Storytelling in Fundraising: When Your Donor Responds with These Five Simple Words, You’ve Succeeded

Posted on May 16, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Books and articles on storytelling and narrative in fundraising are proliferating nearly as quickly as bad storytelling and narrative in fundraising (could there be a connection?). In an effort to bring some rule-of-thumb type clarity to an increasingly foggy subject, permit me to share the five word response you need to be seeking from your hearers each time you speak:

I see myself in you.

In other words, you know you’ve succeeded in your storytelling efforts if at the conclusion of your story your listener feels two things:

  1. “This person has articulated something I believe passionately that I’ve never been able to put into words.”
  2. “This person is like a more mature version of myself. Our stories have a lot in common, only this person is three chapters beyond where I’m at.”

 This is in contrast with the five word response that most fundraisers inadvertently (or–gulp–intentionally!) elicit in response to the stories they tell:

I could never do that.

Sadly, fundraisers feel they’re on the way to fundraising success when, after a presentation, audience members shake their hands and say, “Man, you are great! I could never do what you do.” For the records, that roughly translates into: And I don’t plan to do what you do, or to support you in your doing it, either.

Brian McDonald is the author of The Golden Theme–the best book on storytelling for fundraisers. (Read the whole thing online here or order a paperback copy cheaply from amazon here).

Writes McDonald:

This simple sentence, we are all the same, is the Golden theme that all stories express.

And it is my first belief that the closer a story comes to illuminating this truth, the more powerful and universal it becomes, and the more people are touched by it.

Master organizational storyteller Thaler Pekar puts it, well, masterfully, in her recent post on Stanford Social Innovation Review, The Benefits of Building a Narrative Organization:

In every organization, there is the big story—the organizational narrative—and the smaller stories that support, reiterate, and personalize the larger narrative. Your organization’s narrative is at the core of its values, mission, and actions. Your brand is strengthened when the smaller stories are consistently refreshed and shared. LIVESTRONG, formerly the Lance Armstrong Foundation, offers a terrific example of a strong organizational narrative, consistently supported with stories from cancer survivors and caregivers.

Sum it up and say:

Your story: The big story

Your donors’ stories: The smaller stories

To the degree that donors and potential donors see their smaller stories as aligned and connected to your big story, with your big story just a more mature and developed version than their own, you’re on the way to fundraising success.

To the degree that they don’t, the handshake and hearty words of praise you receive when you step down from the platform are all you’re going to get.

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What’s a Church Congregation Worth? $476,663.24

Posted on May 13, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Christianity Today ran a fascinating infographic recently that profiled the work of self-described “nonreligious” University of Pennsylvania sociologist Ram Cnaan. Cnaan has been working for years to accurately estimate the economic value of urban congregations to their communities, and he recently upwardly revised his earlier estimate of $140,000.

To $476,663.24.

That’s the average amount of services provided to the community by a typical urban church, in the form of things like:

  • Volunteer hours worked: $94,770
  • Reduced crime: $64,476
  • Divorce prevention: $22,500

Cnaan contends that while the actual numbers in each category are debatable, the real value of his work is that it proves that it’s possible to determine the economic impact of a church on a neighborhood.

Some might pooh-pooh this, either denying the legitimacy of the specific calculations Cnaan proposes ($523 in income produced by trees on the church property?) or worrying that such a calculation could lead to unfavorable restrictions once local governments realize that a church congregation provides much less value to a neighborhood than, say, a Starbuck’s (hard to tell the difference between them and churches sometimes) or–even more provocatively–a mosque. And some might suggest that a church’s real value is in intangible spiritual benefits which defy measurement.

But I’m all for the attempts to calculate. After all, they force us to ask: What are the outcomes we’re seeking? If they’re not reducing divorce and suicide and growing, um, trees, then what are they–and how might we measure them?

My old philosophy prof at Purdue, Dr. David Fairchild, used to say, “A difference that makes no difference is no difference.” What difference does being a Christian make in our lives really, anyway?

In my new Whole Life Offering book, I contend that the difference Christianity makes in our daily lives is an increasing movement towards Christlikeness, which can be measured in the maturity, proportionality, and comprehensiveness of our involvement in the ten disciplines of loving our neighbor and seven disciplines of loving God that the Bible commends to us.

It may not yield a dollar figure like $476,663.24, but it does yield a series of measurables that we can use to compare things like:

  • the relative effectiveness of the discipleship methods we use;
  • the congregational structures in which we undertake such discipleship; and even
  • the way that whole life discipleship impacts our economic distribution, i.e., what impact does growth to maturity in each of these causes have on the percentage of our income that we give away, and where and how we give it?

To that end, Cnaan’s books may be worth us checking out.

Then again, with Cnaan’s Faith-based Social Services: Measures, Assessments, and Effectiveness currently running at a cool $175 per copy, perhaps we’d just be better off bartering for the book in exchange for putting in a few more trees around the church parking lot.

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Fundraising Banquet Location Tip: Always Hold Your Banquet on the Mezzanine Level

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Well, here’s the weirdest but potentially most helpful fundraising banquet tip you’ll receive this year, courtesy of Call & Response blog:

According to a study profiled in Scientific American, people are more likely to give generously to a cause after stepping off the “up” escalator.

In fact, lest you dismiss this to flukedom, there were actually four studies about the generosity of “up” that all came to the same conclusion:

In the first study they found that twice as many mall shoppers who had just ridden an up escalator contributed to the Salvation Army than shoppers who had just ridden the down escalator. In a second study, participants who had been taken upa short flight of stairs to an auditorium stage to complete a series of questionnaires volunteered more than 50 percent more of their time than participants who had been led down to the orchestra pit.

A third study took yet another approach. Participants were to decide how much hot sauce to give to a participant purportedly taking part in a food-tasting study. Those who were up on the stage gave only half as much of the painfully hot sauce to the other person as did those who were sitting down in the orchestra pit.

In a final study, participants watched film clips of scenes taken from an airplane above the clouds, or through the window of a passenger car. Participants who had watched the clip of flying up above the clouds were 50 percent more cooperative in a computer game than those who had watched the car ride down on the ground.

The report reminded me of a banquet I emceed a few years ago where the hotel elevators were on the fritz. Participants had to trudge up four flights of stairs to get to the banquet hall.

And the offering was really good that night.

No word on whether the effect holds for elevators or is diminished by forcing participants to undertake a Bataan Death March up twenty flights of stairs to the penthouse. So best be on the safe side and just opt for a generosity-spritzing escalator ride up one level to the mezzanine of the hotel for your next banquet.

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