Humanity and Heroism in Nonprofit Storytelling

Humanity and Heroism in Nonprofit Storytelling

The last article that I wrote here on LinkedIn looked at a conversation that I had with a new client over coffee. The conversation we had focused on the what, how, and why of video storytelling. The back-and-forth of our discussion teased out the productive tension between creativity and curiosity in the process of finding the right story to tell.

I decided to share the story of that conversation because I thought it would shine a light on a subtle but important part of doing good work in mission-driven marketing. It was a story that could help nonprofits and purpose-driven companies appreciate the importance of storytelling. It could also help agencies, freelancers, and students think about the work they do in new ways.

What I didn’t expect was the effect that telling the story would have on me and the way I think about the work we do. Thinking about creativity and curiosity as a productive tension turned my thoughts to other ways that finding a balancing point between the push and pull of competing elements is essential to the work we do.

Part of my last article was spent talking about narrative forms in the context of the creative process. After writing and posting, I continued to think about how narrative forms figure into the productive tension of identifying options and making choices in the process of finding and telling stories. I realized that the narrative form you choose determines what kind of hero the story can have.

The hero is such an important part of any story. So, I thought I would share some more of my thoughts on the productive tension between heroism and humanity in storytelling for mission-driven marketing.

What Is A Hero Anyway?

“A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself”

- Joseph Campbell

There are two maxims in the world of mission-driven marketing. Both of them are worth mentioning here because they both relate to identifying and describing heroes. They help to define where we can find heroes and what we can expect heroes to do. Using them as points on the map, we can triangulate a position where we can ask what a hero is. That, to me, is the really interesting question.

Fundraising

The first maxim related to heroes in storytelling comes from the world of nonprofit fundraising.

Decades of trial and error in direct mail fundraising, digital fundraising, and even crowdfunding have provided plenty of evidence to support the belief that:

How you choose and position the hero of your story is crucial to the success of your message.

Jeff Brooks has written about the importance of this choice and the most common options available to a nonprofit organization. In How To Turn Your Words Into Money: The Master Fundraiser’s Guide to Persuasive Writing, Brooks distinguishes between stories that position:

• Organization as Hero: When your story positions the organization as the hero, you tell the audience that the organization is excellent. But donors don’t give because your organization is excellent. They give because they are excellent.

• Beneficiary as Hero: When your story focuses on individuals that your organization helps, you tell the audience that the work your organization does makes a difference. This approach does a better job of creating an emotional connection: If the story holds the audience’s attention.

• Donor as Hero: When your story positions the donor as the hero, the narrative takes place in their world, tells the audience why they should care, and focuses on action. In short, it connects with the donor and invites them “into a corner of the world” where they can make a difference.

Marketing

The second maxim related to heroes in storytelling comes from Donald Miller’s guide to Building A StoryBrand.

Miller has a lot of important insights on how to use storytelling to grow a business. But the one that stands out the most to me is:

Story is the greatest weapon we have to combat noise . . .

One of the biggest challenges in marketing, whether you’re talking about a nonprofit organization, a mission-driven company, or a profit-motivated CPG, is cutting through the noise. Marketing is a competition for attention and storytelling is an approach that gives organizations an advantage. Miller tells businesses to follow four principles in building their brand story:

• The customer is the hero, not your brand: In transactional marketing, customers want to know what’s in it for them. They’re more likely to buy when they know your product is the best solution to the problem they have.

• Customers buy solutions to internal problems: Consumers spend money on things that they expect to have a positive impact on how they feel. They don’t buy electric vehicles to solve global warming. They buy it to feel like someone who is trying to solve global warming. It’s a difference that makes a difference.

• Customers aren’t looking for another hero; they’re looking for a guide: People self-identify as heroes but they experience internal conflicts. They don’t want a hero to compete with. They want a guide who can supply them with the tools they need to resolve their internal conflicts.

• Customers trust a guide who has a plan: In transactional marketing, a business needs to be prepared to close the deal on their relationship as a guide with the consumer-as-hero. That means they need to clarify what the relationship looks like and remove the sense of risk from the customer’s perspective.

Defining The Hero in Mission-driven Marketing

“Only a small part is played in great deeds by any hero”

- J.R.R. Tolkien

So, from the discussion of fundraising and marketing, we’ve got a good idea of how storytellers usually approach the question of where to look for heroes and what to do with them when we find them.

Brooks tells us to tell stories that make donors heroes through their actions (i.e., financial support).

Miller tells us to tell stories that show consumers how to become heroes through taking the specific actions that we want them to take (i.e., purchase our product).

One thing that I think we need to do to go beyond the frameworks of Miller and Brooks is to acknowledge that they focus on a transactional arrangement. Something else that I think needs to be examined is the relationship between storytelling in transactional marketing and the epic narrative form as a frame for stories.

Positioning

Not long ago, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by an acquaintance of mine that works as a digital marketing consultant. They were interested in talking about how positioning a brand in the nonprofit space compares to the way it gets done in B2B or B2C marketing.

Even though I was being interviewed as the expert, I have to admit that I learned a few things throughout that interview. Or, at the very least, I got fresh insights into things that I already knew.

The big takeaway from that interview, from my perspective, was a clearer understanding of how mission-driven marketing should work. We need to tell stories that position a brand at the intersection of people who want to help and people who need help.

Sure, marketing is a competition for attention. And yes, storytelling combats noise. But what do we do with an audience’s attention once we’ve got it? Mission-driven storytelling isn’t focused on a single transaction. It’s focused on building a lasting relationship based on emotional connections and common commitments.

Framing

One of my close friends has a background in academia. They studied rhetorical theory. When we talk about storytelling, this friend of mine always brings the conversation around to how narrative forms frame the characters in a story.

I won’t burden you with the arcane theories and theorists that come up in our conversations. But I will try to summarize what I think is the most important insight that comes from the realization that the kinds of stories we tell determine what the characters in those stories can do.

All the story forms that we have today originated in the epic. In an epic, the hero overcomes unbelievable challenges to save the day. There are traces of the epic form in the idea that a donor is a hero or that a guide can provide a solution that helps the hero finish the job successfully. But telling a story based on the epic framework forces us to explain why problems persist after the story ends.

In most epics, the hero has to die or retire to explain why the new world they won didn’t solve all of the problems the audience experiences in their lives. Achilles had that pesky heel. Odysseus, well, we all know how that one wraps up. So, what does that tell us about telling stories that will resonate with audiences who can help us keep fighting problems that won’t go away?

Humanizing Heroes is the Key to Stories That Connect

“We are our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves”

- Tom Robbins

When we think about storytelling in mission-driven marketing, we’re not thinking about theories or the literary tradition. We’re thinking about how to get messages heard. We’re thinking about how to get your nonprofit noticed or attract an audience to your company’s mission.

The kind of support we’re looking for isn’t something that can be measured by counting individual examples of successful sales or donations. That’s a KPI that fits with the transactional approach. And, as we’ve shown, storytelling is an approach that gives us a better option. Relationship-based messaging aims to win long-term support based on emotional connections and common commitments.

At Argonaut, we think that the best way to find the right stories to tell is to start with a discovery process that clarifies our client’s “WHY”. What you do and how you do it fit with the “organization as hero” story in Brooks’ three-part schema.

Why you do what you do is something deeper that can connect your organization to your beneficiaries and your donors. It’s the map that shows the way to the point where people who want to help intersect with people who need help. It’s the elevator version of the position you want your organization’s brand to occupy.

When Heroes Lack Humanity

One of my favorite works of literature is Miguel De Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Most of us know the broad strokes of the story: the crazy knight, his faithful squire, tilting at windmills.

I think about Don Quixote a lot in the context of storytelling and especially as it relates to how the heroes we create can impact the audiences we reach. If you only know Don Quixote through popular culture, you might not know that books about chivalry were the source of his madness. Reading too many stories about fictional characters made him see the world through the lens of misleading fiction.

If the stories that you tell present an unrealistic view of the world, your audience just might end up tilting at windmills. But the greater risk is that telling stories with flawed heroes will harm how your organization understands its mission.

Getting meaningful work done on the difficult challenges facing nonprofits today forces us to focus. We have to see our goals, our challenges, our resources, and our allies with clarity. In such a complex setting, it’s hard to capture the magic with overly simplistic heroes.

When We Make Humans the Heroes

Another storyteller that I think about in relation to the work we do at Argonaut Productions is Terry Pratchett. If Cervantes gives us a cautionary tale about telling simple stories when we’re trying to solve complex problems, then Pratchett gives us the other side of the coin. His Discworld series shows us how to write a story without “a hero” even though heroes are everywhere.

There are more than 40 books in Pratchett’s series, so I won’t go into too much detail here. What’s important to know is that there isn’t a single individual in the role of the hero and there isn’t a single event that draws the narrative to a conclusion. It’s a lot like real life in the sense that it just keeps going. There isn’t a “win” that wraps everything up in a bow.

Discworld has lots of heroic figures: Sam Vimes, Esmerelda Weatherwax, Moist Von Lipwig, even Havelock Vetinari. But the thing that sets them apart from the heroes we typically find in an epic narrative is that they each recognize the limits of their own abilities. They know that there is only so much they can do and to attempt to do more is to risk the unintended consequences that follow close on the heels of hubris.

In Discworld, there is no Mount Doom. There is no epic final dual with Lord Voldemort. There is no Death Star. Every day overflows with complex challenges for which there are only imperfect solutions. The characters in Pratchett’s stories make the world a better place by first realizing that they can’t “fix” the world.

How Do We Humanize the Heroes In Your Story?

Nonprofit storytelling should be both aspirational and inspirational. It should point toward the vision of a better world that can be achieved through the combined efforts of an organization and its supporters through the work they do with beneficiaries. And it should be very clear about how important each of those roles is to sustaining the work that it takes to make an impact on a complex challenge.

If you want donors to donate, you should tell a story that emphasizes the heroic impact of supporting your cause. If you want donors to see your organization as the guide who provides what they need to make an impact, you should tell a story that emphasizes your role. If you want to tell the whole story, you need to think about the difference between Terry Pratchett and Don Quixote.

Your organization’s story should start with your WHY. That’s because the thing that drives you—the thing that supplies the drive to do what you do—is the thing that can encompass and energize not just your organization but also your supporters and your beneficiaries.

It's easy to paint your organization as the hero. It’s efficient to paint your donors as heroes. It’s more realistic to tell the version of the story that shows an audience that it takes everybody to make a difference. That’s what we shoot for when we work on a video storytelling project.

In the long run, that’s a better way to build relationships that will last.