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Can Your Nonprofit Tell a Story to Save Its Life?

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Have you heard the tale of Scheherezade? She was a noble lady who married the king of Arabia.  Her new husband had a grim habit: marrying and killing off a wife every night.

Scheherezade’s  beauty couldn’t save her, but her stories did. Night after night, she told him one fascinating story after another, always ending with a teaser or a cliffhanger.  The king kept her alive another day…to hear the end of the story.

After 1001 nights, he had fallen in love with her and remained faithful the rest of his days.

We all love stories–but many nonprofit organizations can’t tell their stories to save their lives.  Is yours one of them?  Here’s how to become the Scheherezade of nonprofits.

Six stories your nonprofit should tell

Andy Goodman tells us there are six stories every organization should be ready to tell.

  1. The nature of our challenge story: This story describes the problem that you are trying to address with your programs/services. “Too often, we express this as a number,” warns Goodman.
  2. The creation story: This is the “how we started” story. “It’s primarily for internal use,” Goodman says, “but I think everybody who works in an organization should know it.”
  3. The emblematic success story: This story shares your unique approach and why it works.
  4. The values story: These are the stories through which your organization shows how it lives out its core values
  5. The striving to improve story: This story is for internal use and says “sometimes we fall short, sometimes we outright fail, but we always learn from our mistakes and do better next time,” Goodman says.
  6. The where we are going story: This is a story that says if your organization does its job right, this is what it will look like in five to 10 years. (For example, the ADL’s “A World Without Hate.”)

Some of these stories are for your prospects and supporters.  Some are for your Board, staff, and volunteers.  All of them say more about your organization than any mission statement or set of numbers can do alone.

Put it in writing

Sometimes you’ll tell your story in person, or on video, or through graphics.  Often, you’ll tell it in writing.  When you do, heed these 10 Tips for Writing Your Nonprofit Story from Network for Good.  I particularly like #7!

3 Ways to Write Briefly

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So you’ve decided that for your audience, shorter is better.  You want to write briefer posts, use fewer characters in your tweet–get to the point.brevity

How do you do it?

There are really only three ways.

  1. Inspiration. You have a flash of insight and you write it down, and then you stop.
  2. Perspiration.  You write an essay, and then you go over it line by line, word by word, figuring out what’s really necessary.  You sweat.  You curse.  And you leave a lot of it out.
  3. Planning. You figure out ahead of time what you’re trying to say, to what audience, to create what effect.  You stick to one main point.  If you find you have multiple points, you now have several ideas for the price of one.

As you can probably tell, I vote for planning.

Which of these approaches is right for you?

 

 

 

How to Make Your Meetings Happy and Productive: 3 Questions You Can Ask

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We love talking with friends.  We hate going to meetings.  Why?

Too often at meetings and conferences, we’re listening to people we don’t know, talking about an agenda that doesn’t matter to us.

With friends, we can share not only thoughts and plans, but hopes and dreams–the things that make us get out of bed in the morning–the things that make us human.

If only we could invite people to bring their whole humanity to the conference room. But how?  Ask these three questions.

1. How You Got Here

“What is the winding path of your life, that has brought you to the work you do?” Hildy Gottlieb of Creating the Future asks this question at the beginning of every event.

Every time I begin a training or facilitation or even sometimes a keynote address, I ask people to turn to their neighbor and spend a few moments asking and answering those two questions. Every time, the room comes alive with chatter and laughter and gesticulating hands.

Try asking this question at the start of your next Board meeting.  See how happy and productive the rest of the meeting becomes!

2. The Awesome Thing that Happened

Marc Pitman, The Fundraising Coach LLC, begins training sessions with the question “What is something amazing that happened to you this week?”  Hildy Gottlieb asks the same question at the beginning of every Board meeting.  Why?  She quotes Hank Green:

There are two ways to make the world a better place. You can decrease the suck, and you can increase the awesome… And I do not want to live in a world where we only focus on suck and never think about awesome.

If your meetings feel like a great big time suck, start them with awesome.

3. What You Will Remember

You’ve come to the end of your panel, or conference, or meeting, and it was grand.  Really.  But you have phone and email messages and a long to-do list awaiting you.  How do you remember what you learned, and carry the experience into your daily work?

Hildy Gottlieb suggests giving yourself the rare pleasure of reflection.  At Creating the Future:

We ask folks to look over the notes they may have jotted down during the meeting, and to share what in particular stood out for them about the meeting.   It is again very grounding to learn about each other in this way. And it is also a great segue to ongoing email conversations that can carry us through to the next board meeting.

Talking about what matters to you will help you remember.  Listening to what other people care about will help you pull together as a group.  Knowing that you will make time to do both will make your meetings happier and more productive.

Try it and see!

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