Challenge & Selection:

My non-profit organization, Rotary (Grassroots BPO), has been in operation for over five  years.  Our mission was to equip high school juniors and seniors with the tools they need to succeed in  college.  As we approached our fifth year, we realized our mission was vague and we had no real defined  purpose or strategic vision.  We mainly focused on executing workshops and interacting with our  students; without a clear view on the value we were providing to our stakeholders and how we would  create a sustainable program that will continue to grow and meet the needs of our students. This was  less of a set back and more of an opportunity for us to define who we were at our core and confidently  articulate who we are as an organization and the value we provide to our community.  We challenged  ourselves to take a step back from curriculum development and realized that we needed to be able to  tell our story in a way that would articulate our WHY to donors, volunteers, and most importantly our  students. Storytelling is integral to a nonprofit’s ability to advance its mission. Stories are what can  connect our nonprofit’s community, funders, volunteers, and students with our cause and vision. The  storytelling tool allowed us to put our stakeholders and their experiences front and center and align our  values and purpose to all our stakeholders; creating a cause to ignite and unite our community.

Application:

We began with assessing our current state, mission, vision, and values and conducting market research  to identity our “What Is”. After conducting primary research surveying a sample of our target audience,  we uncovered great insights that revealed critical stakeholder needs and brainstormed ideas on how we  could address these needs. We received value statements and testimonials from various participants to  hear their prospective of who are we are and our perceived impact from their viewpoint.  Over the last 6  months, we have undergone rebranding and strategic planning sessions to realign on our vision and  mission while infusing the insights pulled directly from our stakeholders into our core values and  weaving their thoughts into our mission and promise on the service that we deliver to them. As a team,  we moved away from focusing on simply creating a better interactive curriculum to drive measurable  student outcomes but moved to defining who we were as an organization at the core and that has  spilled over into all aspects across our organization. What I have learned from the art of storytelling is  that the success of your mission depends on your story. We were addressing the symptoms versus the  root cause of why we were unable to create a long term strategic plan for our organization and  articulate our purpose and vison. By taking a step back and truly connecting with all our stakeholders  and including them in the development of our mission, purpose, and promise, we were able to speak  from the perspective of those who we serve in our program. We moved from a fixed mindset to  adopting a growth mindset. By applying design thinking to our strategic planning workshops and market  research, we were able to uncover insights that reflected the values of our students, communicated our  WHY to our stakeholders, and made our strategy accessible.

Insights:

Storytelling is imperative especially in the non-profit world because we are driven by a social cause that  should link directly back to the values of those we serve. Without that missing link, we would always fall  short on how we sell our impact.  We had to put our volunteers and donors into the right frame of mind  so that we can get them to buy and invest into our solution. The idea of story telling has mainly been  exposed to me in the context of creating effective presentations for various audiences using  PowerPoint. This course has broadened my scope on how applicable storytelling is from an

organizational strategy perspective and the impact it can have for all stakeholders. Once we defined our  story became comfortable with it, it was now time to evaluate the lessons learned from the output of  our strategic planning. What I uncovered, was that your story is never stagnant to one period. It will  constantly evolve as your organization continues to grow and the needs your audience will continue to  shift. It was becoming comfortable with constantly learning and uncovering new opportunities for  growth and embracing that where we were 5 years ago is not where we are today, and our mission,  purpose, and promise should reflect that.

Approach:

Another way I would have approached this challenge would be to do a mind mapping exercise with our  stakeholders to identify patterns and themes in our qualitative and quantitative data. This projective  technique could be used to pull conceptual information from stakeholders using a visual representation.  This could have helped establish key elements to consider when developing our purpose, promise and  strategy.

