Both Susannah Winslow and Susanne Salerno contributed to the writing of this blog.

By lifting your local stories and connections, you ignite an opportunity to inspire more members to join you in your shared vision for public discourse. In part one of our storytelling series, we made the case for why it’s important to elevate storytelling in our fundraising. Now we’re offering some ideas to help build your stories and ways to illuminate them across audiences. The ultimate goal is for the donor to see the value in your work, trust your vision and feel compelled to support your mission.  

1. Start by identifying the ingredients for your story. One tool to pull an effective story together is to connect with key pieces of logos, ethos and pathos. In other words, adding in elements of logic, emotion and trust will persuade your reader to take action (in this case, support your station). Let’s look at each of these choice points: 

Logos is the appeal to logic, the act of persuading the audience by reason. Your logic is defined in your mission statement and the theory of change describing what you do at your station. For example, your role as a community convener.  

Ethos is the appeal to credibility, your organizational leadership and values that build trust with the audience. For example, public media is annually rated the most trusted media source. But have you lifted the story of your station’s role in local journalism? Who are the local journalists uncovering the stories that are meaningful to the community you serve? Be sure to infuse your station’s unique values into the story. 

Pathos is the appeal to emotion, the heart of your story that convinces your audience by creating an emotional response. Our CDP colleague Frank Auer says, “We all know a story well told can move donors to action, but behind the best stories are emotions." And emotions are what trigger a response in the form of a charitable contribution. 

2. Consider the hero’s journey when telling your story. This well-known story structure involves a hero who must overcome obstacles or barriers while on a quest to achieve a goal, ultimately to be transformed. The hero’s journey works especially well in testimonials because (hint, hint) your organization is not the hero of the story. Rather, your organization merely plays an important role in how the hero overcomes the problem, exemplifying your impact in action. And when it comes to making a fundraising ask, the most compelling hero in nonprofit stories is always the donor. Putting the donor at the center of your story encourages them to make a heroic move by supporting your organization.   

 3. Finally, unleash your stories!  Share your stories widely across platforms. Use them on-air and on your website, leverage them on social media, and amplify them in newsletters and email. There are so many ways to incorporate storytelling into your day-to-day work. For example, use one of your stories as part of a gratitude campaign leading up to Thanksgiving. The thank-you note with your story could be sent as an email, a postcard or even a video. And there are many innovative new tools to help share stories with prospective and current donors. One example is Gratavid, a simple and effective video technology that can help make storytelling connections with donors that can be sent individually or via automation at scale. 

There’s no doubt that storytelling is found in the DNA of public media. It’s inherent to the services we provide and the work we do every day. It's never too soon to start leveraging storytelling in our fundraising to elevate the importance of our collective impact in communities across the country.