Compelling stories help people remember and connect with your mission. If we want to change the world for the better and further our good causes, we must embrace the power of storytelling. Wondering how your nonprofit can move people to action through story?

Join our panel discussion to learn how to tell an effective story that gains supporters and raises more money for your organization.

      Learn how to craft an amazing story for your cause
      Avoid common mistakes when telling your story
      Find, create and use compelling images for nonprofit storytelling

The webinar will be on Tuesday June 18 at 1pm EDT. It’s free, with registration required. Even if you can’t make the live session, sign up and you’ll get the slides and recording to view on demand. We look forward to seeing your stories in action!

posted by: Caryn Stein

For nonprofits, it’s ironic that just as we have the ability to reach so many more people in the world, it’s increasingly tempting to opt for generic messages and efficiency. Resist this urge! If we want to inspire action and support for our causes, we must continue to appeal to the emotions of our fellow man. Passion. Hope. Empathy.

So how do you ensure your digital outreach has a heartbeat? Keep these tips in mind:

There are so many ways to get it wrong, yet as agents for social change, we have the best opportunity to get it right. Use the tools of technology to amplify the heart, soul and emotion of your cause, not avoid it. Your message and mission depend on it.

(Thanks to Allison McGuire for the inspiration for this post.)

posted by: Caryn Stein

Editor’s note: While nonprofitmarketingblog.com will get an updated look in the next few weeks, the team at Network for Good will continue to bring you the latest trends, tips and inspiration. Don’t worry—all of Katya Andresen’s posts will remain online and accessible just as before. Thanks for reading!

The entire report is worth a look, but here are a few especially important points for nonprofits:

Mobile usage continues to explode.
If you’re wondering whether mobile is important for your cause, consider this: there are now 1.5B smartphone subscribers. Plus, mobile traffic is projected to maintain its current rate of growth if not accelerate. To drive this point home, Meeker also reveals that smartphone users, on average, reach for their devices around 150 times per day. Wow!

Takeaway: It’s critical for your cause to be mobile friendly. Make it easy for constituents and supporters to find, interact and give to you via smartphones.

Rich content is ramping up.
Digital photos, video and audio are becoming easier to create, refine and share. To effectively compete for attention in crowded inboxes, social streams or browsing sessions, stand out with original content that embodies your message.

Takeaway: Incorporate multimedia formats in your online outreach to illustrate your impact, attract new donors and retain existing supporters.

Sharing and connecting diversify.
Social media platforms are still on the rise with sites like Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr showing significant growth. Though Facebook was the only platform in the report to see a drop in usage from 2011 to 2012, it still sees the lion’s share of usage.

Takeaway: Leverage social media to provide supporters another way to forge relationships with your cause and empower them to share your message with their networks.

We live in an age of unprecedented “findability”.
With such easy access to massive amounts of information online, it’s nearly impossible not to have full transparency—whether that’s coming from your organization or those talking about you.

Takeaway: Understand what is being said about your cause online. What do readers find when they search for you? It is critical to take the lead in being open about your organization to build trust and loyalty.

Other fascinating tidbits include emerging devices and formats that could prove to be powerful tools for nonprofit storytelling, fundraising events and reporting impact.

• Tablets are showing more rapid growth than smartphones; they may also become the predominant type of large-screen computing devices.
• Short-form and temporary content sharing (think Vine and Snapchat) are also seeing rapid adoption rates.
• Wearable technology and other connected devices—such as Google glass, smart watches and activity trackers—are poised to transform how we interact with all of the information available to us online.

You can view the full presentation below or via the KPCB website.

How do think these trends will affect your organization’s fundraising and how you fulfill your unique mission? Chime in with a comment below!—Caryn Stein

As I’ve often written on this blog, human beings are inherently empathetic. Our brains are hardwired to relate to other people’s experiences. When we witness or imagine someone acting, our neurons fire the same way they would if we were undertaking the same action. That’s why your heart races when your favorite athlete soars toward the basket or why the sight of a mother struggling to save her child from floodwaters causes you pain.

When we translate this empathy into helping another person, our brains have another reaction: We’re rewarded with happy feelings, thanks to a dopamine dose to our brain’s pleasure center.

That’s powerful stuff for nonprofit marketers.

You can read about how the science of giving relates to nonprofit marketing in Network for Good’s eBooks Homer Simpson for Nonprofits and Lisa Simpson for Nonprofits.  And now I’ve translated these same learnings for companies looking to engage their customers through cause marketing programs.  This new eGuide – The Brainiac’s Guide to Cause Marketing: How People’s Minds Really Work, and What That Means for Your Next Campaign – shows that if we get how people think, we can get them to do.

While the findings are geared toward a corporate audience, the lessons still apply to those of us who work in nonprofit marketing.  Plus this is a great resource to share with your corporate partners. You can demonstrate true value as a partner in helping companies deepen their engagement with customers through cause initiatives with your organization. 

The Brainiac’s Guide to Cause Marketing has lots of ideas to do just that.

Download your FREE eGuide now!

Did you know that you could have fantastic pro bono marketing experts helping your organization?  No?  Then you should attend the next Network for Good webinar.  Here’s the description.

Effective marketing is absolutely critical for organizations to succeed in winning hearts, minds and donations for their cause—yet 68% of nonprofits lack a dedicated marketing role. Does this sound like your organization? We can help.

Join Aaron Hurst, President and Founder of Taproot Foundation, and Meg Garlinghouse, head of Social Impact at LinkedIn, to learn how to harness the power of pro bono resources and professional networking to get top-notch marketing support for your nonprofit.

This free webinar will show you how to master these key skills:

-Learn what pro bono resources are available and the right way to work with them

-Find out how to use Taproot’s “Powered by Pro Bono” tools to find free marketing help

-Discover how to use LinkedIn to recruit professionals with marketing expertise for your board

Register here.

More recently, a reader wrote me with this nifty list, also from the military.  Always describe:

What’s what.
So what.
What next.

If you’re in a meeting that is focused on getting to the bottom of an important situation, these are great guides.  Encourage people to cite their headlines from the start.  It not only saves time, it ensures the communicator has a point in the first place.

This magazine was born over breakfast one year ago, when I showed Mark the moving short story I’d been reading on the metro that morning. It was a prize winner in the Mississippi Review written by my cousin, Elisabeth Cohen, and it launched an impassioned conversation about why storytelling matters.

The story was called “Irrational Exuberance,” which happens to be an apt term for the creative process. We fall in wild love with an idea, yet when we set it down in words, it becomes a deflated and devalued bit of what we imagined. This is the maddening twin truth of story. It packs such power that every other form of communication is flat and feeble by comparison. And yet, as Flannery O’Connor said it so well, “Most people know what a story is, until they sit down to write one.” A cracking good story could change the world, if only we could write it.

We are hell-bent on trying, along with you.  That’s because we spend much of our waking hours working with good causes, and we know that there are thousands of people among us who hold within them extraordinary stories.  That includes you. Maybe it’s the story of who you are or what you do or why you came to care for a cause. Maybe it’s an incomplete tale, a slice of everyday experience, that - if told - would transport us out of ourselves and thrust us into your shared space, never to be the same. We don’t know what your story is, but we do know this: You must summon the irrational exuberance to try to set it down. Because it will make a difference in a way that taglines, mission statements or technological bells and whistles cannot. It is a direct conduit to someone else’s heart, because it came from your own.

Because we think this is so important, we decided that morning to create Characters. It’s both a call to tell your story and celebration of good storytelling by people who are seeking to change the world.  The first law of story is to show, don’t tell, so we are not telling you how to write a story (as if we could). We are showing you stories that matter. We called it Characters because in these pages are authors - characters trying to do good in the world - along with the characters within their own experience and imagination. It’s a motley, entertaining and inspiring crowd you will most certainly want to meet. 

Thank you to everyone who brought together these characters. First and foremost, Elisabeth, who agreed to be its editor.  It is only fitting as she was the original character who started this story. Taughnee Stone and Jake Van Ness created the stunning design, and we are grateful for their talents. And last, but most important, thanks to everyone who had the courage to tell their story, in public, in these pages and on the Characters website. You show a cracking good story can be told, and that we can write it.

***

I used to have a recurring nightmare: I was a passenger on a plane that plunged downward in a sudden death-spin. I would awake from the dream breathless and stare at glow of the bedside clock till I was certain I wasn’t dying. The nightmare repeated with haunting regularity.

Then a crash really happened – but I wasn’t on board.

Vietnam Airlines Flight 815 crashed at Phnom Penh airport on September 3, 1997. I was a correspondent for Reuters in Cambodia at the time, and I covered the story.

It was monsoon season, and the pilot tried to land during heavy rain and low cloud cover. The plane missed the runway, struck a stand of palm trees just beyond the airport and exploded in a rice paddy. Everyone on board – 66 people – was killed except for one child pulled from the wreckage.

There wasn’t much left of the plane except the tail, which stuck up straight in the field like a monument. The rest was shattered into smaller, unrecognizable fragments. An ambulance had slid into the mud at the crash site, its front tire submerged among the electric green of new rice shoots. There was no one left to rush to the hospital. Bodies were scattered, one nearly completely covered by a cloth. All that was visible was a hand, the fingernails neatly trimmed, clean and white like half-moons. I will never forget it.

I have thought of the poor souls on that flight ever since.

As I stood among their remains, something fundamentally shifted. There was sorrow, and there was also solidarity. I would be among the dead someday, and I saw that time would come as sudden and unstoppable and complete as the events of that rainy afternoon. Why bother fearing it in a dream? It would be my reality, just as it was theirs. But that last moment would matter little in the end. The preceding ones deserved the attention. Because every person on that flight would be remembered for how they lived, not how they died. As will we all.

Someone once told me that recurring dreams cease when you’ve finally received the message they are sending. After the horror of the real plane crash, I never again dreamed of an imaginary one. Perhaps I had finally gotten the point of the dream. It was not to wake up and realize I wasn’t dead. It was to wake up to the fact I was very much alive and to do something about that fortune with the unknowable but numbered hours left on the clock.

Steve Jobs said in his exquisite commencement speech:

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

Nothing is more inspiring to me than that thought. The fact of our inevitable end is not a nightmare. It is a wake-up call, as bracing and emboldening as a billion-bugle rendition of reveille. Rise and shine, it blares. Do that big thing in your heart now, right now, this minute, because you are alive and able.

Online giving should be:

1. Social: Personal connections are essential, so donors must be able to easily share their cause with friends and family.  Giving is often a way to bring people together.  Says the guide, “Many families rally around charitable giving as the touch point to stay connected as generations grow up. This, in turn, provides a philanthropic home base as family members become separated geographically.”

2. Emotional: The giving experience should make donors feel closely connected to the cause.  Says the guide: “The act of giving is an expression of gratitude and a search for meaning, which in turn leads to happiness. In a series of studies at the University of California, people categorized as “grateful” reported feeling 25 percent more happiness and energy—and 20 percent less envy and resentment—than ungrateful people. Americans want to be happy. And they expect their experiences with philanthropy to help get them there.”

3. Easy: Online giving must be intuitive, easy, fun and personally satisfying. “Online technology is evolving from a purely transactional medium to a powerful tool for delivering an enhanced donor experience,” notes the guide.  “The winning tools in online philanthropy will be those that create a positive experience for donors—a trusted home for their giving—in a format that is intuitive, visual and as simple to navigate and use as Amazon.com, from a desktop or a mobile device.”

4. Reliable: “Transparency and transactional accuracy are essential, because in the end, charity is about trust.” Donors must trust the system and know their charitable investment dollars are being handled responsibly.

For more tips, you can get the full guide online here.