This video is number SEVEN in a series of 16 or so on how film can support your charity fundraising. Today’s subject is deciding which stories to tell.

TRANSCRIPT

It’s really important that charities tell the stories of the people who they have not been able to reach yet; the work that remains for them to do. And I think most charities are familiar with that, and that’s where their fundraising appeals come from. It’s also vitally important, just absolutely critical, to tell their — to give their success stories, to tell the stories of the people or places or animals that they have been able to reach in order to do that thing of demonstrating the impact that donations have — it’s proving the efficacy of their work, which they can prove, I have no doubt through facts and figures, but people won’t remember facts and figures. They’ll remember the positive stories, the outcome stories. I think it’s really important to tell the story of how the charity came to be; how the charity came into existence; what its legacy is; what it was founded to do and how that mission has developed over the years, because although that may not seem immediately relevant to people internal to the charity right now, it is incredibly relevant to supporters who are making giving choices — making choices about where they’re going to place their donations with, because it speaks to your heritage, and your pedigree, and your longevity, and therefore your trustworthiness, and the likelihood that you will still be here in 10 or 20 or 50 years hence delivering the work that you set out to do.

There are so many more stories: there’s the stories of you know the people who are delivering your service and how they are motivated and lit up by your mission and what that means to them in, you know the every day when they’re working on the frontline delivering your services, and there’s the stories of your donors themselves and how they have come to be involved with the charity, and what the relationship with the charity has meant to them, and how the charity has enriched — you know, how giving has enriched their lives and how they are then able to magnify that, amplify that by bringing more people into their fundraising efforts, by being ambassadors for your charity; there’s the story of corporate support — that there’s not an area of fundraising that isn’t going to be strengthened by placing an emphasis on storytelling.