Philanthropy is pursued by healthcare organizations in order to have a greater impact within a community served. It generates revenue to support needs, ties the community more strongly to a nonprofit, and creates more engaged employees. Experience and a vast amount of research studies have shown philanthropy reaches high impact where there is strong nonprofit leadership and effective use of story.
Nonprofit organizations that are most effective in terms of fundraising revenue generated and donor growth have strong leadership and a commitment to story. These organizations have an emotional approach to generosity and they use story as the language to connect with donors. Story is not used as a way to emphasize how great and wonderful a nonprofit is for individuals and the community. Instead, story is used to show how the needs of the community are addressed. The hero or heroine of story is the donor, volunteer, client/patient or person providing care or service to those in need.
There are three major reasons why story is and should play an important role for nonprofit organizations.
It is About Emotion . . . and Story
Research has recently shown that giving is driven by donor emotion; donors give from the heart more than from the head. When donors give, the emotional centers of the mind are activated, releasing electrical and chemical properties. Many refer to this as the “giving high” which a number of donors describe.
In order to create the emotional connection, it is necessary to use story. Story is often described as the language of philanthropy. Through the use of fMRI studies, scientist have learned that stories activate more than the language center of the mind when a person reads or listens to a story. It activates a number of centers in the mind. Many of these centers are the same ones as those associated with emotion (see the Emotion content pages of this website).
The right stories will make people act. Chip Heath and Dan Heath discovered that stories can recreate an experience in the mind as lifelike as the story itself. Story has the ability to move people to action because it is generated from the emotion centers of the mind. (1)
The Heath brothers also found story “sticks” with donors far more than facts and figures. Each year, Stanford students participate in an exercise where they must make presentations. One half of the class members are asked to make a one minute presentation about to convince their colleagues that nonviolent crime is an issue in the United States. The other half of the class members are asked to make the opposite argument in one minute. The students are asked to rate the presentations of each speaker.
Following the presentations, all students review a videotape of an unrelated subject, Monty Python. Then, they are asked to write down the important points they recall from the presentations. Heath found that stories are recalled 63% of the time while facts are recalled 5% of the time. It is interesting to note that there is almost no correlation between the speaking talent of presenters and the ability to make ideas stick. In other words, one need not be a smooth storyteller to make it stick. (2)
Individuals are Wired . . . For Story
An individual must deal with a mountain of information in the course of a day. Reading a sentence or two can easily create 11 million pieces of information. However, your mind is only able to register about 40 pieces of the information at a time. The mind can only process about seven bits of data at a time.
Therefore, how do we adapt to the growing deluge of information? How do we make sense of a world where we are overwhelmed with data beyond our abilities?
The answer is we have adapted; we are hardwired for story. It is the body’s shorthand to deal with problems, issues and life-threatening situations. As Lisa Cron found, story allows us to simulate real-life situations without having to actually experience them. This is a way for us to grow and adapt and survive. (3)
In one study, odor centers of the brain were found to be activated when stories provided words with strong odor associations in the stories. This held true also for words associated with motion. Through story, individuals are able to experience.
Story Heals
Not only do stories allow us to experience a situation without the actual experience, they can also help us heal. Bybarczyk and Bellg studied the use of stories in healthcare through comparison of different patient groups who were asked to tell their story. They identified the level of stress prior to their test and following it.
The patents receiving care were split into four patient groups. The two groups that used story to describe their situation experienced a decrease in anxiety after interviews. The other two groups that did not use story experienced an increase in stress. The study also indicated that volunteers who were trained to elicit patient stories were just as effective as professional healthcare providers who elicited patient stories. (4)
This study gives fundraisers food for thought. Do we ask donors for their stories? Do we provide the opportunity for them to emotionally use story as a way to heal? The beauty is that the study also shows it doesn’t take a professional to elicit stories. Volunteers can be effective where properly trained.
Story Survey
How prepared are you to become or remain one of the top nonprofits in your community, state or region? Have you adapted knowing now what works?
One way to find out is to take a brief, basic survey about your commitment to and use of story. You will find below a set of survey questions. Each question can be answered either “yes” or “no.” When you have completed the survey, add up all of the “yes” answers. The higher the number of “yes” answers the better.
a. Do you use stories in your brochures, website, letters and presentations?
b. Are your stories focused upon the interests and needs of your clients/patients, donors, volunteers and service providers?
c. Are your stories emotion oriented, engaging the reader, listener or viewer?
d. Do you lead with emotion and follow with facts in your communications for connecting, cultivating and asking for support?
e. Do your stories focus on one person that readers, listeners and viewers can identify with?
f. Have you included stories in your communications with volunteers and board members to create a culture of story?
g. Do you have a story about your nonprofit that emotionally connects?
h. Do you ask your volunteers, donors and clients/patients for their stories? Many of them want to share their story.
Story Survey Scale
0 to 2 yes answers = Substantial improvement is indicated
3 to 5 yes answers = More improvement is needed
6 to 8 yes answers = Good work and continue to improve
Toolkit Suggestions:
- Take the above survey and identify where you need to focus your efforts to become more effective in use of story
- Find stories in your nonprofit that will emotionally connect with donors and volunteers
- Focus story upon the hero donor, person in need, volunteer or person providing care or services to those in need
NOTES
(1) Chip and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. (New York, Random House, 2007), 206-224.
(2) Heath, 243.
(3) Lisa Cron, Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (New York, Ten Speed Press, 2012), 8-10.
(4) Bruce Rybarczyk and Albert Beige, Listening to Stories: A New Approach to Stress Intervention in Health Care, (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1997), 35-36
