Our series is taught by Ruthellen Rubin, an NYU Professor of Philanthropy and Certified Fund Raising Executive. She distills over 30 years of professional nonprofit fundraising experience and expertise into Get Donors. Here’s the  tidbit for this week!

Lesson 2: Create real, personal, and urgent appeals

The most effective fundraising appeals are real, personal, and urgent. Use compelling storytelling with images and videos to connect a donor’s donation to a tangible impact or result of their donation.

To watch the full video and to get more lessons, visit www.getdonors.com.

Our series is taught by Ruthellen Rubin, an NYU Professor of Philanthropy and Certified Fund Raising Executive. She distills over 30 years of professional nonprofit fundraising experience and expertise into Get Donors. Here’s the first tidbit.

Lesson 1: In order to get more donors, you need to develop a case for support.

Your prospective donors are asking why they should support your nonprofit. You need to clarify why you’re asking for a donation, and sell the successes of your nonprofit. Developing a case for support gets donors to invest in your organization. People don’t give to charity anymore; they invest in results.

To watch the full video and to get more lessons, visit www.getdonors.com.

What if you could easily learn the secrets of a professional fundraiser? What if you could learn how to get more donors?

Fundraising is the lifeblood of your nonprofit. It’s what you need to help you make an impact, but it’s what you worry about the most.

For most of us, we’re not professionally trained fundraisers so it doesn’t come naturally to us. We know how to make an impact, yet we had to learn fundraising the hard way, by stumbling around and making mistakes.

There’s good news.

We’re launching a free 7-part web video series on fundraising fundamentals to help you fundraise like a pro. Our series is taught by Ruthellen Rubin, an NYU Professor of Philanthropy and Certified Fund Raising Executive with over 30 years of professional nonprofit fundraising experience.

Here’s an overview of what you’ll learn:

• The basics of fundraising appeals
• Find donors for your startup nonprofit
• How to get repeat donors
• Creating annual donors
• Collecting email addresses
• Email fundraising strategy

To get these valuable lessons, sign up for free at www.getdonors.com.

Donation tipping recommends, to the donor, that an additional percentage be added to their donation to cover transaction fees or other administrative costs. You can make this mandatory or optional for the donor.

80% of donors have opted in to help cover the fees. On average, this has been an additional 3% in donations for nonprofits.

To enabled this option, just follow these easy steps:

1. Login to your CauseVox admin
2. Select your fundraising site
3. Go to “Site Settings” and then “Fundraising Settings”
4. Check the box for “Donation Tipping”

This is free and included in all plans. Get started with donation tipping today.

At the 2012 Nonprofit Technology Conference, we moderated an incredible session called The Future of Nonprofit Storytelling with JD Lasica (Socialbrite), Jenna Sauber (Case Foundation), and Cara Jones (Storytellers for Good).

In this session, we explored the best practices of nonprofit storytelling, mediums and channels for telling those stories, and where storytelling is headed in the future for nonprofits.

The top 10 insights, in no particular order, from our panelists were:

• The best stories are the ones that you remember. Moves you to share again or take action.
• People will forget what you told them. They’ll forget what you did. But they’ll never forget how you made them feel through stories.
• Don’t make your story about your org, make it about you cause and clients.
• Storytelling doesn’t have to live within the marketing team. Employees, clients, supporters, all can contribute to a culture of storytelling
• How to get staff stories or other stories out? Pair people up with volunteer transcribers, recorders.
• Which medium to use for storytelling? How to choose? Use video for “motion and emotion”.
• What is a story? There has to be a beginning, middle, and end. Talking heads are not stories.
• For viral video goals, statistics show that maximum 1-2 minutes works. You lose viewers every 10-20 seconds.
• Make the link between the person watching the video and who they are watching = compelling
• Simple stories are the best & don’t be afraid to fail.

Debra Askanse beat us to the punch by summarizing our the insights from our storytelling session on Socialbrite.

Read the our curated Storify list below.

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 underutilized.

Everyone knows when they hear, watch, or read a good story. We know how to identify one, but how do you create one?

Creating an impactful story
In order to create a story, you have to first understand your audience and who you want to reach. Are they your Board? Existing donors? Young professionals? Knowing your audience and understanding what drives them will help you pick out the best story to create.

Developing a plot is the next part of a story. In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath suggest that there are three dominant plots that inspire people to take action.

• Challenge Plot - This plot is about a protagonist succeeding against an enemy. Obstacles seem insurmountable, but they inspire us by appealing to our appreciation for perseverance and courage.
• Creativity Plot – This plot is about someone making a mental breakthrough or solving a problem in a unique way. Creativity plots make us want to do something different and try new approaches to solve problems.
• Connection Plot – This plot is about people who develop a connection across a divide—racial, class, ethnic, religious, demographic, etc. These stories make us want to help others. They are about our relationships with others.

When crafting a plot for your story, you can follow a basic structure that has been proven to work well. Create a story that has each of these five elements.

• Intro/Hook – This is the opening that pulls your audience in. Introduce them to your protagonist. Pose open questions to keep your audience engaged.
• Struggle/Context – Explore your protagonist’s story of struggle. Make the struggle feel overwhelming and insurmountable. Use details and anecdotes that make the struggle feel real to help your audience understand how hard it was.
• Moment of Change – Something happens and it changes the protagonist’s life forever. It could be that your organization helps them glean insights about their life. Your protagonist grows. Show the change through vivid, personal details of how their life is different now.
• Resolution – Relate your protagonist’s story to a larger context. This might be a chance for someone from your organization to have a sound bite that communicates how your protagonist’s story is representative of so many more or relates your vision statement. Focus on creating an emotional response to your story; don’t suddenly switch to a rundown of numbers.
• Call to Action – Always end with a call to action on what you want the viewer to do. Always. Actions can be to donate, share, sign a petition, or more.

For more story creation tips, download our free storytelling ebook.

Tips on picking the right medium and channels
What’s the use of a story if you can’t reach your audience with it? You have to choose the right channels and medium. Cara Jones (Storytellers for Good) and Joe Lambert (Center for Digital Storytelling), two of our expert storytelling panelists at our NTC session this year, share their insights.

Tip from Cara: Save emotion and motion for video
Video is the best medium for emotionally resonant stories told by characters themselves. Cluttering these stories with facts and information can interrupt the emotional flow. Video is also the best medium for active, visual stories with lots of what is called “natural sound.” If your story involves people or things moving, sounds of things like cars, hammers, or people singing, yelling or talking to one another, video will be the best way to share it.

Tip from Cara: Save facts for print
Nonprofits often have compelling facts and statistics to accompany their stories but this type of information is better expressed in text at the end of a video or outside of the piece instead of through soundbites. Statistics and facts are also most easily digested through print as people can read at their own pace to absorb them.

Tip from Joe: Social media isn’t a silver bullet
New media skimming, with messages that we think are appropriately bite sized, may not actually be doing much more than making us feel generally connected to the idea. I no longer believe they are what motivates engagement. You cannot Facebook your way into social change.

Tip from Joe: Don’t be afraid to use long-form stories
Deep and powerful stories require solemnity and reverence to absorb. Most contexts of media do not invite serious engagement about the issues that we are trying to tackle as nonprofit professionals. One of the reasons documentaries, non-fiction books, and in-depth personal reflections are powerful is they force us to stay in the story long enough for the issues to be worked through and absorbed.

Of course, if you are already in the community, and have been engaged by the issue from whatever level, they are fantastic as information sources and mobilization strategies, and do lead to successful motivation to take a given step. I generally believe superficial memes invariably create superficial commitments, and powerful stories come from much work.

—

Content from The Starter Guide to Video Storytelling by Annie Escobar from ListenIn Pictures and Rob Wu from CauseVox. Read Cara’s thoughts on story trends and Joe’s thoughts on story mediums/channels, part 1 and part 2 respectively, of our series on storytelling.

No matter what great nonprofit practices you have in place, nothing will ever shift unless your audience really identifies with the story you tell.

My friend Michael Margolis over at Get Storied has put together a totally inspiring (and totally practical) 5-part video series on storytelling. And the best part is that it’s completely free!

Go check it out!

This awesome complimentary video series is all part of the run up to Reinvention Summit 2, which is world’s largest online conference on storytelling.

That’s right, it’s all online. And there are some incredible speakers coming as well. If you’d like more information about the Summit, you can get it here.

Don’t wait to check out the amazing FREE video series and learn why storytelling is KEY to your reinvention.

One of the most effective ways to tell stories is through images. Images evoke emotion — the root of what drives your nonprofit or cause.

We found this free guidebook developed by the Center for Social Impact Communication at Georgetown on how you can use images to create an impact. It walks you through the types of images you should be using and how you can systematically capture them.

Here’s their description:

Images can play a vital role in how effectively messages can reach various audiences. When images accompany text or a story, which element makes the difference in engaging the reader or viewer? Which motivates one to act? Using images strategically in external and internal communications planning and execution can be a vital component of success for an organization. Disparate pieces of advice can be found online and in publications urging organizations to utilize photos for different reasons and in an amalgam of ways; however, a consolidated handbook of how to incorporate photography into communications planning does not exist.

The primary objective of CSIC’s Nonprofit Imagery Fellow was to develop a framework that will walk nonprofit organizations through the process of communications planning with photography as an integral element.

Working closely with CSIC, the fellow examined more than 140 nonprofit organizations’ use of photography in their communications planning, utilizing communications audits, surveys, interviews, and a roundtable discussion with professionals from within the communications and photography industries.

View it here.

More info on these conferences below. It’s not too late to register!

SXSW (South by Southwest) Interactive is an annual festival in Austin TX focused on emerging technology, a focus which has earned the festival a reputation as a breeding ground for new ideas and creative technologies. There’s a social good track and hundreds, if not thousands, or nonprofit professionals attend. Be sure to check out the Good Capitalist Lounge and the Beacon Lounge, the two hot spots for nonprofits and do-gooders alike.

NTC (Nonprofit Technology Conference) is a three-day gathering in San Francisco this year that brings together nonprofit professionals from around the world to collaborate, innovate, and maximize effectiveness. It features a wide mix of social events, seminars, trainings, and resources. We’re hosting a panel on the Future of Nonprofit Storytelling.

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 e-books titled “YouTube Guide: Playbook for Good” and “YouTube Creator Playbook.”

YouTube has a hard-to-resist nonprofit program which is a great option for those meeting its requirements. They also recently launched a nonprofit support program called YouTube Next Cause Program. Vimeo does not have similar programs.

YouTube’s large audience is a strength but also a weakness; it has no shortage of video clutter and no shortage of stalking critics who at times make abysmal comments. However, you can choose not to allow comments, and if you have time you can weed them. In contrast, a strength of Vimeo is the polished professionalism and respectful behavior of its users.

Another Youtube strength is that there is no limit to how many videos you can upload for free, but if your video goes viral you will likely see advertising on or around it, so it’s not entirely free. There is a 15 minute limit to the length of each YouTube video unless you complete an account verification and maintain a clean copyright track record. Both Vimeo and YouTube have strict copyright policing.

YouTube makes all of its money in advertising, whereas Vimeo monetizes through a combination of ads and fees. Vimeo offers a free package that offers 500MB per week, which is about one hour of video and includes one HD upload. For an affordable fee, you can buy the Vimeo Plus package that provides unlimited HD, 5GB (about ten hours of video) per week and never any advertisements. The Plus package even allows you to easily replace the Vimeo logo with your own logo on the bottom of the video. Vimeo also offers a Pro package for businesses for a reasonable price which includes search engine optimization support plus more.

There’s no definitive answer to which one is better. All in all, it depends on your audience and where you can usually find your supporters. If your support base spends their time on Vimeo, then you should host your videos over there. Otherwise, Youtube would be the recommend route.

If you need a service with more powerful analytics, check out Wistia.