Storytelling is central to a nonprofit’s fundraising and marketing strategy. Stories help you introduce your mission, demonstrate the impact of your programming, familiarize donors and supporters with the people they are helping and mobilize people to take action. However, just telling stories without a plan isn’t going to move the needle.
I recently recorded a series of videos for AFP’s Microlearning Series. The series was titled: The W’s of a Digital Storytelling Strategy. The goal of the series is to present you with the questions you need to be asking internally before you start posting and engaging. For the next 5 weeks I’m going to publish a new video from the series.
The Who
The first video in the series is dedicated to the Who. No, not the band. You can watch the video or read the transcript just below it.
The Who Of Digital Storytelling
Hi there. I’m Ephraim Gopin, founder of 1832 Communications.
Digital storytelling should play an important part of your overall fundraising and marketing strategy, so today I’m going to start a series called ‘The W’s of Digital Storytelling.’ Today we’re going to look at the who, not the band.
Who’s Your Target Audience
The first thing to consider is who’s your target audience. When telling a story, you have many target audiences: your donors, volunteers, online followers, foundations, corporate partners and many many more. So you have to consider who’s the audience and then make sure you’re telling the right story for that audience.
Who’s Gathering Content
The second thing to consider is who’s gathering content. You have many many stories you could be telling. Who in your organization is going to find that content and make sure it gets out there. I would suggest it’s everybody. That could be programming staff, it could be volunteers, fundraisers, marketers, anybody who has access to stories should be gathering them.
Who’s Posting Content
The third thing to consider is who’s posting and engaging. So once you have those stories, who’s posting them, whether it’s on social media, email, blog, website or anything else.
Who’s in charge of posting them and who’s in charge of engaging the audience once that’s been posted, because people do react. They comment, they ask questions and you want to have a conversation with them, you want to engage them because it builds the relationship with your audience.
So when it comes to digital storytelling, you need to know who’s your audience, who’s collecting content and then who’s posting it and engaging your audience. Have a good day everybody.
Also, The Who in 2019:
PaulHamaker, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Year-end fundraising campaign time approaches. Is your website content prepared? Email marketing strategy ready to be implemented? Social media posts planned out? If your nonprofit wants to strengthen relationships with donors and raise more money, then your website, email and social media need to be in sync and ready to go when your campaign commences.
Not sure how to pull it all together? Contact me and let’s plan a successful year-end campaign together!
