How to never run out of stories

Embed story gathering in your organisational culture and you’ll never run out of impact stories to share.

We all understand the power of stories. But many charities find themselves in an urgent scramble to find a good case study or impact story when putting together a campaign, bid or report.

How do you make story gathering a habit, so that you always have a story on hand?

Show your team the difference a story makes

Bid-writing teams can make the mistake of viewing story collection as a ‘nice-to-have’ rather than a necessity. In reality, stories are as important as statistics when proving your impact and winning support.

To change this mindset, you need to show all your staff the power of storytelling. Share examples of how well-told stories have secured previous funding, increased donations, or attracted lots of publicity.

Make it everyone’s responsibility

From your CEO to your volunteers, everyone should be motivated and empowered to collect stories as part of their work. Explain how they can easily help with this in their particular role.

When storytelling is in your culture, your volunteers, frontline staff, and people manning the office phone will start to think: “this sounds like good feedback from a client,” or “what happened today was so encouraging, I’ll write it down,” or “this person’s story would be really good to share, I’ll ask their permission and take their details to pass to the comms team”.

Make it a routine

Start integrating storytelling into regular meetings and internal communications. Get your staff into the habit of sharing exciting or encouraging client stories they’ve heard.

Make it easy, quick, and rewarding for staff to record stories. You could use a shared folder where staff can drop stories at any time. You could try a ‘Story of the Month’ system to encourage staff to submit at least one story each month.

When it comes to the people you serve, add story collection to monitoring and evaluation or feedback forms. When you’re capturing statistics, also ask for brief personal experiences.

An interesting sentence written on a client’s feedback form gives you something to follow up - give them a call and they may be willing to share their story in more detail to use as a great case study.

Involve beneficiaries in telling their own stories

The most authentic, powerful stories are told by the people in them.

Providing your clients with the opportunity to speak about their experiences can be empowering for them, too. Offer platforms for them to share their narratives in their own words, whether through interviews, written testimonials, or social media shoutouts. Some people like the opportunity to 'give back' by helping to promote the charity after having a good experience.

Create a supportive environment where clients feel comfortable sharing. This could include offering one-on-one interviews, letting them share anonymously, or allowing them to share their story in a group setting with fellow clients who have gone through similar experiences.

Asking beneficiaries to take their own photos of the project or the situation from their point of view can be powerful too.

Remember to always ensure informed consent and be mindful of protecting people’s dignity and privacy.

Make gathering stories part of your culture and it’ll never be a scramble.

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Get in touch to explore how we could help you increase the impact of the stories you gather.