Empowering Nonprofits - How Corporate Storytelling Can Dramatically Improve Fundraising For Nonprofits

ROBERT BATRAM - Corporate Storyteller, RB Comms

This article aims to provide actionable insights for NGOs on how to harness the power of corporate storytelling for more effective fundraising. It will emphasise the importance of strategic narrative-building, showcase real-world examples of storytelling in nonprofit reporting, and explain how early investments in storytelling can yield long-term financial benefits. The piece is crafted for executives in NGOs, offering them a clear path to enhance their communication strategies and inspire both donors and partners.

Many nonprofits do not realise that they are letting a valuable asset go to waste. Storytelling has shown to improve audience engagement and supporter commitment.

The situation is now so extreme that it has been granted its own term: ‘polycrisis’. This word, clumsy as it may at first sound, is nonetheless both useful and necessary. It was created by humanitarian workers who saw that with so many crises simultaneously affecting the world, they could no longer be meaningfully individuated. These crises, to name a few, include the war between Ukraine and Russia, the civil war in Sudan, the ongoing bloody struggle between Israel and Palestine, drought and desperation in the Sahel. As I write, unprecedentedly destructive flooding has descended upon eastern Europe, and separately, while no-one knows when the next global pandemic will strike, we are assured that it will. 

Combating these seemingly endless crises requires resources and expenditure by governments as well as humanitarian and development organizations. But there is a terrible paradox here: that while money is needed for rebuilding in whatever form, the economic consequences of these events have had such an impact that funding is difficult to come by. Fundraising has in itself become embedded in this crisis: more funds are needed more than ever, but less and less funding is available.

Fundraisers missing a valuable opportunity

To be frank, competition is tight for any aid money that is available, from whatever source, whether it be government and supra-government organizations such as the UN and the EU, or so-called ‘mass donors’, individuals who can only give what they can at any one time, but of whom there are a great many. Everything needs to be done to raise however much money that needs to be raised. And yet it seems that many fundraisers are missing a trick, and are failing to deploy a fundraising technique that is wide open to them.

This technique is almost as old as the hills, certainly as old as our most distant ancestors. I’m talking of course about storytelling.

Storytelling, when deployed properly, has the power – and it is a power – to absorb audiences in ways that no mere facts and data can. And Corporate Storytelling – that is, stories deployed in a work context and especially for fundraising, not only absorb, but encourage your readers to take action for positive change by supporting your cause.

Storytelling provokes powerful emotional reactions

Let me be clear: storytelling is for everyone. Stories have the power to move us – all of us – and change our behaviour, to shift us from indifference to positive, constructive action. That’s because the best stories evince emotional reactions. Every rational decision is underpinned – even driven by – an emotional response. Being able to evoke emotions through storytelling is a powerful tool even though there is often a temptation to overuse facts and figures.

The vast majority of readers and audiences find facts and figures too difficult to remember. They have their place though – and here are some.

Messages delivered as stories can be up to 22 times more memorable than just facts. Audiences retain 65-75 per cent of what a story contains, compared to only 5-10 per cent of the information listed in statistics.

People remember stories better than hard data

When reading straight data, only the language parts of our brains decode the meaning. But when we read a story, other parts of the brain become activated as well. These are the empathetic part of the brain, the sections that enable us to relate to other people, even those with whom we may have nothing in common. This means it’s far easier for us to remember stories than hard facts. With more and better storytelling, you are increasing audience engagement.

But that doesn't mean we can just write fairy tales. Of course not. Nor does it mean that they can just be 'wishy-washy' and about anything in particular – which of course, really means nothing in particular. Stories follow a set pattern and certain rules. Storytelling in particular and communications in general need a distinct focus and structure.

This structure should closely follow, and be described in, your organization’s communications and marketing strategies.

Audiences and key messages must be established first

Firstly, you and your organization need to decide – and I mean really decide! – two very important things: who are your target audiences, and what are your key messages. Without either of these, let alone both, your story will lack focus and purpose, and help no-one at all, least of all your beneficiaries.

Audiences and messages go together. The audiences will have been selected for your core organizational strategy but that doesn’t mean that storytelling is appropriate for all of them.

For instance, would a donor government necessarily want to read the same story as your mass membership base? Would they necessarily want to read any story at all? Does your mass membership base need to be split by demographic so that the most appropriate stories are targeted at the right people? Once you delve into this, you may realise you haven’t given it enough thought before.

Messaging frameworks for target audiences

The same with messaging. Do you know what you are saying to your audiences – really know? If not, or if you need clarification, there are a number of frameworks that I find very useful. It’s best to keep things simple, and my favourite is the ‘Who, What, Why, How’. This technique allows you to dive into your real motivation for targeting each audience, and for those messages to be as specific and tailored as possible. Believe me, it works.

For Corporate Storytelling, my view is that the ‘Hero’s Journey’ is the best story structure to follow.

The term was coined by the US academic Joseph Campbell, who analysed story after story from a multiplicity of cultures from a multiplicity of periods, spanning centuries. He identified seventeen stages of the full ‘Hero’s Journey’, the full structure from start to end.

Stages of the Hero’s Journey

Seventeen stages is, of course, far too many for our purposes. For our Hero’s Journey structure, for Corporate Storytelling for nonprofit fundraising, we need just three or four. We have only a few hundred words to work with, not the hundreds of pages that poets and novelists can set down.

So firstly we need to identify our hero. This is someone – usually an individual or family, although a community such as a village can also ‘qualify’ as a hero – who needs help, whose life is at threat of permanent stagnation in one form or another. He or she might not be able to access water, for example, or whose human rights are consistently being violated. The hero should be someone that your organization is trying to help, whose life you and your colleagues are changing, or have changed, for the better.

Your organization acts as mentor

It's important to note, therefore, that your organization can never be the hero. There’s a simple reason for this: your organization fulfils another function in the Hero’s Journey, that of the ‘mentor’.

The mentor’s role is to help effect change, a change that sufficiently impacts the life of the hero that their situation is (ideally) permanently improved. This, is the ‘transformation’. By definition, the transformation cannot take place without the intervention of the mentor, and can only be directed towards the hero.

A story following these principles might simply flow along the following the lines. The reader is introduced to the hero, with an outline of their context and challenge, which may seem intractable. We are then introduced to the mentor, whose expertise and purpose becomes clear when they are described. Finally the description of the life-changing impact will readily demonstrate the transformation that took place when the two worked together. The whole story could easily follow those three inflection points, sometimes divided into as many paragraphs.

Emotive, not technical language

A word needs to be said, of course, about language. There’s little point in identifying audiences and messages on the one hand, and then structuring your story around the Hero’s Journey, if your language is flat and dull.

The last thing you should be doing is deploying language that appears in technical reports, a language that very few people really understand (although many more think they do).

No, instead you must language that is emotive, language that tugs at the heartstrings. We need to be empathetic when writing these stories, because that it is the best way of encouraging people to relate with countless others.

As we’re turning the corner from summer into autumn, nonprofits should now be starting to think about what will be in their annual report for this year (2024). Annual reports are a curious product: in many countries organizations are obliged to publish them for transparency and compliance purposes. And yet – and this still astonishes me – so many of nonprofits do not leverage their annual report for fundraising purposes. I say ‘astonishes’, because it’s about the only comms product that nonprofits have a legal obligation to publish. If it’s going to be done anyway, why not exploit it as an opportunity – if you’re publishing a report already (which you have to) then it surely comes at no extra cost.

Dig Deep’s compelling annual report

One excellent example is the annual report by Dig Deep, a US-based NGO that focuses on water and sanitation. Dig Deep has projects across the US to ensure that every American has access to a toilet. Their annual report is clear and compelling, both in terms of presentation and message, with superb visuals.

And yes, it has story examples just a quick scroll away from the landing page. Everyone can relate to the need for good sanitation, and especially to the need for toilets, so why not share these stories?

Likewise, the Legal Aid Society, a nonprofit based in New York, publishes an annual ‘year in review’. This organization supports clients in three key areas: Civil Rights, Criminal Defense and Juvenile Rights. They successfully support people who would otherwise have no legal representation through lack of funding. Again, their annual report is peppered with quotes from clients – a form of story in themselves – along with profiles of donors, those organizations that help with financial contributions to their work.

This is an important point: many potential supporters will not necessarily know from where NGO funding is derived, and it will also help to reinforce the point that the organization is obliged to be assisted financially by other organizations. They also profile their legal experts, in whom, of course, all their clients place their trust.

Corporate Storytelling can lead to expenditure savings

It is my contention too that Corporate Storytelling can lead to expenditure savings for nonprofits, not just increased funding. If governments as donors are shown evidence of how previous interventions have worked, it will complement the existing efforts of organizations to establish sustainable and durable funding. After all, what if stories elucidated how things would have been had the status quo remained? It is likely that a form of intervention would have been required at some point, and, as with so much in life, costs (financial or otherwise) tend to escalate the longer a problem is left to go unchallenged.

This presents a golden opportunity for both fundraisers and storytellers, especially in this current era of tight funding: donors can be shown that early funding will not only allow any intervention to be completed early on, but will soon raise money in the long-run.

And in conclusion, that is precisely what every government donor is waiting to hear.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Robert Bartram  is a communications specialist with over 25 years of experience in journalism, government, and nonprofit sectors. His career began in UK politics, where he served as a Special Adviser to the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street before transitioning into journalism as a BBC broadcast journalist. He later applied his expertise in international development, working in communications roles for two UN agencies in Lebanon and as an editor for MSF International. With a deep understanding of storytelling’s power, Robert helps organizations craft compelling narratives that drive engagement, policy change, and social impact.

This article appeared in the October 2024 Issue of Impact Renactimento Magazine.

EDITOR IN CHIEF: Dr. Giulia R. Tufaro, ART DIRECTOR: Angela Melandri ADVERTISING & PARTNERSHIPS: Fiona Schmid