Including All the Heroes of Your Story

Donors are crucial to your success as an organization. Financial support gives you security and stability, which means you can maybe take off one or two hats and do more to further your mission. But donors are only one piece of the puzzle and bringing all of your stakeholders into the story of your organization is an often-overlooked strategy that can create deeper connections to your work.

 

Nonprofit thought-leader and executive director of Rainier Valley Corps Vu Le writes about evolving from donor-centric to community-centric fundraising for his blog, Nonprofit AF.  As he points out, it’s important to create a partnership with your donors, but there is a danger to being too donor-centric in your messaging. If you frame donors as the sole heroes of your work, you risk creating a disconnected, savior/saved dichotomy. When in reality, donors, staff, volunteers, clients and advocates all have crucial roles to play in advancing your mission.

So how do you take a community-centric approach to communicating the impact of your work? How do you bring all of the key stakeholders into your story? For their annual major donor event, Community Warehouse put together an organizational video that captured the impact of their work through the voices of their staff, volunteers, donors and clients.

As a community furniture bank, Community Warehouse relies on donations, volunteers and staff to provide this service for their clients. In this video, they’re able to illustrate the community behind Community Warehouse and demonstrate how each person has a connection to this work. A staff member talks about the stools his daughters sit on in the kitchen, a client talks about how nice it is to have a couch so she can invite people over, a volunteer shows us the kitchen table her family eats at and how she can help clients pick out their own table. It’s an incredibly powerful example of telling your story with all heroes’ voices represented.

When you’re thinking through the story of your organization, consider the different voices you can include to demonstrate that we’re all in this together. People give because they want to be a part of something.

 

Photos by Justin Houk