I worked with a client who was doing everything right, they had a clear mission and their content was broadly pretty good. However, they weren’t getting hitting their donation targets and recent campaigns had underperformed in terms of engagement and conversion. Through the work we were doing with engaging audiences, we were able to connect with individuals who had particularly inspirational stories. We incorporated these stories into the website and found this had a huge effect on engagement, suddenly real-life faces were at the forefront of the campaign instead of stock photos.

Storytelling is essential for charities because it helps to humanise the cause, connect and resonate with your supporters and create a response whereby they want to help others, through your charity. We’ll cover why storytelling matters so much, the importance of authenticity, crafting clear and impactful messages and the importance of interactive storytelling.

Why storytelling matters for charities

Build emotional connection with your audience so you are top of mind when they think of the cause you’re fighting for.

The charity sector is a crowded space and online content is being churned out at a fast pace, how can your storytelling help to differentiate your charity’s work from the next one?

Facts and figures are all well and good but it’s stories that we remember above anything else. Putting a face to the name is so incredibly powerful.

Storytelling content can be re-used because the core content can be moved into a podcast format, video, graphics, blog posts or newsletter content.

Importance of authenticity in storytelling

Authenticity builds trust with your audience, I cannot stress how important it is to be authentic, transparent and real in today’s world. Your audience is wise and savvy and they will switch off if they constantly see stock photos,

Save the Children does this nicely by threading through images of real children within landing page content. The way this content is written is noteworthy, straight to the point: problem – intervention – result. It can be very easy to exaggerate in storytelling but this comes across disingenuous and your audience will pick up on this and switch off.

Craft clear and impactful messages

When it comes to storytelling, it’s very easy to get lost in the creative direction of the storytelling, whether that’s the video format or the design of the page. However, it’s important to think about the core messaging behind your storytelling.

This could be simplified with 1-2 lines: “x was struggling with x, with our help, they were able to get the help they needed to find x, y and z. You can too, by calling our dedicated health advisors”

It’s more impactful to have one simple message that sticks, than many messages which get diluted down across multiple platforms.

It’s the same for calls to action too, with one clear call to action, there is no room for interpretation around how you get involved – plus it also makes things a lot easier for tracking and measuring success against!

Videos and pictures are essential to good storytelling

Imagery is so powerful when it comes to sharing the story of others.

Here are a few tips and tricks:

1. Portraits or self-portraits created by the individual or by their friends and family could be a powerful way to give the power and creative steer to the person being depicted. I think of the amount of portraits I’ve seen at the National Portrait Gallery which have a very real and raw style to them because it was created by the individual themselves or people very close to them.
2. If your subjects aren’t happy with their identity being disclosed, you can commission an illustrator to produce imagery. Visuals like CAFOD’s comic book style page, tells the story of a boy from Uganda called Fabiano who has to collect water three times a day. It’s simple and beautiful.

Whichever approach you do, start to articulate your visual language and how this will show up across different platforms, including website, social media platforms and newsletters.

User-generated content is powerful

User-generated content is very powerful, Shelter have been trailblazers in storytelling to raise awareness of homelessness. In the video below, they ran a series of workshops to create a poem, read out by nine speakers, all involved were affected by homelessness in some way adding to the authenticity of not only the way the poem was written, but the way it was spoken.

Really important that you don’t try and steer the ship too heavily on this, one of the best things about storytelling and using user-generated content is that you have to approach it from a journalist perspective, how you can amplify this individual’s shared experience in a way that is honest and true to them.

Measuring the impact of your storytelling

As with any effort with content creation, it’s important to set specific goals around what you want to be able to achieve, some examples:

• increase awareness
• increase donations
• grow the volunteer base

For each goal, you have to be clear on how you will track the engagement with content, whether it’s through video views or number of reposts,

For content assets like videos, it might be worthwhile putting the content in front of some of your target audience to see how it might affect their spending behaviour. Alternatively, creating ways to engage and get feedback from your audience online is also effective, whether that’s a feedback box on your website or a community manager managing comments on social media platforms.

Storytelling is a must-have for any charity

Storytelling through your charity’s website and social platforms is an incredibly powerful way to democratise the content on your site and to amplify the intervention and great work you Storytelling needn’t be a big and scary process but more of an opportunity for your charity to amplify your message through content. Once you get clear on your message and the call to action, there is space to get creative and to do something really exciting with this!

With 12+ years experience in delivering digital content and strategic input for charities, public sector and medium-large organisations, we understand the complexities that come with organising and improving your content and we break it down into something small and actionable. Book a free consultation call today to get started.