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Fundraising Tuesday: Where does your nonprofit keep its stories?

July 11, 2017 by Dennis Fischman Leave a Comment

storybankThe 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.

Collect Your Nonprofit Stories

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.

What is a Storybank?

“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.

  • Written–by the person who knows the story
  • Oral–notes from the story’s source, or a recording of them telling it
  • Photos
  • Videos
  • Quotable quotes

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 the
importance of what you do.
Then, ask (or even require!) staff, Board members, and volunteers who help you carry out your mission to report a good story every month. When something special is going on, make sure that someone is assigned to take photos and someone walks around interviewing people about their history with your nonprofit. Put it all in your story bank.

Tools to Have Stories at Your Fingertips

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.

tools they can useThe 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!

Tips for Banking Your Nonprofit Stories

  1. Think ahead about how you will use these stories. It’s possible to use them many different ways–and it’s a good idea! But if your sources can picture their stories–in print, or on your Facebook page, or on YouTube–they’re more likely to share them and shape them for an audience.

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.

You be the judge. Is storybanking right for your organization?

 

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Nonprofits, Sit Around the Campfire and Share Stories

December 12, 2016 by Dennis Fischman Leave a Comment

Where do you see yourself in five years?  That’s a classic interview questionStories at Work. But it’s a question that nonprofit organizations should ask themselves too–and the answer should be a story.

Not just a number. Saying “We’re going to serve 25% more people” is fine, but it says nothing about how you’re going to reach that objective.

Not just a statement. Saying “We’re going to offer art education to every student in our neighborhood” is inspiring,” but without a vision of how to get there, it may remain empty words.

Telling the Where Are We Going Story (as Andy Goodman of the Goodman Center calls it) is a way to share your vision, inspire your people, and make them all the heroes of the story. It’s the only way of describing the future that helps create it, too.

Where Are We Going?

I can think of two different ways of telling the story of what will happen if your organization succeeds. One is what the world will look like at the end. The other is the travelogue of how you intend to get there.

Take the statement we made above: “We’re going to offer art education to every student in our neighborhood.”

Story #1: Five years from now, a mom walks into our center. By her side a small boy stands, fidgeting, not meeting our eyes. “My son draws all the time, and he’s good,” Mom says. “But no one ever taught him how to get better.”

“We will,” you say. “Sign up right here. Son, do you draw with pencils, crayons, or computers?”

Story #2: Tomorrow, we’re cleaning up that classroom. Next week, we’re hiring an art teacher. He gets a budget to go buy supplies. In the mean time, we’re going to put the word out with flyers, email, and social media, in English, Spanish, and Chinese, that we have an art program for children who live in this neighborhood.

This year, we’ll arrange with the museum for free field trips. We’ll take children’s artwork and tell their stories to local businesses and raise money for the program. We’ll expand. In five years, everybody will know about it, and we’ll have enough teachers, supplies, and space to serve everyone who wants it. (That’s where Story #1 begins!)

Storytelling around the fire

Businesses Use Storytelling Too

“We’ve never had a policy manual. The way we pass along our values is to sit around the campfire and share stories.”

That’s the CEO of a $1.3 billion company talking.

Elizabeth Weil, in Fast Company magazine, interviewed many business leaders about the power of storytelling. The Where We Are Going story is a basic tool of corporate leadership.

“Leadership is about change,” says Noel M. Tichy, a professor at the University of Michigan Business School and the coauthor of The Leadership Engine (HarperBusiness, 1997). “It’s about taking people from where they are now to where they need to be. The best way to get people to venture into unknown terrain is to make it desirable by taking them there in their imaginations.”

In other words, by telling them stories.

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Fundraising Tuesday: Bank Your Stories

March 1, 2016 by Dennis Fischman 3 Comments

storybankThe 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!”

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.

Collect Your Nonprofit Stories

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.

What is a Storybank?

“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.

  • Written–by the person who knows the story
  • Oral–notes from the story’s source, or a recording of them telling it
  • Photos
  • Videos
  • Quotable quotes

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 the
importance of what you do.
Then, ask (or even require!) staff, Board members, and volunteers who help you carry out your mission to report a good story every month. When something special is going on, make sure that someone is assigned to take photos and someone walks around interviewing people about their history with your nonprofit. Put it all in your story bank.

Tools to Have Stories at Your Fingertips

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.

tools they can useThe 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!

Tips for Banking Your Nonprofit Stories

  1. Think ahead about how you will use these stories. It’s possible to use them many different ways–and it’s a good idea! But if your sources can picture their stories–in print, or on your Facebook page, or on YouTube–they’re more likely to share them and shape them for an audience.

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.

You be the judge. Is storybanking right for your organization?

 

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