The New Culture of Storytelling

Michaela and Brian at the World of Coca Cola

As we do every year, Forum One participated in the annual Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC). This year's event was held in Atlanta April 8-10, and over 1,400 nonprofit tech folks attended. Brian, Kurt, and I represented the Forum One contingent.

As always, the event was a blast. It helped me meet and reconnect with some of the most inspiring people in our industry, catch up on the latest social media technologies (Whrrl!), and network in my pajamas at Holly's Slumber Party. I also had the privilege of speaking on another Online Storytelling panel with Roger Burks and Jay Davis.

Since we received such great feedback from last year's session, Roger Burks and I have hosted a series of webinars since the last NTC, focusing on how organizations can leverage online storytelling and maximize social media in the process. We've provided training on how to interview subjects, tips for photographing and video-recording, as well as best practices for writing strong stories that encourage and elicit action. This live session rounded out our Online Storytelling Bootcamp webinar series with a focus on how to create a culture of storytelling within one's organization.

My presentation addressed the challenge of incorporating story telling into an organization's everyday behavior and addressed the fact that the act of collecting and sharing success stories does not happen in a vacuum. Let's face it, this content doesn't come out of thin air. It takes time to cultivate through staff, donors, and beneficiaries, and it takes additional effort to organize, adapt, and publish to the web. Too many groups set up a perfect web site platform for storytelling, only to find that they can't populate it because they haven't gotten senior leadership buy-in, or they haven't identified regular contributors to develop content. In the end, successful story telling initiatives are as much about the culture (making it an organizational priority and incorporating it into everything you do) as they are about the technology.

In my presentation, I looked at ways organizations need to change, in terms of their conduct and how they generate content, in order to facilitate a storytelling culture, namely:

• Ensure organizational backing from senior management. Have everyone buy into the idea that storytelling matters!
• Empower stakeholders, provide training and writing guidelines, as well as incentives for their contributions.
• Provide resources for people to tell stories more effectively: digital cameras, video cameras, audio records, and a solid blogging platform or web site.

To illustrate how storytelling culture can be absorbed into an organization, I looked at three case studies:

1. Mercy Corps: A nonprofit, international development organization whose culture revolves around storytelling. It has cultivated over 130 staff bloggers, invested in a web platform (Drupal) to faciliate storytelling and collaboration, provides storytelling training to staff, and recognizes the importance of leveraging staff writers, photographers, and videographers across all of its efforts. They've also noted over $6 million of online donations since the launch of their blog last May.
    
2. Charity: Water: A nonprofit organization that has storytelling as central to all of its work. "It's part of our DNA," they tell me. Charity: Water has an ambitious goal of providing 100 million people with clean drinking water in the developing world over the next ten years, with a hefty price tag of $2 billion. By telling over 1,000 personal stories of the challenges faced by people who don't have clean drinking water, they are using people's stories to compel action and donations. Through video, photography, and compelling first-hand stories, Charity: Water has garnered worldwide attention. They recognize the importance of organizational backing, and most of their staff have notable writing expertise. Also, everyone on their staff is a regular contributor to their web site. On top of writers, they work with photographers and videographers regularly to enrich their storytelling content.
    
   *Note: Although the two above organizations have invested greatly in staff writers and photographers/videographers, that doesn't mean that organizations with a smaller budget can't embrace a storytelling culture. The shift is more about all staff owning the initiative, learning how to collect and tell stories (a Flip camera/video is often more authentic and compelling than a polished documentary), and the organization recognizing the need to support storytelling work in whatever ways possible. I would recommend that organizations at minimum hire a part-time staff writer to help with content and/or work with an intern who has a background in english or journalism.
    
3. Organizations investing in staff writers during the Haiti crisis: In the past, news organizations have usually sent writers, photographers, and videographers to areas hardest hit by natural disasters. However, with this new shift in storytelling culture, we are now seeing nonprofit relief organizations send aid workers as well as writers/photographers to the field to capture the good work they are doing. This is a good thing (and a great opportunity) because as news outlets close their foreign bureaus, the public will be turning to the actors on the ground for the latest news/updates. Some groups that sent staff writers to document the Haiti Crisis include:

• International Medical Corps
• Oxfam
• Concern Worldwide
• International Rescue Committee

Overall, our presentation was very well received. To my surprise, we easily filled up the 200+ person ballroom. It's heartening to see that organizations are finally recognizing the importance of storytelling and exploring ways in which they can leverage it for their missions. And, why not? Every group that makes a difference has a great story to tell; it's about time the world gets to hear them!

My presentation slides are below. Also, the public notes for all three of our presentations are located here.