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Five Steps to Starting Your Nonprofit’s Storytelling Campaign

A few months ago, someone asked me about how to start a storytelling campaign for her nonprofit. She wanted to spread the word about how the nonprofit helps young people who are blind and have developmental disabilities. She teaches gardening and horticulture and helps her students to run a business and deal with a few clients. I gave her a basic strategy for a storytelling campaign that used different social media channels, as well as a website and blog.

Other nonprofits that want to tell their story can do more than just launching a newsletter or being active on Twitter. If you see your ongoing communication as one long story — think of it as a long-running TV series

This is a strategy any nonprofit could use to tell the stories about their efforts and the communities they serve. The goal is to help potential donors and volunteers get to know the people they’re helping. If you can put a face and name to your work, people are more likely to give.

This is one of the reasons nearly all fundraising letters have you “meet” one of their recipients. Someone who needs your help, and who has been helped by that organization. And you can help more people just like this one just by donating $10 per month.

1. What stories do you want to tell?

Before starting a storytelling campaign, you need to figure out what story you actually want to tell. A story can have a few parts to it, so you can have more than one focus.

In fact, you could think of your story as a TV show, where there is usually an A story, a B story, and a C story. The A story gets the most attention and time, the B story gets the second most, and the C story gets the least. In a 22-minute sitcom, the A story may get 9 – 11 minutes of storytime, the B story gets 6 – 8 minutes, and the C story gets 3 – 5 minutes.

So your A story could be how you help people through a meal delivery service, your B story could be your mobile health clinic, and your C story could be your future plan to open an apartment building with in-house medical facilities.

That means your meal delivery service gets the most “air time,” the mobile health clinic gets the second most, and the apartment building gets the least. That doesn’t mean you don’t talk about the B and C stories, or that they’re always second and third on the list of your blog articles and videos. Rather, it means they get to be the sole focus of your attention once in a while.

2. Identify your channels

Now you need to know where you want to promote your story. And you do that by figuring out where your target audience is. Essentially, you want to “fish where the fish are.”

If you do a lot of events where people are likely to share photos of themselves, then you want to be on Instagram. If you don’t have a huge visual component to your storytelling, then you can skip Instagram. If your audience is older, you should focus more on Facebook and skip Snapchat.

But you can also double up in a few places. Since Facebook owns Instagram, you can automate your posting between both networks. If you post things to Instagram, you can set it up so those things automatically post to Facebook. You can even use an automation service like IFTTT (If This, Then That) or Zapier to automatically push photos to Twitter.

Just don’t go nuts. Limit the number of social channels you join, rather than joining as many as you can. You may have heard a lot about Clubhouse, Fireside, Snapchat, and every other new tool people are buzzing about, but that doesn’t mean they’re worthy of your attention.

Instead, pick the ones that are well-established and show some signs of longevity. I normally recommend Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and a blog for most nonprofits. You could also use LinkedIn, but I typically advise against it unless your nonprofit deals with work — teaching reading and life skills, helping people develop skills to find a job, educational institutions, etc.

You’ll also want a weekly or monthly newsletter — your newsletter is where you’ll collect the email addresses of your donors, volunteers, and supporters. This list is your lifeblood because these are the people who keep you in business and help you support your mission.

3. Your channels will affect your content.

What do you have the capabilities and time to produce? What does your audience want? Do you have a lot of people who watch and share videos? Or do they prefer reading long-form content? You can figure that out just by asking them with a survey.

Once you know what they would prefer, start giving it to them. Maybe it’s a weekly 700-word blog article, maybe it’s daily photos of your birds of prey, or a weekly podcast interviewing other people in your nonprofit’s mission.

At the very least, I do recommend photos and blog articles. The blog helps with search engine optimization and your search rankings, but this is where most of your storytelling is going to happen. Your blog is where you get to explore the nitty-gritty of your work, explain your positions on policy decisions, analyze how new laws and regulations affect you. It can also provide you content for a newsletter.

And if you have the time and capabilities, consider a podcast or video series about your nonprofit’s greater mission. For example, if your nonprofit is about rehabilitating injured birds of prey, start an educational video or podcast series that teaches people about birds of prey, the different kinds of birds there are, and how they live.

4. How will you tell your stories?

We’ve done the easy part, now is the hard part. How do we tell your stories? Do you tell an individual’s story? Do you tell the group’s story? Your organization’s origin and success story?

Start with what amount to case studies and testimonials. Take one person who is involved with your organization, talk about their experience before they got involved, what they learned, and how it’s helped them afterward.

For example, your story would look like this: John had a problem. He was 100 pounds overweight, constantly tired, and was at risk of diabetes. He had tried different diets, but nothing had worked, and he was worried he was going to have serious illnesses in a couple years. So John started an exercise program at Major Payne’s Get Fit Boot Camp. In 9 months, John had lost 100 pounds, had plenty of energy, and reduced his risk for diabetes by 82%. He even grew back all his hair, married a supermodel, and won the lottery.

Basically, you can build an entire campaign on stories like this. You know what you need to write and tell, and you can place each of them into your A, B, and C stories.

And you can break them up so that for every three A stories you write, you write two B stories and one C story.

You can produce a video or shoot some pictures, write a blog article, share it on your chosen social channels — share it more than once in a week; three or four times per week is perfectly acceptable — and produce those stories once or twice a week.

5. What is your storytelling campaign’s throughline?

Throughline is another TV term. It’s the underlying theme of a movie or TV show. It’s not the story, but it’s the motivation behind the story.

For example, the throughline of the Captain America movies is “Cap hates bullies.” So everything we see him do is based on his intense dislike of bullies.

Your throughline is related to the purpose of your organization. It could be education, it could be housing, it could be creating awareness of a particular disease or societal problem.

If your purpose is education, your stories will show how you’re educating your target audience, such as adult literacy, helping at-risk youth, or animal rescue. Your stories won’t be about teaching, mentoring, or saving, but that will always run through your stories.

For example, you won’t do a video on “this is how we saved this dog” or even “The 12 steps we take to save dogs.” But you’ll write about a dog that you saved, cleaned, and adopted out to a loving family.

So your stories should include your throughline. Even if you were doing a “meet our staff” story, you would want to focus on how they help fulfill your purpose and mission.

Starting a storytelling campaign can be a little difficult, but if you just start with the basics — pick a couple channels, decide what story to tell, and follow your throughline — you’ll quickly figure out what to do and how to do it.

Don’t worry if creating stories is hard or you’re not very good at first. You’ll learn a lot, you’ll get better, and pretty soon you’ll be whipping out those stories, editing those videos, and writing those blog articles like they’re second nature. As long as you build a good storytelling campaign framework, you can easily see what works and what doesn’t work, and you’ll have a formula to follow with every new story you write.

Photo credit: Tumisu (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)
Photo credit: StockSnap (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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Should I Create Multiple Twitter Accounts?

A personal branding question I’m regularly asked by authors, artists, and other creative types is whether someone should have multiple Twitter accounts. In fact, someone posted that very question to an audio theater Facebook group I belong to:

Looking for opinions regarding Twitter: Is it better to have separate accounts for each show you’re creating, or just one main company account that posts on behalf of all shows? I’ve seen it both ways so I was interested in seeing which way people like more.

Well, to start with, you may have seen it both ways, but those “more than one account” people are probably wrong. I’ve seen people run red lights, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us should do it.

I’ve seen people create Twitter accounts for movies, TV shows, books, plays, and any other creative venture you could name. People get excited about a project, and they want to build some buzz around it, so they create social media accounts around that one project.

That’s not the best way to go about things, because those projects typically have a short life, which means the Twitter accounts do, too. Then, the creators are off onto another creative venture, creating yet another social media account.

So let me just say this: Create a single account for yourself or your creative group as the brand. Focus all your energy into building that account.

Think of your favorite actor. Don’t you follow them through their variety of performances? Wouldn’t it be a pain in the ass if you had to re-find them for each character they played? Every time a show or movie ends, you have to wait to find out what their next role is, follow them, and soak in all the goodness, until that role ends. And then you repeat the process.

Think of how painful that would be if your favorite musician launched a new Twitter account every time they recorded a new album.

Can you imagine how much of a time waster it would be if your favorite painter created a Twitter account for every new painting they did? Bob Ross would have created 403 Twitter accounts just for his show paintings, although the actual number may be closer to 30,000.

It’s About Your Personal Brand

You’re better off focusing your energy and efforts on building your personal brand, or your troupe’s brand because that’s the thing people are interested in. Just like you have your favorite performer that you follow from project to project, people will follow you along your creative journey as well. They don’t start and stop with each project, they’re with you every step of the way.

Spend your time building an audience for your group, getting people emotionally invested in that account, and coming to rely on it for news and information about what you’re doing. Have conversations with people with that account, so people are more likely to like and trust it.

Imagine putting all that time and energy into a project account, only to have to repeat the effort several months later. And then doing it again a year after that.

You would have to repeat the brand-building exercise over and over, trying to re-convince your audience from the last show to join you on the new account, and then re-re-convincing them on the one after that. And the next one. And the next one.

By having an account that spans for years, you can even give your new fans a look at your old history as they look back to see what else you have done. As your account grows and ages, people can take a retrospective look at your catalog of work, which they can’t do if you only have a Twitter account that lasts for a year or two.

Photo credit: Mariamichelle (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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Sportswriters, Don’t Give Up Game Recaps for Social Media

I was listening to a recent episode of Jeff Pearlman’s Two Writers Slinging Yang, and his interview with Langston Newsome, a sportswriter with the Columbia (Missouri) Tribune. Jeff talks to sportswriters and other writers about the art of writing and state of journalism.

In this episode, Jeff and Langston discussed the need for game recaps — also called “gamers” in the sports journalism biz — and whether there was a need for it.

Langston said he thought gamers were worthless because “I’m not reading the 600-word gamer on any site anymore.”

“Stop the presses, Jimmy! I got the scoop of the century!”
The need for gamers is an ongoing discussion in many sports departments, as sportswriters and editors struggle with whether they need to write a recap of the big plays and turning points in each matchup, or whether the networks’ and teams’ Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube accounts are filling the gap and shoving traditional gamers to the side.

As a social media professional, I can tell you that social media is not the panacea everyone thinks it is. As much as we think this is an online digital world, and we can do away with things like newspapers, libraries, paper books, and even sports gamers, we can’t. We still live in an old-school world that relies on old-school methods and old-school channels of communication.

Not everyone watches games live; they still want to read about what happened. Maybe they don’t live in the area where the game is broadcast. Maybe they don’t have cable. Maybe they had two games they wanted to see.

Not everyone pays attention to teams’ social media; they don’t see the updates that are happening in real time. Maybe they’re at work. Maybe they don’t follow the teams’ social accounts. Maybe they don’t have social media themselves.

Not everyone is online in the first place; they don’t have the ability to see those updates when they’re happening. Maybe they can’t afford a smartphone. Maybe they don’t have Internet access. Maybe they’re seniors who don’t want to deal with the Internet. (These are your biggest newspaper readers, and they’re part of the biggest demographic in the country; 97 million people born between 1928 – 1964.)

Sportswriters, don’t give up on gamers. There’s still a need for them, just as much as there’s a need for analysis and features.

Gamers are glimpses into the past, social updates are real-time, have-to-be-present highlights.

Gamers can focus on some of the smaller plays and interesting facts, social updates only focus on the big, big plays, not the little things.

Don’t Abandon the Old-School Just Yet

One of the favorite digital marketing stats that gets bandied about is that roughly 50% of the country never reads a newspaper. But that means that roughly 50% of the country still reads a newspaper, even if it’s once a week, even if it’s online.

According to a Statista.com report, as of May 2017,

  • 54% of people 60 years and older read a print newspaper at least once a week.
  • 44% of people between 30 – 59 read a print newspaper at least once a week.
  • Only 28% of people between 18 – 29 read a print newspaper once a week or more.*

* These are the people to gear digital news toward. They’re the ones looking at game highlights online and following teams’ social media accounts.

While the need for gamers may eventually go away, that day is not today. There are still plenty of people old enough to keep reading newspapers — there are 72.56 million Baby Boomers in the U.S., people born between 1946 – 1964 and another 24.44 million born between 1928 – 1945 — and they’re not embracing digital.

So sportswriters should keep writing gamers for as long as there’s a need and an audience. Don’t go by your own viewing and reading habits to determine what’s acceptable and wanted by 97 million other people in this country.

Besides, gamers help you become a better writer in the long run.

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Social Media for Seniors: Find The News You Want

Every so often, I will feature guest posts from writers who actually have important and interesting things to say. My friend, Daniel Bell, is an up-and-coming copywriter based in Orlando and has written a few blog articles I’ll include on this site.

You can do a lot of things on the Internet. Play games with strangers around the world, check e-mail, take an online class, laugh at funny videos. But most seniors do not want t get wrapped in all of that. They’re keeping up with family on Facebook, but that’s about it.

So what if you wanted to get your favorite news, whenever and wherever you chose, in the places you want it?

Here are a few tips on how to make that happen:

1. Open A Social Media Account

The first thing is to learn is what a social network is: It’s basically a site where you can share, read and search public information. You can also interact with people both privately and publicly. You’ll have the ability to do this once you have created your own profile with your own information about yourself.

According to Elise Moreau, a social media expert and contributor to Lifewire.com, the top 5 social networks that people use are Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Every one of these can be accessed through a laptop or a mobile device. You can use a website or even the network’s own mobile application.

Every site is easy to join and they have help right there to help you get started. Just follow along and you’ll be fine.

2. Follow Your Favorite News Stations

News stations are constantly sharing breaking and slower news online. And because people love to use social media, news stations have created their own profiles that people can follow. It’s a great way for people to see what news they have first before anything else. And you can build your entire social media stream to contain nothing but news.

For example, let’s say you wanted to follow your favorite news station on Facebook. I live in Orlando so I might want to look for the local FOX station.

On Facebook, you would need to search in the Facebook search bar, like this:

Facebook search bar, looking for WOFL Fox 35

After you press enter, you will see the top results. More than likely, the top one will be the news station you’re looking for, like this:


To actually get the content the station posts on their Facebook page, you need to click on the “Like” button.

Repeat this for as many news sites as you would like to receive the news from, and any time they post news stories, you’ll see them.

You can do the same thing on Twitter, although you would click the Follow button instead of the Like button. Search for your terms in the Twitter search bar, and visit the profiles that come up.

Understand What Trends Are

A trend is something that is widely mentioned or discussed on the Internet, especially in posts on social networks. Basically, a trend is a topic that is popular on the Internet at the present time. It could be a sporting event like March Madness or the World Series, or a particular political event or current event.

Breaking news is a good trend to follow, because random stations will post their own #BreakingNews hashtags. You can get news from all over, and you don’t have to follow any particular stations to do it.

If you put #breakingnews (don’t forget the #) in the search bar of your favorite social media sites, different profiles that post breaking news with that hashtag will appear. You can search for it occasionally and see what new news is coming up, and it’s like having your own 24-hour breaking news newspaper at your fingertips.

There’s a lot more to the Internet than just searching for news, but this is a good way to get started, to keep up with what’s happening in the world, and to learn how you’re going to use it all so you can navigate it and see what it has to offer.

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Stop Selling to Me on LinkedIn

Are you married? When you first met, did you walk up to your prospective spouse and just pop the question?

Or are you in a long-term relationship? How did you start it? Did you say, “How would you like to form a long-term relationship? My strengths are that I have good manners, love my mother, and am kind to dogs?” And then did you follow that up with a list of past significant others who can vouch for your good character?

Of course not! That’s clearly no way to enter into any kind of relationship.

But when people connect with me on LinkedIn, it turns me off when the very first thing they do is ask if I need their web services, followed by a 500 word explanation of everything they can do, the companies and projects they’ve worked on, and a request to hop on the phone for a 15 – 30 minute conversation about what they just sent me.

(Not to mention that every message looks nearly identical. They’re either all copy-pasting each other’s sales pitch, or it’s just one company creating thousands of profiles with the same message.)

Oh, I know, I know. Some of you are saying: “Hey, it works. We get clients this way.”

I’m sure you do. And there are stories where people agreed to get married after just one date. In fact, there’s a TV show where people agree to get married the moment they meet. That doesn’t make it a sound strategy for building a long-term relationship.

And neither does you hitting me up about your services the very instant I accept your connection request. It’s rude, presumptuous, and desperate. I ignore the people who send me those messages. Maybe I’ll tell them “no thanks,” but usually only if they insist on repeating the same request a couple weeks later — you know, in case I missed it the first time.

The practice is so pervasive that I get at least two of these a week with the same copy-pasted sales pitch all asking for my hand in business marriage.

Part of my problem is that I can’t just refuse to accept people’s connection requests. I’ve written a few social media books, and people often connect with me after reading them. So I don’t want to be a jerk and snub a reader, but it’s getting harder to accept a request because I just know I’m going to get burned.

I can usually spot most LinkedIn spammers though. They tend to have a title that says “Business Development.” They live in a city or country that I have never been to or rarely visit, and yet they’re connected to 5 – 30 of my friends. And they usually work for some sort of web, SEO, or marketing agency.

I stopped accepting connection requests from people who fit that profile because I know what will be cluttering up my inbox 24 hours later.

More importantly, I’ve begun disconnecting from people who spammed me with their first message.

LinkedIn is for serious business connections, not a way for lazy salespeople to spam other people they’ve never met. And that’s what you’re doing: spamming people.

The only difference is you’re calling it business development and you’re (hopefully) doing it by clicking on the mouse yourself, instead of using the automation software that’s infected Twitter. I don’t care if you think it’s not spamming, or you tell yourself that you’re special and you’re not doing what those other people are doing, because you totally are.

You’re sending the same unwanted, unasked-for crap we get in our email inboxes. The only difference is you’re doing it on LinkedIn as if that somehow makes it okay.

Not only do I disconnect with these people, I will also occasionally report them to LinkedIn by clicking the “I don’t know this person” link or marking them as spam. If enough people do it, their account will be suspended or even terminated. And then maybe they’ll get the hint that this isn’t acceptable.

If you’re one of those people who uses LinkedIn instead of the phone to place your unwanted cold calls, why don’t you try some relationship building first? Start a conversation with people. Find out about them first. Don’t try to close the deal on the first date, don’t try to propose entering into a business relationship the moment you meet someone.

And I’ll make you another deal. If you buy a copy of my book and email me a photo of you holding it, I’ll agree to a 15-minute phone call with you about your company. Because if you’re going to make demands of my time without actually investing anything into the relationship, then I’m going to make a demand of my own.

Put your money where your mouth is. Invest in the relationship first, and then we’ll talk about what your company does.

(And then read the book. Maybe you’ll learn a better alternative to the “Married At First Sight” strategy.)

Photo credit: Qwertyxp2000 (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 4.0)

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Ten Social Media Promotion Tips for Audio Drama Creators

I belong to an Audio Drama group over on Facebook, and the question came up about “how do we promote ourselves?” As a long-time audio drama writer and fan, this is something I’ve talked to other theater troupes about, as well as authors, musicians, and visual artists.

Since most (i.e. none) audio theater groups have a budget to do a lot of advertising, doing a little DIY personal branding is going to make a big splash. It will help you find an audience, grow your network of listeners, and by cooperating with other groups, help you cast a wider net to find audience members who are already interested in audio theater as an art form.

Here are ten things you can start doing to grow your audience.

Cast of Decoder Ring Theatre, an audio theatre company in Toronto. They produced a few of my radio plays several years ago.
  1. Appear as guests on other podcasts. We are in the golden age of podcasting. The people who are going to listen to your podcasts are the people who already listen to podcasts. So find a way to get interview spots on other people’s podcasts to talk about your work. Check out iTunes and Stitcher for writing podcasts, theater podcasts, horror fiction and comic book nerd podcasts, etc. Reach out to those people and ask them if you can be a guest on their podcast. For example, I’ve been on Park Howell’s Business of Story podcast twice to talk about writing and storytelling. Who better to talk about how storytelling and podcasting than a bunch of audio drama actors? (Tell him I sent you.)
  2. Advertise on Facebook. Set up a Facebook advertising account and create ads to appear only to specific people who fall within a certain age range, gender, family status, work status, and so on. Figure out who your Typical Listener is (soccer moms in their 30s, college students, etc.), and start targeting people who fit that persona. Write some ads, set a daily budget of a couple bucks, and then post the ads. Be willing to spend $40 – $50 per month for 3 months as a test.
  3. Set up a co-operative catalog company. Not actually a company, but just a clearinghouse website that contains all the different audio dramas out there. Everyone who’s involved chips in a few bucks, and that’s how you pay for the Facebook advertising. Advertise that company, rather than individual productions, and you can advertise longer, reach more people with diverse interests, and increase each other’s audiences. Plus, a website this big (possibly with a blog) is going to start winning Google searches for keywords like radio theater, audio theater, and so on.
  4. Create an email newsletter. You can either create your own email newsletter, or create one for this co-op website. Feature one or two audio dramas per issue. Everyone who’s a fan of ANY of the dramas can subscribe, and then you’re reaching a combined audience of everyone’s listeners. (I recommend MailChimp, because they have a free option.) If you start your own newsletter, it’s still a good idea to feature other favorite audio dramas in addition to your own work. Do that for each other, and introduce new artists to your audience.
  5. Do giveaways for fans, and ask them to share your work. Hold random drawings for sharers, and give away small prizes. Ask them to share your new episodes and other content with their own social networks, especially Twitter and Facebook. Give prizes for the most creative, the biggest reach, and so on.
  6. Advertise each other’s work on your own podcasts. At the end or in the middle of an episode, during a “commercial break,” play a preview of someone else’s show. Sort of like Amazon’s, “People who like this also bought X” feature. People listening to your podcast may also like this other podcast. Again, do this on a cooperative sharing model, where you create a “ring” of advertisers. A shares on B, B shares on C, C shares on A, etc.
  7. Build a Twitter following. Do a basic Twitter search, and find your Typical Listeners. They’re the ones talking about horror movies or superhero adventures, or whatever you’re producing. They talk about it in their bios, or they talk about it in their tweets. Follow those people, and then put them in a Private Twitter list that you watch daily. Talk to those people, respond to their tweets, answer their questions. Build relationships with them. They’ll want to support you because you’re Twitter buddies.
  8. Follow certain #hashtag topics on Twitter. Is there something happening in the news that ties into your audio drama? Set up a column for that particular term and see if there are any tweets you can respond to. (Use Tweetdeck to easily see and respond to your lists.) Then, when it seems appropriate and not creepy, respond to a tweet with your own. Don’t be ham-handed and say, “Oh, we wrote an audio drama about that. Here it is!” Rather, just participate in the conversation naturally. If people are interested in you and want to know why you’re interested in the subject, they’ll check out your Twitter page. Hopefully you’ve got your audio drama and the website in your Twitter bio.
  9. Don’t forget the visual element. Audio drama may be for the ears only, but if you can add a visual element to your work, do it. If you do live recordings, create a video of those, and post them to YouTube. If you ever perform live in public, share it on Periscope or Facebook Live video. Take photos of people creating the audio drama, and post those to your Instagram account and Facebook, and turn those into stories. And if you’re a fan of the old radio technology, take photos or find others, and post those to Pinterest. Your content may not be for the ear, but there’s still a visual element worth sharing.
  10. Write audio drama reviews. Whether you post it on your own blog, or even if you started the co-op company in #3 and blog for it, review other audio dramas. These don’t have to be critiques and criticism, as if you’re a movie critic. Rather, write a review, where you discuss things that happened, what you enjoyed, etc. (Remember, you all know each other, so don’t be an a-hole!) Publish those reviews as guest articles in as many places as you can too, where others can read them.

If you focus on just two or three of these items, you can expand your audience of listeners and fans. Then, just be sure to use Google Analytics to measure traffic to your website, Twitter analytics to see how your audience is growing and how they’re engaging with your tweets, and then your podcast analytics to see if any growth there coincides with your new social media efforts.

Want to know about artist branding and social media promotion? Check out my book,Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself. The book is now in its third edition, and is published by Que Biz-Tech, an imprint of Pearson Publishing.