Storytelling

Challenge

I work for a non-profit organization that provides quality education to under-privileged children.  My company adopts under-performing public schools in low-income communities. After adopting  those schools, we implement reforms that lead to positive student learning outcomes and increased  student enrollment.

In order to raise funds for our initiatives, we organize fundraising dinners. Guests pay an entry fee  to attend a musical performance followed by dinner. During the event, my company’s Fundraising  department used to highlight important facts about the shortcomings in the public school system  by displaying shocking facts about the low student enrollment, high drop-out rate, and abysmal  student achievement. The Fundraising Department personnel would then distribute donation forms  among the guests and ask them to make donation commitments to address the problems that they  were highlighting. At the end of the event, we would collect these firms. Very few people would  make any commitments and those who did, would not follow though by actually sending a  donation check. We were unable to identify why our guests were not making any donation  commitments when they clearly cared enough about the cause to attend our event.

Selection and Application

Last year, we all sat down to discuss ways to collect more donor commitments during our  fundraising dinner scheduled for December. We decided to interview guests and tried to place  ourselves in the shoes of our donors. We realized from our discussions that our fundraising pitches  during the events did not draw any interest from the guests. They would mostly tune out or start  talking among themselves when our Fundraising Manager would come on stage. The Fundraising  Manager would list out a number of facts and figures about the abysmal state of public schools but  it did not resonate with the guests.

Therefore, we decided to come up with a different approach to our fundraising efforts. So we  decided that instead of presenting facts and figures, we will pick stories about our students who  had done well in our schools and gone on to attend University. We selected this approach because  people would be more interested to see the students, learn about their lives and see how our work  impacts them instead of viewing graphs.

This time, our CEO would tell the stories of these children and we would display photographs  from their time in school while playing sports or participating in one of our classes. At the end of  their story, we would invite the student to come on stage and narrate how he viewed our company  had impacted his life. After narrating our students’ stories, we would then ask the guests to commit  a donation that would sponsor a child’s education for a certain amount. We would then share  details about the sponsored student’s progress with the donor.

Insight and Approach

In previous fundraising dinners, we would receive donor commitments from 5 percent of the  invitees. But after using storytelling as a tool to inform the guests about our impact in the public  schools, we received commitments from 23 percent of the guests who attended the fundraising  dinner held in December last year.

We learnt that storytelling is a powerful tool to not only draw attention but to also drive donations  because people connected better to uplifting stories. What we have learned is that the stories we  pick should represent the diverse background of our students. We have students in our schools  who have overcome great odds to complete their education and start successful careers. These  stories can help highlight how our work helps these students accomplish their goals and overcome  hardships. We decided that we will highlight more of these stories on our website and on our social  media campaigns for fundraising purposes.

Submitted By

Jaya Madni

