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What’s Your Campaign Story, Nonprofit?

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As tomorrow’s election approaches, the news is full of last year’s election. Particularly, both presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton and seasoned campaign manager and Democratic National Committee operative Donna Brazile have books out trying to explain what happened.

campaign biographyLooking back at elections can teach us something, but there’s an equally interesting kind of book to read: the kind that’s published before the election. We’re talking about the campaign biography.

Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope was a brilliant example. It told the story of who he was and made that the story of what we, the voters, wanted to see. It won him donations, volunteers, votes. It helped make him President.

Nonprofits can learn a lot from the campaign biography.

There’s an election going on, and your nonprofit organization is one of the candidates.

You’re competing for volunteer time.  You’re competing for donor money.  Everyone in your community can choose from a slate of good causes and “cast their vote”–for you, for a similar organization, or for a completely different cause that also appeals to them.

You need name recognition to win.  No one will vote for you if they don’t know who you are.  But how do you make sure people hear about you, and remember your name?

Tell stories.

Tell stories that dramatize the problem you’re trying to solve.  Tell stories that give people hope that there are solutions.  Give them a chance to be the hero of the story by giving you their time or money.

When they choose between you and other organizations, make sure they know your name.  Then you’ll have a chance to get their vote.

When the Client Asks for the Moon

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What do you do when your client–or boss–asks you to do something you don’t know how to do?

A friend who’s a social media consultant submitted a proposal to a new client.  She would make sure they had a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, and write their blog.  The client asked, “What about data mining?”

“Data mining?” she thought.  “That’s not social media.  It’s not what I know how to do.  What should I say?”

The consultant turned to her friends in Phyllis Khare‘s and Andrea Vahl‘s Social Media Managers School for advice.  What they came up with was a strategy I call Many Moons.

What Do You Mean?

In James Thurber’s classic children’s tale, the princess is sick and won’t be well until someone gives her the moon.  The king turns to one expert after another.  They have no solutions.  All they can tell him is how big the moon is, and how far away, and how it’s impossible to give the princess what she wants.

At last, the king tells the court jester that the princess will never be well until she has the moon.  So the jester goes and asks her:

“How big do you think it is?”

“It is just a little smaller than my thumbnail,” she said, “for when I hold my thumbnail up at the moon, it just covers it.”

“And how far away is it?” asked the Court Jester.

“It is not as high as the big tree outside my window,” said the Princess, “for sometimes it gets caught in the top branches….”

“What is the moon made of, Princess?” he asked.

“Oh,” she said, “it’s made of gold, of course, silly.”

So the jester gets the goldsmith to make “a tiny round golden moon just a little smaller than the thumbnail of the Princess Lenore.”  And the princess gets well!

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Asking the Right Question

It turned out that “data mining,” like the moon, can be many things to many people.  What this client really wanted was not anything statistical.  They simply wanted to keep their ears to the ground and listen to what people on social media were talking about – and then to join in.

I would call that “social listening,” not “data mining.”  But that doesn’t matter.  My friend could give them what they wanted–and more–once she asked the right question.  And so can you.

When it sounds like the client is asking for the moon, remember you might have what they need right under your thumb.

 

5 lessons for nonprofits from children’s books

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tweener reading

Does your agency tell stories like kids’ and YA books ?

People say there’s a part of me that’s got to be permanently twelve years old. I love children’s books!

In my house, there’s a shelf of them: some picture books, some chapter books, some classics, some translated into Spanish.

And I should probably take them off my taxes as a professional expense.  They have taught me how to write.

What can children’s books and their big cousins, YA fiction, teach us about telling our agencies’ stories?

Five lessons for nonprofits from children’s books

  1. Start with an improbable hero.  Zoom in on one person.  An ordinary person, because our readers need to identify with him or her.  That could be Harry Potter or Halla from Travel Light–or it could be your nonprofit’s client.
  2. Give them a challenge. It’s not a story if nothing’s going wrong. Here’s your chance to show the problem that your client faces (whether it’s poverty, illness, bad schools, or bad air) and make it real to your reader.
  3. Show their character.  When she struggles, your client shows who she really is.  She has no superpowers or magic: only the qualities that make her human.
  4. Give them helpers.  Of course, this includes your organization.  But this is  your golden opportunity to…
  5. Bring the reader into the story.  J.M. Barrie did that overtly in Peter Pan: “If you believe,” he shouted to them, “clap your hands; don’t let Tink die.”  Most bring the reader in more subtly. But if you have ever refused to come in for dinner until you finished a chapter, you know what it feels like to take the hero’s place.

Great writers make us feel that the ending of the story depends on us.

Above all, you want your readers to feel that they are irreplaceable. If they can see their donations as the key thing needed to ensure a happy ending, they will not only give. They will want to give. So much depends upon their heroic action!

When you write newsletters, appeal letters, blog posts–even Facebook posts and tweets–how do you make your supporters into the hero of the story?

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