Help Donors Catch Your Stories

Your donors are busy. They’re tired. They make decisions all day in a world where everyone is clamoring for attention. Here's a simple way to help them "catch" your stories.

If you struggle to tell stories, you’ll struggle to raise funds. 
In the Mission Writers course:

• Learn the exact stories that every ministry, missionary, and nonprofit needs to tell.
• Master the fundraising story calendar.
• Develop and practice essential storytelling skills to increase funding for your mission.
• Build your story library and your confidence.

Details at MissionWriters.org
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Mission Writers is an online course and group coaching experience where you’ll develop and practice essential storytelling skills to help increase funding for your mission. Get started now, for a year of coaching at over 60% off the regular price.

Transcript

Kay  0:00  
Have you ever opened up an email from a nonprofit and the thing just kept going on and on and on and on? Or you opened an email and it was – they tried to format it to make it look like the print newsletter, but it turned instead into this kind of maze of misshapen text on your phone, right? Did you fight through and read it? If you did, (and most won't) could you recall anything at all that it said?

Kay  0:32  
I'm Kay Helm. And this is the Life and Mission Podcast. And today we're going to talk about this problem, and how you can fix it for your newsletters.

Kay  0:44  
The idea of sending out a regular newsletter, whether you do it monthly, or quarterly, or a couple of times a year, this is a good idea, you should be doing this, but do it, print it, send it through the Postal Service and include a returned device or a return envelope for donations. But whatever you do, however you do your newsletter, please don't try to cram it all into one email. There's a couple of reasons you don't want to do that. First of all, for yourself, it kind of leaves you with nothing left for the rest of the time between newsletters. It's kind of like a big production, and then you do the newsletter. And then you kind of forget about storytelling for a while. And then you do another big newsletter. At least, that's what I've observed. I'm not saying everybody does it that way. But that tends to be kind of the pattern that we can fall into. 

Kay  1:38  
And the problem is, while the print newsletter is really great to have everything together, because it can sit around in somebody's house, it sits on their desk reminds them of you multiple times, however long they keep that print piece. I know some people that will use that newsletter to prompt prayer for a missionary or for a ministry, they sit it on their desk and and look at it again, when they're writing the checks for their bills. I mean, just depends on your donor base and how they interact with your newsletter. But when it comes time to take that thing and move it into the email space, if we try to replicate what we did in print, we can really make a mess of it. It's just simply because everybody's got a different size screen. So many people are looking at their email on their phones, and the text is going to behave a certain way; your images are going to show up a different way. And if you have a lot of different stories, and you're trying to use like a lot of different columns and formatting that works nicely on paper, and you're trying to translate that over into email, it can really do strange things as you get into different formats on the screen. 

Kay  2:53  
And so if you keep it simple, and just do one story at a time, you're going to have greater success in communicating with your people. So if you think about the scenario that I opened with, where you open this email from a nonprofit, and it's just long this is the first issue is is it's just too long, right? Or we have that formatting issue. These are two different things. But they're both caused by trying to do it all in one email. 

Kay  3:22  
I like to say the real problem with either of these is that when we try to put a bunch of stories together into one email, readers can't catch them. What do I mean by catch them? I mean that your readers are going through their email, they're going to give maybe a few seconds to each message, if that much. If they open your message, and it's very long, they're likely to just close it. They don't have time for it, they're in the middle of skimming through and looking for things. They might flag it, or put it in a folder, or mark it a certain way, you know, to come back to it, or mark it unread. Again. That's what I do a lot, but then it gets bumped down. And eventually it gets into that space where you just don't see it anymore. And you've lost your audience; you've missed your chance to tell your story. 

Kay  4:14  
But if your email is short, easy to scan, easy to read, to the point, engaging. So that's where we why we use storytelling. You're telling one story. Then it's like you threw them a ball and they were able to catch it. 

Kay  4:30  
If you think about make your emails easy to catch. Even if your people really love you, even if they really want to get news and information and stories from you, even if they really want to donate to you. This problem of too much all at once, can still cause them to not get your message, or to dilute the message that they do get. So try this instead. Write your beautiful print newsletter; format it the way you want; include all the key stories that a newsletter needs. And then spread those stories out over several emails, one story, one email. 

Kay  5:12  
So if your newsletter has a constituent story, a donor story, a volunteer story, that gives you three emails right off the bat, to send with content from your newsletter that you don't have to rewrite. That's three emails. So your print newsletter goes out. And then you send out an email newsletter, and it's got your constituent's story from your print newsletter. Then the next week, they get the donor story. The next week, they get the volunteer story, whatever stories. Another email could be, though, what's coming next section of your newsletter. The–you know how you do your email. So break it up and say, How can we make each section of this newsletter its own email. And if you break that up, then send it say a week apart, or spread it out in that space. whatever space you have between newsletters. 

Kay  6:02  
It does a couple of things. It makes it really easy for your newsletter readers, your email recipients, to read those emails and to catch them, and to then respond specifically to that story and or to your call to action for that story. And the other thing it does is it really takes a load off of you. Now you don't have to wonder about "Well, what am I going to put in the email this week?" You've got it. You've already got it written. It's ready to go. You can load those things up and schedule them and go about your business until you collect the next batch of stories. And we're not trying to do this to make more work for you. I'm just saying use your storytelling in a in... a in a strategic way. 

Kay  6:46  
And the question that we get a lot with this as well. "Won't people notice that? I'm repeating the same stories? You know, they got it in their newsletter? Why do I need to send it in an email too?" Well, most people don't remember from print to email. And if they do, they go "Oh, yeah, that was cool. I remember that. And I wanted to give to that." Yeah, it just reinforces what you're doing. It keeps you top of mind. Like there's nothing bad that's going to come from that repetition. So don't worry about that. When things, sometimes we worry about the things we don't need to worry about. And we don't worry about the things we do need to worry about. So one story, one email. 

Kay  7:25  
And do think of it like a game of catch, okay, each story is a ball. If I toss you a story, you can catch it and read it. If I toss you several balls at once, can you catch those? Maybe. But even if you're super motivated and nimble, it's likely that you're gonna miss most of those balls. So we don't want to toss everything at our readers at once. Just toss them one at a time, one story, one email. Our donors are busy, they're probably very tired. They make decisions all day long. In a world where everyone is clamoring for attention. They've got balls coming at them all day long. You can be the bright spot in their day by tossing your people just one at a time.

Kay  8:11  
As I mentioned earlier, when you try to cram several stories into one email message, your primary story and your calls to action are diluted by the others. Are there times when it's right to send multiple stories in one email? Well, there actually are. But it's, it's part of a different kind of strategy. And you really need to understand that strategy and know what you're doing in that to really benefit from that strategy. Meanwhile, if you treat your emails like that game of catch, send one story at a time so that they can catch that and respond, toss it back to you maybe in the form of a donation or interaction where they ask a question, whatever that interaction needs to be. You make that thing easy to catch. 

Kay  8:58  
Try it. We're at the time right now where you need to be telling stories for your year end fundraising. I'm recording this in September, and September, October and November are storytelling months. By the end of November, you need to start asking, and all through December you're asking. But if you haven't told the stories, if you haven't shared stories with your people in these months leading up to that, you're going to feel really weird about asking. And they're going to be like, "Hey, where'd this come from?" So they're not going to be so connected and ready to respond to your ask. So one story per email, try it out. Let me know how it comes out. 

Kay  9:40  
If you enjoyed this podcast, share it with somebody. Until next time, I'm Kay Helm for the Life and Mission Podcast. Find your voice. Tell your story. Change the World.

Kay  9:49  
[ad] Mission Writers is a one year course where you'll develop and practice essential storytelling skills to help increase funding for your mission. You'll learn the exact stories that every ministry, missionary, and nonprofit needs to tell. Develop your storytelling and direct response copywriting skills, learn the fundraising story calendar, build your story library and know when and how to tell your stories. You'll do that with coaching calls. I've got a course library that's already beginning to fill up with lessons, and you'll have the community support. You do not have to do this alone. But you do need to tell stories in order to raise funds. I have a free video workshop that you can get at my website. Kayhelm.com. That's kayhelm.com Scroll down the page about two thirds of the way down, hit the purple button. And it will take you to sign up for that video of the three stories that every ministry mission and nonprofit needs to tell.