A Bank That Always Builds Interest
Investing time now in building your story bank can ensure your staff and volunteers will always find the right story when they need it.
By Andy Goodman
When good causes realize that storytelling can enhance advocacy, fundraising, recruitment and just about everything they do, they start looking for stories everywhere. Staff retreats are held exclusively to collect stories. Board members and volunteers are interviewed to mine their experiences. Web sites are updated with "Tell Us Your Story"
pages where members and others can post their anecdotes.
Collectively, these processes can yield dozens (if not hundreds) of stories, which
presents an entirely new challenge: once you've got 'em, where do you put 'em?
The answer is a storybank, which can take many forms but generally serves one
purpose: to provide a central repository where you can easily and quickly find a story
that enlivens whatever point you want to make.
Not long ago, we asked a range of organizations for best practices in storybanking so we could share them here. Many responded and we built on this feedback with new research of our own.
The lessons learned are below, and through it all one message kept coming back loud and clear. If you're serious about storytelling, get serious about building your own storybank. Stories can be a powerful tool, but they can't help you if you can't find them when you need them.
Building it doesn't have to be complicated.
Some organizations solicit stories by advertising in internal newsletters and mailing lists. Others send out postcards advertising the URL of their online story bank where individuals could post their own stories.
Brandon Seng of the Michigan Nonprofit Association strongly endorses the online approach since it eliminates faxing, transcribing, and other time-intensive activities.
The Literacy Volunteers of Tucson used SurveyMonkey to collect information about the quality of their services from volunteers, tutors and students. The survey included some open-ended questions (e.g., "What can you do now that you couldn't do before?") and many respondents filled in these boxes with personal success stories.
Cathy Beaumont of the University of British Columbia's development office combs through various publications produced by the school and staff and tells us, "There's no shortage of material." On average, she finds two new stories per month to add to UBC's online story bank.
As part of her job as a communications officer at PATH, Teresa Guillien actually goes into the field for two weeks every year and produces six or seven stories per trip. She is accompanied by a consultant (a former NBC journalist), a videographer and a photographer and travels to various countries to interview people face to face.
It's not just about fundraising.
Most organizations assume that stories support development, which is true, but we heard from many who were using stories in a variety of ways:
The University of British Columbia uses stories to demonstrate to donors the school's diversity. The Michigan Nonprofit Association uses stories to train staff and help them better understand the work of the organization. The Literacy Volunteers of Tucson uses them in volunteer recruitments and orientations "to give more humanity to the project,"
according to Lisa Kemper.
Jim Gangl from St. Louis County Public Health & Human Services told us his organization consisted of employees at the end of long careers mixed with younger ones just starting out. "Because there isn't much in the middle," he said, "we need stories to convey our experience." And just this week we heard from an aquarium that was looking to tell stories on the labels of exhibits to create a more engaging experience for visitors.
It’s not that complicated.
If you haven't started a storybank due to concerns over technical hurdles or huge start-up costs, stop worrying and start building. Some of the organizations that responded to our request had their IT departments whip up a simple proprietary database. Others got a little fancier – with built-in content management, online collection tools, and cross-referencing with photos - but one respondent simply set up a single folder (containing categorized subfolders) on her company's intranet while another started with just an Excel spreadsheet.
However you use them, your first have to find the stories and keep them in a safe, easily accessible place. So build your storybank and watch it build more interest in everything you do.
Andy Goodman is a nationally recognized author, speaker and consultant in the field of public interest communications. Along with Storytelling as Best Practice, he is author of Why Bad Ads Happen to Good Causes and Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes. He also publishes a monthly journal, free-range thinking, to share best practices in the field.
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