every nonprofit that wants to increase awareness of their work and mission. Acquiring new donors, volunteers, and community partners all starts with awareness of your organization. But how do you determine how much of your community is aware of your nonprofit? It all starts with a community awareness survey!
If you want to gauge how much of your community is aware of your nonprofit and the work you do (aka, your story!), we recommend conducting a community awareness survey. To complete this survey, you can set up a shareable Google Forms survey (an example is pictured below) or send volunteers and board members out to a popular community event to collect responses in person.
You want to ask survey respondents if they know about your organization and what you do in a single question. To keep things quick and easy, keep a running tally of the two possible responses (either they’ve heard of you or they haven’t). When you’ve finished collecting data, crunch your numbers. Determine what percentage of survey respondents knew about your organization and how many hadn’t heard of you. This will help you set specific goals for increasing awareness of your organization—and storytelling is the tool to help you meet those goals!
Unified Messaging
In addition to community awareness, you want to make sure people who represent your nonprofit are sharing a consistent message about the work you do. At a retreat or team meeting, ask your volunteers, staff, and board members to write down what your nonprofit does in 2-4 sentences. Ask the group to share what they wrote. If you notice that there is disparity in the way your team describes your nonprofit, or you think that not enough of your team members understand the impact of your work, it’s time for a storytelling workshop!
Create an agreed upon description of the work your nonprofit does with your board. Share that description with all of your staff and volunteers. You can even add stories of those you’ve helped as examples of the work you do. This will help those who are closest to your organization (your built-in ambassadors!) share a unified story about your nonprofit’s mission and work with their friends and family.
The key elements of a great story
Ideally, when you identify a good story that showcases the impact your organization has, that story can be shared on multiple platforms (social media, direct mail, email, etc.). Your writing, and the way you share these stories visually will change, but the following four storytelling steps will remain the same. The best stories can be written in four steps:
Introduce the character.
Tell readers about the problem impacting the character. When did the problem start? How is it affecting them? What will happen if the problem isn’t addressed?
Describe the action needed to address the problem. Nonprofit storytelling would treat this third step as the opportune time to write a call to action.
Describe the positive outcome that occurred or is expected.
To create a story that people will want to share and that will catch the eye of those unaware of your nonprofit, answer the following questions in your story:
Who’s the main character in your story?
Telling stories about real people is very compelling! You may want to consider changing names to protect privacy or telling a story that represents clients without naming them (especially if you work with at-risk communities).
What prompted your main character to seek services from your nonprofit?
People who seek services from your nonprofit come to you for a myriad of reasons. What circumstances sparked your main character’s interactions with your nonprofit? What needs did they have?
How was your main character’s life changed by the services they used?
Most people don’t care about the particulars of each program as much as they care about the effects those programs have on real individuals. Instead of writing a story about the services you offer, describe the real-life impact your services have.
This Facebook post by IDignity does a great job showing the human impact their work has. This nonprofit regularly shares long posts on social media that detail the stories of individuals they’ve helped.
Dispersing your stories to increase community awareness
The stories you create that describe your mission or those who have been impacted by your work can be shared on social media, used in fundraising appeals, added to marketing materials, and shared with board members and volunteers so they understand the impact of the work they are doing.
Dispersing the same story and adapting it for different platforms is multi-channel marketing! To learn how you can adapt your stories for different platforms, check out our tips below:
Direct mail storytelling:
Direct mail appeals can be anywhere from one page to four pages in length! This format allows you to dive into the details when telling your story. Just because you’re writing a letter doesn’t mean you should shy away from using visuals. Enhance the story by showing readers the main character of your story.
Social media storytelling:
Storytelling on social doesn’t mean typing out a long appeal in one Facebook post. In fact, posts with fewer characters receive more engagement than long posts. Your goal on social media should be to share your story as concisely as possible! Videos and images are great for conveying more information with less text. To help increase community awareness of your story via social media you can boost your posts or use paid advertising to show your content to more people in your city or region.
Email storytelling:
Do keep it brief! Unlike direct mail appeals, the maximum recommended email length is only two hundred words. To make sure your reader still has access to the full story you can write a digest version of the story with a link inviting readers to read more on your website or blog. Be sure to include your organization’s logo and branding so your email can easily be identified.
Website storytelling:
Aside from social, your website is one of the first places people visit to learn about your organization. Your website must illustrate the work you do and how donations make a difference for those you serve. Storytelling on your website does more than net you online donations. Consider branding your home page around a compelling story that supports your mission and then linking out to a longer version of that story.
The example below illustrates how Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region was able to incorporate storytelling onto their website. Not only does their homepage link to multiple stories of donor impact, it also features a diagram that perfectly illustrates all of the services they provide through the story of a dog named Winston.
Blog storytelling:
Your blog is where you tell the long version of stories. Blogs are a great place to share info, plus you can incorporate images and videos to reinforce your story.
Conclusion
Nonprofit storytelling is both an art and a science. You need to be creative to craft a great story, but also must convey it well to get it noticed. By adhering to best practices when it comes to storytelling across different platforms, you’ll be able to create community-building content that can be used to increase awareness of your organization.
For more storytelling resources, download Qgiv’s free eBook, the Nonprofit Storytelling eBook. In the eBook, you’ll get:
Tips and advice on how to tell great stories visually and with words
Examples from other nonprofits
Storytelling worksheets
Helpful resources to get you thinking about what stories your organization needs to tell
And more!
About The Author
Melaina is Qgiv's Social Media & PR Manager. Before coming to Qgiv, she worked as a director of annual giving and used her digital marketing savvy to lead several successful giving days. When she's not at Qgiv analyzing social media stats, she can be found binge-watching Parks and Rec and taking photos of everyone else's pets.
