Lest you have any doubt about this magical power I’m talking about, let me share what just happened with PWA’s email newsletter.

At our February board meeting last Tuesday, Julie Meyer, the executive director, told us about one woman, Shonda, who had received gifts for her child and herself through our “adopt a family” Christmas program. Julie was clearly touched by Shonda’s gratitude, and so I told Julie she should write up Shonda’s story for our e-newsletter, but that she needed to do it soon, because mid-February is a little late to be talking about Christmas.

Julie jumped right on it and asked her administrative assistant Mary Berkley Whitley to work with Shonda’s case manager Kelly Newsome to write up the story. They whipped it together and emailed it to our supporters on Friday. Here’s the story. The subject line was “Hearts Were Touched During the Holidays.”

I’m sharing this with you for two reasons. First, it’s a great example of how to combine storytelling and gratitude into one email newsletter. PWA protects the privacy of both its clients and the “Secret Santas” through this program, so we can’t really connect grateful clients and generous supporters one by one. But by telling Shonda’s story of gratitude for PWA and its supporters, we as an agency can pass on our gratitude to everyone who participated in the program this year (more than 60 children in families affected by HIV/AIDS were adopted by PWA supporters as part of the program). All of the Secret Santas on the email list can see the good they’ve done by hearing Shonda’s story. It’s exactly the kind of feedback that donors want after giving. It’s worth sharing with you for that reason alone.

Now here’s the second reason, and the one that really drives home the power of this approach.  As soon as I saw the email newsletter on Friday, I emailed Julie and said “I bet someone will want to pay for Shonda’s nursing exam.”  In the story (read it now if you haven’t yet), Mary Berkley and Kelly mentioned Shonda’s inability to take the nursing exam simply as a way to set up her financial situation and how, despite her best efforts to support herself and her son, she was still falling short and desperately needed the help of PWA and its supporters to provide for her baby, especially at Christmas. There was no covert attempt on their part whatsoever to ask for additional support for Shonda.

This morning, the next business day after the email newsletter went out, Julie received email messages from two people on the mailing list, offering to help pay for Shonda’s nursing exam. One was a nurse herself and the other has many nurses in her family. I don’t know how this story will eventually turn out, but the fact that two people responded to the email doesn’t surprise me at all. Donors respond positively to real stories about real struggles and to gratitude, especially gratitude from someone like Shonda, who’s struggling with problems that many of us can’t imagine. The nursing connection was obviously a very powerful motivator for these donors too.

Would these same two supporters have responded to an email from PWA that asked point-blank for someone to help Shonda with her nursing exam fees? Maybe . . . or maybe not. By asking directly for something in a thank-you note, I believe you risk diluting much of the goodwill you create with your gratitude. I think the fact that this was a pure “thank-you” email actually made it much more likely that donors would respond in the way they did.

I want to point out that Julie, Mary Berkley and Kelly are not professional writers nor do they consider themselves natural-born storytellers. In fact, it’s taken a quite of bit of coaxing from me to get them to embrace this approach, but now that they have, they are writing wonderful stories about the people PWA helps and their stories are touching PWAs supporters in new ways with every piece of communications the agency sends out. You do not need a professional communications staff to make this work for you! (I’m teaching our popular storytelling webinar this Thursday if you want to learn how).

I’d love to hear your reaction to this story I’ve now shared with you . . .  what’s your take on using storytelling and gratitude as nonprofit marketing strategies?

February Special: Get a Pass *Plus* to Nonprofit Marketing Guide this month and get a free copy of the great new nonprofit marketing book from Sarah Durham called “Brandraising.” Get the Details Here.

Several advertising studies show the same thing. As described in Brand Immortality: How Brands Can Live Long and Prosper by Hamish Pringle and Peter Field, the UK-based Institute of Practitioners in Advertising analyzed 1,400 case studies of successful advertising. They compared the profitability boost of ads that appealed primarily to emotions versus those that relied on rational information, like statistics.  Ad campaigns with purely emotional content outperformed the rational only content by two-to-one. Ads that were purely emotional also performed better than ads with mixed emotional and rational content, though by a much smaller margin.

These results affirm what Dr. Robert Heath of the University of Bath’s School of Management found in 2006.  He found that U.S. and U.K. television advertisements with high levels of emotional content made the advertising successful, not the message itself. The emotional ads enhanced how people felt about brands being advertised. Ads with low levels of emotion had no effect, even when they were factual and informative.

So why do so many nonprofits still insist on a “just the fact, ma’am” approach to nonprofit marketing?

On Tuesday, September 29th, I’m teaching a writing workshop via webinar where we’ll look at ways to add more emotion into everyday nonprofit marketing and fundraising text to make it more effective with your supporters. We’ll also look at using both negative and positive emotions and discuss the differences in those approaches, while also exploring the different emotional buttons that successful fundraisers and volunteer recruiters most often push.

This is brand new webinar, so I hope you’ll join us on Tuesday! As always, registration is $35 a la carte, or it’s included in your All-Access Pass.

P.S. Check out the Neuromarketing Blog for more on “where brain science and marketing meet.”

Get all of our live and recorded webinars for 90 days for just $145 with the All-Access Pass. Includes archive of the last three months too! Get the Details and Order Here.

“A group of fellow cancer patients and myself recently formed PMP Research Foundation to promote awareness and fund research for our rare form of cancer. Having only a for-profit business background, this whole nonprofit world has been a learning curve. Finding your site has been great. I’ve watched a couple of archived seminars and have attended two live webinars so far.

I like the format of the webinars — the slides are always excellent, the timing is perfect to glean the important details, and the briefing fits into my busy day. I’ve taken advantage of many suggestions which have been implemented via our new email and newsletter campaigns. I’m glad we purchased an All-Access Pass and feel the investment is well worth the money and time spent.”

Lisa Luciano
President, Board of Directors
PMP Research Foundation

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“I just wanted to let you know how much I’m enjoying your webinars! I started in my very first non-profit in mid-January. I had so much to learn! So I’ve signed up for as many webinars and teleconferences as I can manage. Of the different ones I’m taking in, yours are hands-down the best. The information is right up to date, you lay everything out clearly and you’re so positive and encouraging. Thanks for all the help!

P.S. I was asked to put together a PowerPoint presentation for an upcoming board meeting. Even with compressed photos, it took forever to send in an email. But then I remembered that you recommend SlideShare. So I opened an account and uploaded it there.  The Board members (scattered across the country) were told where they could view it – and we’ve had other traffic besides (free publicity!). So huge thank yous to you!”

Barb McMahon
Director of Communications
Pediatric AIDS Canada

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“The webinars have been great for me, especially as I just started in this position last December (with no real direct experience in the non-profit world). I really appreciate what I consider my guaranteed weekly learning time!

The “4 page annual report” webinar was terrific, and I am using it as my template to put our report together. The organization of the information and detail included means that it’s pretty much a step-by-step guide I can use to piece it all together. The fact that the webinar included example layouts really helped me envision what I wanted our report to look like as well.

I feel that way with all the webinars I’ve attended – at the very least, it’s a great chance to sit and focus on one important topic, and I always get a minimum of one or two really great ideas that make it an hour very well spent.”

Jude Walton
Community Relations Coordinator
Avalon Housing, Inc.

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All-Access Pass Summer Special!
Only 39 Passes Left

We are offering 75 Summer Passes to the Nonprofit Marketing Guide webinar series for just $75. The pass will give you access to all of our live and recorded webinars from now through August 31, 2009. New pass holders only – no renewals, please!

Only 39 passes are left. Get yours now! You must use this special link for the Summer Pass.

Get all of our live and recorded webinars for 90 days for just $145 with the All-Access Pass. Includes archive of the last three months too! Get the Details and Order Here.

Problem is that many of them are just plain awful.  I see bad profiles falling into four categories:

1. Tedious Bio Syndrome. It’s the narrative equivalent of a resume. Or worse, it starts when they were born. Total snoozer.

2. Too Shallow and Wide. The profile brushes over so many different aspects of the person’s life that we don’t get enough interesting detail about any of them. The cardboard cutout equivalent of a human being.

3. Gushing Flackery. The worst kind of profile that is so obviously written just to kiss up (OK, we know you are just trying to say Thank You, but really, it’s too much). Be nice to your VIPs, but don’t overdo it.

4. Mildly Entertaining, But Pointless. It might be a nice story, but why are you telling it? If your reader doesn’t understand why you are telling her about this person and how it is supposed to make her feel or what it is supposed to motivate her to do herself, then what’s the point?

That’s the bad news. The good news is that I have identified seven different formats for personal profiles that are actually interesting and will therefore do what profiles are intended to do: inspire others!

I’m offering two free ways for you to get some tips on how to write better profiles.

• Magic Keys Radio & Podcast This Friday

On Friday, May 22 at Noon Eastern (9:00 a.m. Pacific), Claire Meyerhoff and I will be hosting another live edition of Magic Keys Radio and we’ll be talking about how to write good donor profiles. You can listen live and call/chat in your questions or you can download the podcast (an MP3 recording) right after the show ends.

• Free Webinar on Tuesday, June 9

On Tuesday, June 9 at 1:00 op.m. ET (10:00 a.m. PT), I’m teaching How to Write Moving Personal Profiles about Donors, Clients, and Other Supporters. It’s free, but you do need to register in advance. We’ll talk about seven different ways to write engaging, dramatic profiles about the real people around you.  We’ll also explore some interviewing techniques that will help you uncover the most interesting elements of a person’s story. Get the details and reserve your spot.

Get all of our live and recorded webinars for 90 days for just $145 with the All-Access Pass. Includes archive of the last three months too! Get the Details and Order Here.

The problem, of course, is that providing solid results is a lot easier said than done. Many of the issues that we work on in the nonprofit world will never be “solved” and those baby steps we are taking toward those big solutions sometimes don’t feel all that significant. Much of what nonprofits do simply can’t be measured effectively in numbers. Much of our success also comes from partnerships or helping other people who are really doing the hard work in their own lives. Taking credit for those results can be tricky too.

One of the better solutions to this results dilemma is to use storytelling to give donors examples of the good work you are doing — examples that are really emblematic of your larger accomplishments, especially when those larger results are hard to quantify or explain.

I’m teaching a webinar on Tuesday, May 19 called Boasting without Bravado: How to Share Your Success Stories.  During the one-hour webinar, you’ll learn how to

• separate your real accomplishments out from all of your activities
• emphasize the parts of your success stories that excite your supporters the most
• take credit by giving credit to others
• build a choir that sings your praises
• use stories to make complicated or esoteric accomplishments easier to grasp
• capitalize on your current successes to build support for future work

We’ll review not only how you write up success stories, but also where and how you can use them to encourage your existing supporters to stay with you and to connect with new supporters too. I hope you’ll join us on Tuesday!

P.S. Get the All-Access Pass now and you can attend the Success Stories webinar, Mal Warwick’s webinar on writing successful fundraising letters (Thursday, May 21) and everything else we host for the next 12 weeks, all for $97.

Get all of our live and recorded webinars for 90 days for just $145 with the All-Access Pass. Includes archive of the last three months too! Get the Details and Order Here.

Guidestar is now working with GreatNonprofits to share user comments about charities with each other. Comments posted on one site will appear on the other as well.  I did a quick check and the nonprofits that are “most reviewed” and have the “highest ratings” are nearly all local or regional nonprofits, which means that they are actively asking their supporters to write reviews, rather than waiting for it to happen naturally. Smart cookies!

Instead of getting panicky about the idea of negative comments about you being posted there, use this instead as an opportunity to collect stories from your supporters, in their own words, about how fabulous you are.

Here is how you can take advantage of this: Go to the  GreatNonprofits Welcome Page for nonprofits and set up your account. This will let you add text, photos, video, etc. to your page. Then email all of your fervent supporters the comment link and ask them to write a little blurb for you.

Project Homeless Connect in San Francisco is the most reviewed nonprofit on the site today and it looks like nearly all of the reviews were written by volunteers. On their website, in the menu, is a link called “Tell Your Story” that goes directly to the GreatNonprofits page. GreatNonprofits also gives you a badge that you can put on your site to collect and promote your reviews, if you want to take it up a notch. You can also use the reviews in other marketing pieces by simply identifying them as “GreatNonprofits.org User Reviews.”

How long will it be before the average donor knows where to go to check for reviews? Still quite awhile, I bet. But why not get out front and use GreatNonprofits and GuideStar to present positive testimonials to prospective donors and to reinforce the great work you are doing with your current supporters?

Thanks to @rosettathurman’s retweet of @boardsource for the tip that led to this post. For more, also see Tactical Philanthropy’s recent post on Sharing Information to Drive Impact

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Photo by
aymlis on Flickr

Profiles of donors, volunteers, clients, and other supporters are a staple of nonprofit newsletters. You can also use them in your annual reports and other marketing materials.

Today I posted 25 different questions you can ask when interviewing the people you’d like to profile. These questions will help find that special something about the person that makes them really worth profiling and that will be of keen interest to your newsletter readers (remember, you still need to write for your reader, even when you are profiling someone special in your organization!).

I’ll be sharing lots of tips on how to write personal profiles and how your nonprofit can use them during the webinar on Thursday, November 20, 2008 called How to Write Moving Personal Profiles about Donors, Clients, and Other Supporters.

P.S. Still looking for your thoughts on the 2009 Weekly Webinar Series . . . Here’s the Quick Survey.

Get all of our live and recorded webinars for 90 days for just $145 with the All-Access Pass. Includes archive of the last three months too! Get the Details and Order Here.

How to Write Moving Personal Profiles about Donors, Clients, and Other Supporters

It’s This Week’s Webinar

Thursday, November 20, 2008
1:00 p.m. ET (10:00 a.m. PT)
Registration is $35.

Nonprofits use personal profiles (aka personality profiles) all the time. You’ll often find them under headings like Volunteer Spotlight, Friends of (Your Issue), and Meet the Board.  Nonprofits also use profiles as one form of storytelling to put a specific human face on their programs, accomplishments, needs, and advocacy positions.

Every good profile starts with an interview. Here are some tips I’ve learned after writing many a profile over the years.

Don’t ask for information you can easily get elsewhere. Do your homework. Don’t ask your board chair where she works or what her title is. Don’t ask a donor how much he has given your organization. You should already have that information. It’s OK to ask people to confirm the spelling of their names or if the total amount donated over several years sounds right to them, but this should be presented as quick fact-checking, not as part of the interview.

Be flexible about the format. You can get the information you need whether you conduct the interview in person, over the phone, or via email. I find it’s actually easier to take good notes while interviewing over the phone, rather than in person, because you don’t have to worry about maintaining eye contact, and I can type much faster than I can write. People who are a bit nervous about being interviewed often prefer email, because it gives them time to mull over their answers.

Prepare a list of questions, but be willing to stray from it. Come up with some good questions to get the conversation going, but don’t be afraid to ask new questions or take the interview in a different direction, as long as you are getting good details and quotes. Listen for intriguing details or good sound bites and follow them.

Ask open-ended questions that contain “emotional” words. Fact-filled profiles simply aren’t as interesting as those full of feeling and emotion. To get your subject to provide you with good anecdotes and quotes, ask questions that are variations on “How did that make you feel?” Try questions like “What has surprised you most about . . . ?,” “What upsets you most about . . . ?,” and “What do you remember most about . . .”

If you are writing the story with a specific purpose in mind, ask some leading questions. For example, if you are profiling Mrs. Smith because she put your nonprofit in her will, and you want to encourage others to do the same, you need to ask Mrs. Smith some leading questions to elicit the right kind of quotes. For example, you might ask, “Why did you select our nonprofit specifically when you could have left your gift to any group?” and “How did you feel after you made the decision?” Asking donors about the kind of legacy they want to leave behind can also work well.

Give the interviewee control over the content. This is not hard news or “gotcha” journalism. You are profiling people because you care about them and because they care about your cause. Ask if your profile subject would like to see the story you write before it is published (most will say yes). Give them a few days to get back to you with any changes they feel are important. This ensures not only that you have your facts straight, but that your supporters are pleased with the way they are portrayed in your communications.

Want More? Writing great personal profiles that you can use in marketing your nonprofit is the topic of this Thursday’s Nonprofit Marketing Guide webinar, “How to Write Moving Personal Profiles about Donors, Clients, and Other Supporters.”

P.S. Tell me what webinars you want to see on the 2009 schedule. It’s a quick survey, and there are free webinar passes up for grabs!

Get all of our live and recorded webinars for 90 days for just $145 with the All-Access Pass. Includes archive of the last three months too! Get the Details and Order Here.

Online Writing: Dos and Don’ts of Writing for the Web and Email

Webinar This Wednesday,
November 12, 2008
1:00 pm Eastern (10:00 am Pacific)
Learn More and Register

Maybe not, if you believe what Jakob Nielsen says about writing styles for print versus the web.

Neilsen (whose Alertbox e-newsletter is a must-read) writes:

In print, you can spice up linear narrative with anecdotes and individual examples that support a storytelling approach to exposition. On the Web, such content often feels like filler; it slows down users and stands in the way of their getting to the point.

Web content must be brief and get to the point quickly, because users are likely to be on a specific mission. In many cases, they’ve pulled up the page through search. Web users want actionable content; they don’t want to fritter away their time on (otherwise enjoyable) stories that are tangential to their current goals.

Instead of a predefined narrative, websites must support the user’s personal story by condensing and combining vast stores of information into something that specifically meets the user’s immediate needs. Thus, instead of an author-driven narrative, Web content becomes a user-driven narrative.

In my webinars and workshops on nonprofit websites, I talk about organizing your site around the answers to the top three questions visitors will have and the top three actions they’ll want to take. But in that same course, I also talk about the importance of telling stories on your homepage as a way to give people solid examples of exactly what it is you do.

So if we believe what Nielsen says (and I almost always do), how can good online writing and storytelling co-exist?

I believe the answer is through good page layout. Instead of throwing a story into the middle of an article that is otherwise very how-to oriented or full of bullets, put that story in its own column or box. Let the story support the fact-based article and vice versa, but don’t meld them into one.

What do you think? How do you blend the web user’s need for speed with emotional storytelling? Leave a comment to add your perspective.

Want more? Attend Wednesday’s webinar on how to write for the web and email.

Get all of our live and recorded webinars for 90 days for just $145 with the All-Access Pass. Includes archive of the last three months too! Get the Details and Order Here.

I’m teaching
Nonprofit Storytelling: How to Write Your Nonprofit’s Best Stories
this Wednesday, September 10, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern (10:00 a.m. Pacific).

Join the webinar for just $35.

Every nonprofit has great stories to tell, although it’s not always clear exactly how and when you should tell those stories.

One story that ALL nonprofits should tell is your “founding” story or “how we got started” story.

One of my favorite founding stories is the one on Heifer International’s website. It’s buried in the site, but I bet it’s a story that staff tells all the time when introducing the organization to new supporters.

“These children don’t need a cup, they need a cow” was Dan West’s reaction to ladling out food rations to starving kids. What he did next, and how it grew into Heifer International is a great story for several reasons:

It’s about real people.

It’s about real emotions.

It’s about real actions that those real people took based on those real emotions.

Here is another founding story that appeared as Ruth Sheehan’s column in the Raleigh News and Observer this week: “Paying It Forward for Real” is the story of how the Caring Community Foundation came to be (Thanks to my buddy Claire Meyerhoff for the tip).

Once again, you’ll see that what makes this story so effective is that it’s about just a few specific, real people, reacting with real emotion to a situation (cancer in this case) and doing something concrete about it.

Note what these founding stories are NOT about:

– All the different organizational permutations that brought them to where they are today.

– Generic people who had generic ideas and generic responses ala “A bunch of people in the community had an idea and started coming to some meetings about it.”

– Lots of irrelevant detail that detracts from the core message. It’s sometimes hard to boil down a founding story when you are in the process of founding an organization, but with a little time and hindsight, you should be able to find those essential elements that explain why and how you came to be.

You can learn more about nonprofit storytelling during this Wednesday’s webinar. Details and Registration Here.

Get all of our live and recorded webinars for 90 days for just $145 with the All-Access Pass. Includes archive of the last three months too! Get the Details and Order Here.