Nonprofits rely on raw data to learn about supporters, track the success of marketing and fundraising campaigns, and measure program progress. Using this data, your organization can determine which metrics are best for measuring your social impact and illustrating all of your work’s tangible achievements.
But to clearly convey your impact on your community, your nonprofit needs to put its findings into context. Storytelling is a great way to connect data points to real people, actions, and outcomes, making cold metrics more engaging and personal.
In this guide, we’ll explore five strategies your organization can use to tell compelling, data-backed stories that illustrate your impact. Let’s get started!
1. Understand your audience.
First, you’ll need to define who you want your story to appeal to. For example, are you targeting donors, grantmakers, or volunteers? Further, what are some unique traits associated with that audience? Get to know their values, interests, and preferences, and prepare to tailor your narrative to align with those.
To do so, your nonprofit should:
- Reference the data in your CRM. Analyze demographic details, past giving behaviors, engagement levels, and interests. Consider segmenting supporters based on shared characteristics to make targeted messaging possible. Additionally, look for trends in the data, such as which projects have received the most support.
- Consider the success of your past marketing or communications efforts. Next, review outcomes from past marketing campaigns. Reference metrics like open and click-through rates, conversion rate, and return on ad spend (ROAS). Replicate the strategies that were the most successful and avoid repeating those that didn’t perform well.
- Ask for their feedback. Reach out to supporters to learn more about their interests, motivations, and how they currently perceive your organization and its impact. Use these findings to lean into the subjects that supporters are most interested in or that address their concerns.
Additionally, identify any communication preferences the audience has, including preferred communication channels, formats, and frequencies. This will improve the success of your fundraising asks (or other calls to action) because you’ll be more likely to reach and engage supporters with your communications.
2. Identify key data to share.
Now that you know what kinds of stories and topics your audience is likely to be interested in, it’s time to identify specific data points to include in your narratives. These insights must be meaningful and relevant to the larger narrative. For example, volunteers may want to hear about the impact of your fundraising events, such as how many people attended or where the funds went.
To identify which data to share in your stories, consider:
- Your current messaging strategies and organizational priorities. Reinforce overarching themes and priorities with the data you share, supporting broader narratives and making campaigns feel cohesive. For example, if your organization is focused on expanding its afterschool programs, you might share how many new students have been reached, improvements in their grades, and more.
- Pairing data with impactful visuals. Identify metrics that can easily be displayed with infographics, charts, or graphs. This helps simplify data and makes it much easier for supporters to quickly understand the numbers. For example, have a graphic designer create a bar chart to illustrate month-to-month growth for your afterschool program.
- Data that shows change over time. Use these data points to illustrate growth and progress toward your goal. This could be something like increases in the number of meals a soup kitchen provides or how many successful adoptions an animal shelter has after implementing new initiatives.
Don’t forget to consider both quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative data, like financial metrics or program participation rates, provide objective measurements of your success. Qualitative data, like success stories or case studies, offer richer context and narrative evidence of your success.
These strategies are meant to help you choose the best data to communicate your impact and inspire more support—but this doesn’t mean twisting data to have it say what you want. To foster trusting relationships with supporters and comply with regulations, you must remain transparent and authentic.
3. Develop a central message.
Your narrative needs a central theme to guide it. Often, nonprofits choose to center this theme around their greatest win or biggest, most pressing need.
Here are a few examples of effective central messages for different types of organizations:
- An animal shelter shares the story of a specific dog from its life on the streets to receiving medical care to adoption. The story highlights the shelter’s dedication to compassionate care and its high intake and adoption rates.
- A mid-sized food pantry documents a before-and-after story, showing how donations transformed it from offering food to only a dozen families to serving tens of thousands of meals.
- A homeless shelter starts an initiative to get more beneficiaries into permanent housing and jobs. It shares success stories from real people and backs those stories up with program success metrics.
Make sure that your central message aligns with your broader nonprofit branding and top organizational goals. This will ensure that your efforts are coordinated and make your campaigns more cohesive.
4. Structure the narrative.
Once all of the groundwork has been laid, it’s time to create your narrative structure. UpMetrics’ guide to nonprofit storytelling recommends including the following key elements:
- Character: A character is a person, animal, or place your story is centered around—ideally, someone or something your audience will relate to and root for.
- Setting: The setting is where your story takes place, shown by describing the sights, sounds, and smells of that location.
- Plot: This is the sequence of events that occurs in your story. Often, the plot includes an exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.
- Conflict: The conflict encompasses the challenges your character faces. There are many different types of conflict you can incorporate, and some stories may have more than one.
- Resolution: This is the final outcome of your story, and it usually offers closure. Depict your character resolving the conflict and reaching their goals, and outline the role your work played in their success.
Storytelling is an art form that will take practice and experimentation. However, using these key elements will give your story the foundation it needs to be successful.
5. Revise and refine.
When you have a first draft ready, it’s time to take a closer look. Have someone involved with your impact reports and marketing strategies review the narrative. Your editor should look for ways to:
- Enhance the clarity and accuracy
- Improve the balance between logical, numeric data and emotional storytelling
- Ensure the story is consistent with your central message
- Make the story more engaging to keep readers hooked until the end
If you run a small shop and don’t have an editor available (or just want a different perspective), consider using AI tools. While you should never use AI to write stories for you or fabricate details, this technology is great for generating creative outlines, proofreading, and helping you stick to a certain tone or voice.
Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools for communicating your nonprofit’s work and impact to its supporters. Impact metrics back your emotional success stories and testimonies with objective supporting data, wrapping everything in a compelling narrative package that supporters won’t want to put down.
