Storytelling How-Tos

Tips and tools for telling your story

To help you think through what exactly is the story to be told (and why and to what goals), or to prepare your team to tell stories in their own words, check out the following resources: 

• 5 Ways Charity: Water Uses Storytelling to Inspire More Giving: Brief article in Fast Company gives overview of essential components and creative ideas for how to form empathic connections between people in disparate places and cultures. “Good stories provide an emotional bridge between people in need and the potential donors,” says Charity: Water’s founder, Tyler Riewer. “We want to give our audience the opportunity to feel powerful rather than powerless.”
• The Storytelling Non-Profit: A Practical Guide to Telling Stories That Raise Money and Awareness: A step-by-step process for telling stories that raise more money and awareness; how to understand your audience; keys to finding and collecting great stories; how to create a 12-month plan for storytelling; ways to navigate ethics and confidentiality when telling stories; how to measure the results of your stories to get the best results; and ideas for telling stories across digital and offline channels to reach the broadest audience possible.
• Video Storytelling “Toolkit” from Chronicle of Philanthropy: Did you know that donors spend more time watching YouTube videos than non-donors? Series of articles on how to tell compelling stories and improve video quality on a limited budget.
• Ready to ACT? 3 Steps to Effective Foundation Communications by Sara J. Redington and Danielle M. Reyes for Exponent Philanthropy’s PhilanthroFiles blog
• 3 Elements Every Good Story Needs podcast by award-winning Moth StorySlam and The Gist’s Matthew Dicks
• The Power of Vulnerability, TED Talk by Brené Brown
• 7 Ways to Get Readers to Connect with Your Mission by Suzanne Skees for Huffington Post
• Ashoka: A Changemaker’s Guide to Storytelling
• Capturing Your Core Stories
• Digital Storytelling for Social Impact summary of report by Jay Geneske and Doug Hattaway for Stanford Social Innovation Review; and Digital Storytelling for Social Impact Guide by The Rockefeller Foundation, Hattaway Communications, and Timshel
• Marshall Ganz on Why Stories Matter; story worksheet from his class at Harvard Kennedy School
• Paul VanDeCarr’s excellent series on storytelling in Chronicle of Philanthropy, including Don’t Tell a Boring Story and Technology and Trends in Storytelling
• Skees Family Foundation Media Release Form
• Skees Interview Guidelines
• Spitfire Strategies_Storytelling Tool Planner 2012
• Storytelling and Social Change, a guide for grantmakers and nonprofits
• You Have 6 Nonprofit Story Types to Tell