Helping you win loyal friends through your communications
If you work for a nonprofit organization and you’re sending out a thank-you letter that sounds like a tax receipt, stop!
Find your most memorable story. Put it in your thank-you letter.
Why? To find out, read Say “Thank You” with a Story, a guest post by me on Tripp Braden’s blog.
The key point? “People will thank you for your thank-you. They’ll remember your story. And they’ll give to you again.”
Read Say “Thank You” with a Story and rewrite your thank-you letter today!
The judge shook his head in disbelief. Before him stood a bank robber, arrested for the fifth time. “Why do you do it?” he asked. “Why do you keep on robbing banks?”
The robber looked at him in pity. “Because that’s where they keep the money!”
A good story you can tell your donors is like money in the bank for your organization. Where does your nonprofit keep its stories?
If you want to tell stories that will touch your donors’ hearts and move them to give money, you need a place to keep the stories. You need a story bank.
You get to work in the morning and realize it’s time to send out an appeal letter. Naturally, since you know it will dramatically increase the number of people who read your letter and give, you want to include a story.
What do you do? Do you start emailing and leaving voicemail for your frontline staff? How long does it take for them to get back to you? How much of what you hear from them is actually a story (as versus a dry timeline)?
Collecting your stories as you go solves all these problems. When you need one, it’s right there–and you’ve already figured out the story arc that will make it stick in the reader’s mind.
“A storybank is a mechanism for capturing and sharing stories in a variety of media,” says Wendy Levy of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture.
Elizabeth Prescott has good advice for how to start your story bank. Begin by
collecting the low-hanging fruit–those stories that your colleagues already know well and routinely share with each other (or with donors) to illustrate theimportance of what you do.
You could use tools specially designed for storybanking. Prescott likes TrackVia. Others have spoken well of Zahmoo or WuFoo. It’s certainly going to be helpful to be able to share the information you collect online, and no spreadsheet or word processing document can do that.
The problem with new technology is that often, the people in your organization won’t use it.
Learning a new tool feels like one more thing to do, on top of a pile of things to do that’s large and constantly growing (in every nonprofit I know!).
So, you are probably better off using tools that are familiar to people in your organization. Do you have a shared Google Drive? Use that. How about a wiki, or a Dropbox? Use what people are used to.
If you have to, assign one person to be the address for the storybank and have everyone email their stories, photos, etc., to that person. It’s better to have a bank of stories that’s low-tech than not to collect those stories at all!
2. For each story, track dates, demographics and times used.
This tip comes again from Elizabeth Prescott, who says, “It may not seem as important when you only have a few stories, but the bigger your bank gets, the more you’ll wish that you had some good search terms so that you could find just the right person to speak about a particular topic or from the perspective of a particular social group.”
3. Make sure you have permission to use names and photos. Having a standard release form for people to sign is a good idea. In your story bank, keep notes (or copies) of the permission given. Even then, though, double-check. It’s better to use a slightly less vivid story than to make a client or a supporter feel bad about your organization.
Why should this specific person care about your nonprofit? Here’s how to figure it out.
You’re having a conversation, at a party or business networking event, and you mention that you’re on the Board of Good Cause Inc.
“Oh, that’s interesting,” someone in the room says. “What is Good Cause Inc.? What does it do?”
It’s natural if your first response is to think hard about what you should be telling them about your organization.
(And in the last couple of weeks, we’ve talked about how to give an elevator pitch that invites more questions–and how to get out of the question-and-answer format and have a real conversation.)
But really, what you should be telling them is less important than what you should be finding out.
Finding out who you’re talking with is just as important as actually answering their question, for two reasons.
One: This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. If you succeed at having a real conversation, then pretty soon you’ll want to invite that person to an event, send them information that’s useful to then, or ask them to give time or money.
Any of those “asks” will go better if you’ve done your homework first. Start your prospect research now.
Two: Answer the question they’re really asking right now. Every time a person asks, “So, what do you do?”, the underlying question is “Why should I care?” And the key word there is “I.”
Different people care about what you do for their own specific reasons. Think about the supporters you already have. Different issues, different populations, even different service delivery methods get some of your people excited…and leave others cold.
The person who is asking about your nonprofit for the first time might fit into any one of those categories of supporters. But which? It’s up to you to find out, so you can address exactly the thing that matters to them the most.
You can’t read the mind of the person who asked you about your nonprofit. True. And you aren’t going to get to know them intimately all in one conversation, either. But there’s a shortcut you can use when you’re figuring out how to answer their question.
Donor personas are portraits of the typical supporters of your organization. (Some people call these “marketing profiles,” but the idea is the same.)
Most organizations will find their supporters falling into at least two different profiles.
For example, if you’re a community-based environmental organization:
As you start answering their question, remember that you have a mystery to solve: Is that new person you’re talking to a “Jan” or a “Keri”?
Finding that out won’t tell you precisely who that is, asking about your nonprofit. But it’s a really good step in the right direction.
Do you need help creating donor personas for your nonprofit? Could you use expert assistance crafting the questions that will tell you who you’re talking to?
At Communicate! Consulting, we help your nonprofit win loyal friends–starting with the first conversation! Email us to get started.