Your nonprofit uses stories everywhere: Website, social media, fundraising appeals, enewsletters, annual reports, one-on-one meetings with donors, reports to funders and corporate partners. Basically, you should have a “story bank” which is always full and allows you to choose what you need for the correct outlet and campaign.

I recently recorded a series of videos for AFP’s Microlearning Series entitled: 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.

You can view the previous episodes: The Who of Nonprofit Digital Storytelling and The What.

The Where

There are two major questions related to “the where” of your nonprofit storytelling strategy. You can watch the video or read the transcript just below it.

The Where Of Nonprofit Digital Storytelling

Hi everyone. I’m Ephraim Gopin of 1832 Communications and today I’m continuing my W’s of Digital Storytelling series for AFP’s Microlearning moments.

Where To Find Content

In our last episode we discussed the ‘what’. Today we’re going to discuss ‘the where’ and there are two issues that we need to consider. The first is where to find content and that gets divided between internal and external. Internally you have stories that are being generated all the time and that you need to discuss. You need to ask program staff, volunteers, people in the field what’s going on. Bring me stories. Those stories then get pushed out to your followers, your supporters, your donors, foundation partners or corporate partners. But that’s internal.

There’s also the external side. You have a mission. You want to show people, not only talk. You don’t want to be always organization centric with your stories, all about us but you also want to show field expertise. One way to do that is to publish articles or stories that relate to your mission. Now where are you gonna find that information? Well, there’s the Internet. It’s a pretty big place. You could look on Twitter and if you follow the right people, you’re certainly going to get that kind of information, to you know, articles that you can look at. But the platform I use is Feedly. Feedly is a news aggregator. You simply type in the website where you want to read articles from and then it simply aggregates all the articles from that publication in one place. So you can simply scan headlines, find the articles you want to read, make sure they work within your content strategy and then you can push them out.

Where To Post Content

So now that we’ve dealt with where to find content, now you have to discuss where to post it. So you have stories, you have articles. Where to post it? Is it an e-newsletter? An annual report? A direct mail appeal at the end of the year? It could be on Facebook, or TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn.I think I covered most of the bases. But you get the idea. There’s plenty of places where to post your content and that goes back to your overall strategy and knowing who’s your audience and what to engage them with on each platform. As soon as you know all of that, you’ll know where to post the right story for the right audience. 

Happy fundraising everyone! Have a great day.

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!