Stories are powerful. From the beginning of humanity, stories have been how we make sense of the world, share wisdom, and explain our existence.

Storytelling is the most powerful tool nonprofits have at their disposal. All good stories engage audiences, influence their behavior, and inspire them to share the emotion felt from the story. It’s used to start movements and create social change.

The importance of online storytelling for nonprofit fundraising and advocacy is evolving quickly. With the use of social media, sharing good stories have become easier, faster, and cheaper than ever before. Yet for most nonprofits, stories are …

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Video is a powerful way to raise awareness and fundraise. YouTube and Vimeo are the two largest video hosting communities; which is better?

YouTube and Vimeo had approximately 150 million and 7 million unique visitors last month, respectively. With the larger number of users, YouTube allows you to tap into a potentially large community of supporters.

As with any technology, there is a learning curve relative to video sharing. Vimeo provides a free video school packed with entertaining video tutorials; they even have a free online acting school. The YouTube schooling isn’t quite as entertaining, but they do provide free …

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Today we interview Joe Lambert, founder of the Center of Digital Storytelling out in SF. He’s one of our panelists at the Nonprofit Technology Conference this year too. Here he shares his thoughts on the future of nonprofit storytelling.

What is the future of nonprofit storytelling? How is it going to change?
I recently found myself reading Robert Fuller’s Somebodies, Nobodies and the Politics of Dignity, a book about hierarchy and what he calls “rankism”, and the explicit and implicit ways we all abuse our large and small privilege and power as people, more or less without exception.

I believe …

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When I left the TV news business, the only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted to tell inspiring stories. When I looked around most of those stories were coming out of the nonprofit world, so I decided to put my focus there. I believe that nonprofit stories will continue to be some of the most powerful of our time but that nonprofits will need to tell the following types to get the stories produced and noticed in the ever changing media landscape.

Stories that turn up the emotional volume
With thousands of websites and new videos created …

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Telling your story matters much more than you think. It especially does when you’re running an online fundraising campaign.

From a population set of campaigns (outliers removed), we picked the top 15 highest grossing campaigns that CauseVox has powered.

In total, this sample set raised $1,203,072 in donations with an average raise of $80,205.

After examining what type of media was embedded on their fundraising sites, we found that over 90% of these campaigns used video. The campaign that raised the least did not use a video; they used a static photo instead. There is a strong positive correlation between …

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Digital storytelling is one of the big trends for nonprofits in 2012. More and more of them are seeing a high ROI on creating videos, writing narratives, and investing in media. Yesterday, we presented with Annie and Ethan from ListenIn Pictures at NTEN’s 501 tech event in NYC about our digital storytelling for nonprofits. We had a crowd of 80+ nonprofits, video experts, and techies. Here are a few highlights from Twitter:

• @nonprofitbridge: Advice for #nonprofits – don’t focus on what you do; focus on who you do it for
• @ekornblut: “Your organization is not the protagonist”: good advice from

…

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In The Starter Guide to Nonprofit Video Storytelling, we described some of the concepts behind videos for your online fundraising campaign. Here are nine examples of effective videos in campaigns that CauseVox has powered. Check them out for some inspiration.

1. One Girl Australia’s “Do it in a Dress” campaign launch video
The team used a humorous and catchy idea behind their campaign, and also included visuals to help their support base understand how fun it would be to participate.

Visit their fundraising site

Video link

2. RestoreNYC’s thank you video
The team created a heart-felt thank you video to …

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We are thrilled to announce that our e-book The Starter Guide to Non-profit Video Storytelling (which we co-wrote with ListenIn Pictures) is now available for download!

In the book, we describe how your non-profit can create a video strategy that will set you up for success. We explore how to create video which push people to action, what kinds of stories hold the greatest emotional power and how to ensure that your video will not only be seen, but shared.

Get your copy now at www.startstorytelling.com

And don’t forget, every Thursday for the next four weeks one tweeter will …

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Ready. Set. Stop.

I’ve seen this happen with nonprofits. They prepare themselves for a big fundraising campaign, set up a fundraising site, and launch it.

They do all the right things. They launch big, get their support base involved, and send out messages on all their channels.

After a few donations, things putter to a stop. Their support base doesn’t respond.

Here are five steps get your donors to take action:

1. Create structure
Assign one person in your organization a designated contact person per donor. Then carry out a donor engagement plan that involves setting goals and plans for …

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Nonprofit fundraisers need to understand this: writing fundraising copy is not like writing a paper or a direct mail letter.

You can use some of the same techniques, but your approach must be different. When people read online, they have shorter attention spans and they tend to skim content.

You need to write in a way that meets how they read online. To write effective fundraising copy, follow these five tips.

1. Know your audience
It’s the golden rule of fundraising copy. You need to have a target audience before you can write a winning plea for support. As a …

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