As the Executive Director of Pinky Swear Foundation, Erica Neubert Campbell knows one of her main roles is fundraising, but she doesn’t consider herself to be a fundraiser. Instead, she is Pinky Swear’s “Storyteller in Chief.” Erica has found that telling stories and developing a storytelling culture at the foundation has been the best way to build relationships, spark interest and solidify commitment with potential supporters.

The first story you are likely to hear about Pinky Swear, is their origin story: 9-year-old Mitch overhears a family talking about not being able to afford Christmas presents. Mitch decides to empty his bank account and share all he has with the families who are in the cancer ward at the hospital where he is receiving treatment for bone cancer. Mitch asks his father to ‘pinky swear’ to do the same the next year, after Mitch is gone. You can see the story here – bring tissues.

Building on a beautiful foundational story, Erica and her amazing team knew they could reach the hearts and minds of donors, volunteers, staff, and community members by improving their own abilities to share powerful stories. Here are two brilliant ways they have done just that:

Story at staff meetings

At least once a month at staff meetings, the Pinky Swear team does an exercise led by All-Star Engagement Manager, Sue Ratcliff. Sue’s role at Pinky Swear is to connect with families who are battling cancer (who they call “All Stars”). For the team exercise, Sue will share information from an interview with a family, write up a story version, and then each staff member will practice sharing the story. They don’t read it word for word. Instead, they practice telling it in their own words; how they might share it with a potential donor or supporter. This way the story won’t feel like a canned speech but will come from the heart.

Erica says having every member of the staff practice storytelling is a huge part of their culture of philanthropy. “Whether you are an office assistant, accountant, or lead fundraiser, you have an important part to play in fundraising and philanthropy.” Story practice enables every member of the staff to communicate what they do through a story of impact.

The story tour

Sometimes donors and potential donors come by the office at Pinky Swear for a meeting or tour. They want to see what the foundation is all about, but they have a rather small office filled with cubicles. How could this inspire donors?

Lacey Kraft, Vice President of Philanthropy, came up with a game-changing way to give an office tour. She envisioned story stations that were set up strategically to create a flow through their office. By the time you finish the tour, you understand the Pinky Swear Foundation mission and are enamored with not just what they do, but how they do it.

I got to take an abbreviated version of the tour via Zoom. Erica started by bringing me to “Mitch’s Corner.” This is a collection of Mitch’s memorabilia, like his yellow rain boots, a fireman’s hat and Wheaties box. There is a story about each item.

Next to Mitch’s Corner, a small pink leotard lays over the back of a kid’s chair next to a picture of Victoria. Victoria’s mom got a phone call about her daughter’s cancer diagnosis right after a dance class. So, they rushed to the hospital with Victoria still wearing her blush pink leotard.

When a donor interacts with each object, the story of these kids and their families become visceral and emotional. When I saw the mud that is still on the bottoms of Mitch’s yellow rain boots, right away I imagined him splashing and laughing in the rain. I felt connected to him.

Across the office is another station where they put together their Orange Envelope program. This program is often the first connection they make with a family battling childhood cancer. The staff stuff these envelopes with gift cards for immediate needs, a guide to resources and words of support. Right next to the big orange envelopes is a photo of James, so whoever is giving the tour can connect the impact of this program through James’s story.

The tour isn’t over yet! There is a wall of pictures of several kids the foundation has worked with. The tour guide can ask which picture speaks to you, and then they can tell the story of that kid and their family: who they are, what their goals and dreams are and how Pinky Swear is supporting them every step of the way.

The Pinky Swear Foundation has been very strategic and purposeful about putting storytelling to work. When asked why that is, Erica makes it sound like a no-brainer. “We realized that’s where we get the most traction. People come and they are genuinely moved.” Erica sheepishly admitted she doesn’t always add a financial ask to the end of the story. Oftentimes, she doesn’t need to. After taking the tour and hearing the stories, people reach out to her to find out more about how they can support the work.

The Pinky Swear team has also found that the families they have served value their stories being seen and heard. They love telling their stories and see that as a way to support the organization that supported them during a difficult time.

If you want your organization to become a storytelling culture, borrow these great ideas from Erica and her team: tell stories at staff meetings and make them part of your office tour. I promise, you will create lasting connections with your supporters. In fact, I pinky swear.

In this month of hearts, it seems fitting to focus on the role emotions play in connecting your audience to your cause. How can your comms efforts have the power to compel action? How can you get your audience to donate, to volunteer, to vote – even just to pay attention? How do you win hearts and minds?

Let’s take a moment to consider that phrase itself. There is good reason it is “hearts and minds” and not “minds and hearts.” The pervasive attitude since Descartes famously coined, “I think therefore I am” has been that humans are rational beings who have feelings, but experts like neuroscientist Antonio Dimasio and anthropologist George E Marcus have been making claims that turn Descartes on its head.

Marcus, in his paper The Sentimental Citizen: Emotion in Democratic Politics claims that reason itself relies upon emotion to determine what to respond to, what is central and vital to us and to initiate and manage action. Or as one of my favorite experts, Andy Goodman, always says “If you don’t care, you don’t do.”

In public interest communications, we have to win their hearts in order to access their minds and help them make the decision to sign up or show up. We need to give them all the feels.

Science backs me up on this, too. In their paper Emotion and Decision Making, Jennifer S. Lerner, Ye Li, Piercarlo Valdesolo, and Karim S. Kassam state that “The research reveals that emotions constitute potent, pervasive, predictable… drivers of decision making.”

If you want your outreach to be potent, pervasive, and persuasive, you are in the realm of storytelling. Neuroscientist Paul Zak has shown in his lab that storytelling has the power to release oxytocin in the brain of the listener or watcher. Oxytocin is a hormone which plays a key role in human bonding.

Zak goes further to call oxytocin the “moral molecule.” “My lab pioneered the behavioral study of oxytocin and has proven that when the brain synthesizes oxytocin, people are more trustworthy, generous, charitable, and compassionate.”

You already know this, because you have experienced it. Stories in the form of films, tv, a loved one’s anecdote or bedtime story have elicited your joy, hope, compassion and more. I think we are sold on story.

Here’s a warning though: the word “story” is bandied about. “Tell your brand story.” “What’s your website’s color story?” “Your data tells a story.” These are not the stories that Zak and I are talking about. You need to be telling stories where real people experience real things and are changed. This is dramatic narrative.

So, if you want to capture those hearts and minds and spur some action, tell your audience the stories of what you do and how you do it. And if you want to know more about how to do that… well, my friend, you are in the right place.

Who doesn’t love a fresh start? Whether it’s a new year, a new project, or a brand new day planner just waiting to be cracked open, people love a clean slate. Unless, that is, you’re a writer, and that clean slate is a blank computer screen with a blinking cursor that is impatiently waiting for you to write something…anything. As Deneen L. Brown writes in the book Telling True Stories, “The hardest thing about the beginning is the blank screen.”

Beginnings are intimidating because we know how crucial they are to the success of a story. In an age of ever-shrinking attention spans, if we don’t grab the audience’s attention right away, they will tune out or scroll to something else. That kind of pressure can inhibit your creativity, so it helps to have tools to rely on when the cursor keeps blinking but your muse isn’t talking. And the tools I consistently rely on come from improv.

At its essence, improv is telling stories, and for the actors, the empty stage and the absence of a script are the moral equivalent of a blank screen. In studying improv at the Groundlings Theatre, Upright Citizens Brigade and Impro Theatre, I’ve learned an important lesson about getting a story started: once you have the who, what, and where in place, the story will begin to write itself.

Who: Who is the audience going to care about, connect with, and follow on their journey? Giving this person a name and describing them so we can begin to picture them in our mind’s eye is essential, but that alone won’t be enough to keep the audience reading. You need the audience to care about the protagonist in your story right away.

Storytellers accomplish this by creating scenes in which the main character does something that is universally recognizable as likeable or even heroic. The legendary screenwriter Paddy Chayevsky dubbed these “pet the dog” scenes. (Or for you cat lovers, check out Blake Snyder’s book, Save the Cat.) The possibilities are endless, but whatever you choose, make sure you show the main character exemplifying a strength, a value or some behavior that will generate an emotional connection to the audience.

What: What is happening? Why are we seeing this person on this day? What is the situation they are in? Let’s start to get an idea about what they want – so the audience can wonder what will happen next (which is the secret to them continuing to pay attention). A great way to get right to the what is by starting in the middle of the action.

As Deneen L. Brown writes later in her essay, “I often begin with the tensest moment I’ve encountered in my reporting. I start the story on a pinpoint but then spread out.” So, rather than starting from neutral territory (where everyone is calm and happy) and then waiting for something big to happen, start when the big thing has just happened. Then your audience is piecing together the who and where of the story as they breathlessly follow the action.

To test whether this works for your story, lay out the sequence of events and identify the moment of highest tension. Then dive right into describing that moment for your protagonist. You might find that the middle of the action is the perfect place to begin.

Where: Nothing fancy here. Where are we? The audience won’t be able to connect to the story until you can set them in a specific time and place. A few well-chosen details can create a world to welcome your reader to. You want the audience to be able to picture themselves in the room with your character(s) and decide to stick around.

In a recent Goodman Center storytelling webinar, one of our students, Josh Taylor from Wordplay Connects wrote a compelling story to illustrate how his organization can turn young people in the Potomac Highlands region into lifelong readers. Taylor started his story this way:

Dexter crosses the threshold of the bookstore, the jingle of its doorbells rattling behind him. As his mother greets the owners cheerily and tugs on his reluctant arm, Dexter warily sizes up the rows of bookshelves which tower over him. He idly stands by as the adults discuss their goings-on, then his face flushes bright red as he realizes they’re talking about him.

In just three sentences, we know who the story is about, where we are, what is happening… and we’re left with that important sensation of wondering why people are talking about Dexter.

In improv, we practice creating the who, what and where in three lines – or less! This is a great exercise for both getting unstuck but also starting your story in a way sure to grab the audience’s attention. Because as Lisa Cron reminds us in her book, Wired for Story, “From the very first sentence, the reader must want to know what happens next.”

This article is from the December 2012 edition of our newsletter “Free-Range Thinking.” 

The next time somebody says, “Three guys go into a bar,” pay attention. There’s a lesson in storytelling behind the laugh.

Barnet Kellman

The next time somebody says, “Three guys go into a bar,” pay attention. There’s a lesson in storytelling behind the laugh. Barnet Kellman is an Emmy Award winning director best known for helming over 70 episodes of the hit series “Murphy Brown.” He currently teaches a course entitled “Foundations of Comedy” at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, but it was back in 2008, when he was teaching a class on directing that he hit upon an offbeat way to teach his students the fundamentals of storytelling. He made them tell jokes.

“I gave them an assignment before the first class,” Kellman told me when we spoke by phone last week. “They had to bring a joke and be prepared to tell it.” There was one condition: it couldn’t be a knock-knock joke or a riddle. The students did their homework, the jokes told in class ran the gamut from hilarious to weird to just plain dumb, and by the end of the exercise, Kellman had made his point.

“Making them tell jokes gave them an obligation,” Kellman said, putting extra emphasis on the last word. “They had to keep people’s interest and get a laugh at the end.” In fact, Kellman asserts that joke-tellers have no fewer than five obligations to their audience if they are going to earn a good laugh. As Kellman outlined these obligations, I could easily see the parallels to telling a good story:

1. Quickly grab attention. Jokes, stories, newscasts, commercials – all forms of communication have this initial obligation because we live in an age of ADD. Kellman said that good joke-tellers instinctively start with the same word – “So…” – because it’s the fastest way to meet this first obligation. “Anything else is warming yourself up and wasting time,” he added. “You can’t wander. You’ll lose your audience.”

2. Create interest through incident and/or identification with character. A joke, like a story, is an invitation to temporarily leave the real world behind and teleport instantly to another time and place. Most people are happy to take this leap, but they need a little help first. They need characters with whom they can identify or a familiar scene they can enter. When a joke-teller says, “Three guys go into a bar…” he’s meeting this second obligation with just six words. As an illustration for his directing class, Kellman used a joke that begins with precisely this set-up. Before you go any further, go to this jokes page and scroll about two-thirds down the page to read the full text.

3. Build tension through complication, elaboration and misdirection. Laughter is literally the body’s way of releasing tension, so it stands to reason that the more tension a joke-teller can build up, the bigger the laugh. Note how the joke about the three men in a bar presents a pattern of behavior (i.e., tossing bottles in the air and shooting them) that builds into a bizarre battle of one-upmanship. Stories build tension in similar ways, giving the audience just enough information so they understand what’s happening but are curious to see what happens next.

Photo courtesy of callmefred.com

4. Make “the turn” (i.e., a sudden change in attention or subject). “A joke is really two stories,” said Kellman in explaining the fourth obligation. “The set-up gets us following one story, but we ultimately end up in another.” The bottle-shooting contest seems to be a story about a macho display of hometown pride until the third man (from Boulder) shoots the other two. The stories you tell may never feature such a dramatic turn of events, but they do require some element of surprise. “You keep people interested by not letting them know exactly where you’re going,” said Kellman.

5. Deliver the punchline. Like stories, jokes are intended to convey meaning, and that’s what the punchline is all about. After all the elaboration, complication and misdirection, the punchline reveals the true meaning of the story: the Boulderite in the bar isn’t a cold-blooded murderer. He’s just an ardent believer in recycling! “The laugh at the end proves you’ve successfully conveyed your meaning,” said Kellman. “It’s a verdict you can’t hide from.” Storytellers don’t have to deliver punchlines, but their tales must convey meaning – the final, and perhaps most important obligation of all.

When I began this work in 1998, gas was $1.07 per gallon. The world’s most popular mobile phone was made by Nokia. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation did not exist. Also absent from the public interest sector was significant interest in the craft of storytelling. Whenever I would talk to prospective clients about improving their narrative skills, reactions ranged from disinterest to mild disdain. Get serious, many told me. One doesn’t change the world with a bunch of anecdotes.

Twenty-four years later, I can report that attitudes have changed dramatically. It’s hard to find a public interest organization today that isn’t telling stories or talking about ways to “change the narrative.” That said, I cannot report that all the stories I’m seeing are well-told or are the best kinds of stories to tell. Even more troubling are the stories told in ways that do more harm than good. So, for this month’s edition of free-range thinking – the last I’ll author – I have five requests for those who still aspire to tell truly world-changing stories.   

First, be clear on the kinds of stories you’re telling and what you expect them to accomplish. In the public interest sector, most stories tend to fall into one of two categories: journalistic stories or dramatic narrative.

Journalistic stories are designed to provide everything the audience needs to know within the first few paragraphs, answering the essential who, what, when, where, why and how questions that define “news.” The remaining paragraphs fill in the story’s details in descending order of importance. The overarching purpose of this format is to inform quickly and concisely, and there is a built-in understanding that the audience does not have to stay for the entire story to glean the main points.

Dramatic narrative, in contrast, is designed to engage the audience emotionally, which can motivate them to take a specific action. These stories tend to focus on an individual or small group with whom the audience can closely identify. The narrative usually follows the three-act structure (or what is commonly referred to as a beginning, middle and end), and the audience must follow the entire story to learn what happens and, most importantly, understand why this journey was worth their time and attention.

One of the most common problems I’ve observed over the years occurs when organizations confuse the kind of story they’re telling with the intended outcome. Simply put: If your goal is to spread awareness, the journalistic model is fine. But if you want your audience to actually do something – to sign, to march, to give – then you need dramatic narrative. Emotions are the precursors to actions, and journalistic storytelling simply isn’t designed to provoke emotional engagement.

Second, it’s time to move beyond the “broken person model” of storytelling. Also known as “deficit-based” framing, these stories introduce us to an individual at a crisis point (if not the lowest point) in their life. They are unhoused, unemployed, food insecure, a victim of domestic violence, addicted to drugs, or any combination of such dire circumstances. Through some means (often unspecified, which is another problem), they come into contact with our organization, and thanks to a specific program or initiative, they emerge a “fixed” person with a better life trajectory. (You can read more about problems caused by deficit framing in our March 2022 blog post.)

This storytelling model can evoke pity, but what you really want is empathy. Writing in Psychology Today in 2015, Dr. Neel Burton explained the key difference between pity and empathy: “Pity is a feeling of discomfort at the distress of one or more sentient beings and often has paternalistic or condescending overtones. Implicit in the notion of pity is that its object does not deserve its plight, and, moreover, is unable to prevent, reverse, or overturn it. Pity is less engaged than empathy, sympathy, or compassion, amounting to little more than a conscious acknowledgment of the plight of its object.”

The antidote to this common problem is, as you might guess, asset-based framing. Trabian Shorters, a thought-leader on this form of storytelling, calls it “a narrative model that defines people by their assets and aspirations before noting the challenges and deficits.” Or as we like to say at The Goodman Center, let your audience meet a person before they see a label. (Read more on asset-based framing in our March 2022 and May 2022 blog posts.)

Third, please stop calling everything a story. I cannot count the number of websites I’ve visited that present client testimonials but label them stories. There is no denying that testimonials have value – putting a human face on your proof of concept is always better than numbers alone. But a quote from a client thanking the organization for turning their life around rarely has the same impact as a full-fledged story in which we can see (and feel) for ourselves how that life was transformed. (The same can be said of most case studies, organizational histories, and donor profiles, which all have the potential to be powerful stories but are usually presented without the key elements.)

Fourth, even elite athletes have coaches and trainers, so…. If you want to enhance your storytelling skills and avoid the problems noted above, don’t be reluctant to ask for help, and I hope your first call will always be to The Goodman Center.

Our new Director, Kirsten Farrell, has storytelling in her DNA. As a member of the nationally recognized Impro Theatre, she is part of a company that crafts long-form improvisational plays, literally creating 90-minute stories on the fly in front of live audiences. You simply cannot do that unless you know the rules of storytelling inside and out (and also know how those rules can be bent or even occasionally broken and still delight an audience.)

As an advisory team member for The Corporation for Supportive Housing’s “Speak Up! Program LA,” Kirsten trains people with lived experience of homelessness to tell their stories. And since joining The Goodman Center in 2021, she has facilitated dozens of in-person and online workshops helping public interest organizations across the U.S. and around the globe hone their storytelling skills. I am honored and thrilled that she will be continuing the work I started back when I was filling up my car’s tank for $10 and making calls on my very cool Nokia flip-phone.

Fifth and last, never lose faith in the power of your stories. They are, always have been, and always will be the essential currency of human communication. Which is why I will end my last newsletter with the same words we use to end every storytelling class we offer:

Numbers numb, jargon jars, and nobody ever marched on Washington because of a pie chart. Stories, by their very nature, tend to get stored in our brains. So, if you can change the story inside someone’s head, you’ve taken the first step to changing the world.

In 2012 the YMCA of Rye, New York launched a story-collecting project to capture the personal experiences of its members, staff, and volunteers. Modeled loosely on StoryCorps, a national oral history nonprofit, “The Rye Story Project” has collected over 450 stories since then and has regularly shared them in on-site exhibits, marketing materials, annual reports, and social media.

When we first interviewed Lisa Tidball, Communications Director, and Denise Woodin, Director of Community Impact and Social Responsibility, in November 2013, they told us that capturing and sharing these stories helped build community, added a more personal touch to marketing materials, and supported the Rye Y’s fundraising efforts. With the project marking its 10^th anniversary this month, we thought it would be a good time to reconnect with Lisa and Denise and find out what lessons they have learned with a decade of story collecting behind them.

Kirsten Farrell: I have a hunch there are plenty of lessons learned after ten years of collecting stories, but does one rise above all the others?

Denise Woodin: I think it’s that everyone has a story. While it may not be an earth-shattering “The Y Saved My Life” story – although we do get those – a lot of the stories are just “I bring my kids here for swim lessons and they love it,” or “This is just such a great place for our family to come and spend family time,” or a senior citizen telling us, “This is how I get out of the house. This is how I make social connections.” Sometimes those are the best stories.

Kirsten: Has the process changed over the years? Have you found some things that were more helpful in gathering or telling stories?

Denise Woodin and Lisa Tidball

Denise: For the most part, we hit on a formula right away that worked. One change is that a lot of interviewers, including myself, started out by recording people’s stories on a legal pad, writing them down. Now most of us are recording them on our phones, and it makes it a lot easier to transcribe them.

Lisa Tidball: I much prefer that because I can really focus on the person I’m talking to. Also, we always tell the story in first person. We started that out in the beginning, and that’s one of the things we ask our interviewers to do.

Denise: If you’re transcribing the person in their own words, it’s in their voice. It makes it fresher, more immediate. Most of the people that we use as interviewers are not writers. So, it’s easier for them to transcribe the story. Then they send it to me, and I go through and I edit. I edit very lightly. I take out the “ums”, I take out the repetitive things, but I try and keep it in the interviewee’s voice.

Lisa: We also send every story to the person we interviewed for their approval, so that they can feel comfortable with it.

Kirsten: Given that many of the interviewers are not professional journalists or necessarily storytellers, do you provide other guidelines to help them gather these stories?

Denise: We give them a tip sheet, and we try to do a 20-minute training every year. We give them a list of questions but we say, “Glance at this before the interview, but never look at it while you’re interviewing the person.” We want you to have a conversation with this person. Pretend it’s someone you’ve met at a cocktail party and you’re genuinely curious about them. How long have they been a member? Does their family come here? What are some of their goals? What are some of their challenges?

Lisa: And let the interviewee lead it. Let it take the form that they want.

Kirsten: You told us in 2013 that you regularly use the stories and in several different ways. How are you using them now, ten years in?

Lisa: Denise will read a story often before a board meeting, and it keeps the board members connected. We’ll put some stories in social media. We’ll put them in our annual report. We’ll use them throughout the year to remind people of who we are, the people who are benefiting from the Rye Y, and then we have our on site exhibit for people who are just coming to the Y, they’re bringing their child to swim, or they’re getting on the treadmill, and they may not be aware of all the important work we do.

On-site display of stories

Kirsten: I can imagine that it makes people feel so good if they work there, but also anyone who is in that space. Even if you’re just going to do some laps. Reading these stories must make people think, “I like being here in this space that provides so much to so many people.”

Lisa: Yes, and if you’re just having a hard time dragging yourself to a class, and then you read this amazing story about a person who came to the Y through all these different challenges, it’s helpful.

Denise: It’s great for staff morale too, because over and over again we hear people say what they love about coming here is the friendliness of the staff, the helpfulness of the staff, and they name them. So, if we put that in the story – “Caitlin and Rich greet us at the front desk and they know our names” that’s a great boost for our staff.

You can read examples from The Rye Y Story Project here and also access the interview tips they use, their permission form, and the PowerPoint they have used in the past to help spread this storytelling project to other organizations.