How a nonprofit’s storytelling campaign tripled donations after featuring personal stories of their clients and supporters

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If you’ve ever said that your nonprofit is the “best kept secret” — you’re not alone.

Community Support Advocates services individuals with mental health challenges or disabilities, and president Christina Smith has said it, too.

Organizations that work directly with CSA know the work they do, but outside of those direct partnerships or referrals, many don’t know about CSA. With their funding streams changing, Smith knew they needed to focus more intentionally on fundraising and marketing efforts.

CSA launched a storytelling campaign in 2022 as part of their 25th anniversary year. On the podcast, she shares:

·      Why she was initially hesitant to share member stories, and what changed her mind

·      Why an initial video story didn’t get the results they wanted

·      How CSA distributed the digital storytelling campaign, and why the second effort worked

·      How storytelling changed their interaction with their audience, including engagement

·      Why the campaign helped with fundraising

·      Changes they’ve seen after the storytelling campaign ended in 2022 and what they want to do next

What prompted you to want to share your story on your digital channels?

As a mental health and disability organization, we are not great at telling our own story. We’re not great at marketing ourselves. We’ve been around a long time and we never really had to market ourselves, but funding has been really tight in the last few years, so we decided we needed to start getting our name out there. We are a really well kept secret. If you are in the field or if you need services, people know who we are. But otherwise, people don’t know who we are.

What’s kept you from sharing your story before?

We sometimes feel like it’s exploitative to ask members or our families to be part of marketing. So we were having that kind of weird feeling. We started off with a brand video and asked them to talk about services, we weren’t quite sure how it was going to go. But to be honest, it was not exploitative. It was actually very powerful and beautiful.

We had a couple of family members and members that we serve come in and talk about the impact CSA had on them. And it was amazing to listen. Not only were there a lot of people who wanted to tell their story, we had to turn people away, so that was eye-opening for me.

They wanted to tell others about their journey and how our team helped with services, so other people know how to get help. And that changed how we looked at marketing and storytelling. 

You started with a video story, what happened from there?

The video didn’t have as many results as I wanted, because we didn’t know how to share it. So we decided, for our 25th anniversary campaign, I needed to partner with someone who knew how to get the stories out. So we hired a professional marketer, StoryStruck Marketing.

I already had a plan in place, and I wanted to invite people to share their story. I wanted it to be branded, and I wanted it to be easy to push out the stories. And I wanted it to feature all kinds of different people — people with disabilities, health issues, families, schools, funders, board members, and other providers of services. There’s all different kinds of people who we’ve impacted over the years.

We collected all those stories, then StoryStruck helped us put it all together in a really organized, collective and branded way. So then it was pretty easy for us to put those out all throughout the year.

We never really interact with our audience. Usually, we’re telling people what we do — here’s an event or hey, can you give us money? But we never shared the impact we’ve made or had pictures or quotes.

What was the impact of your nonprofit’s storytelling campaign?

It was really surprising. Honestly, I don’t know why, but how many comments I received about people loving the campaign. People really impressed. They didn’t know what we did, because we do a lot of different types of things.

People would say, “I love that and I’m waiting for the next one.” So that’s been a lot of fun. We basically interacted with all of our of network for the entire 25th anniversary year, and then we launched our end-of-year giving.

How did your end-of-year fundraising campaign go?

We were curious how that would change. It did change people’s giving, and I think it was because we were interacting with them differently, and we were reminding them all year how we impacted them and the community around us. We were really excited.

We’re not where we want to be ultimately, in terms of fundraising, but we saw a huge impact and now we just need to continue. Our donations tripled.

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How does your nonprofit share its story through marketing, fundraising, or outreach? Consider sharing a how-you-do-it story on the nonprofit Storytellers podcast. Submit your nonprofit’s story by filling out this form.