How Do You Make a Compelling Story?

It’s the nonprofit’s constant challenge: you know your work is good, important and worthy. So how do you convince everyone else? In the session “Video Storytelling for Social Change,” Catherine Orr and Elena Rue, co-founders of StoryMineMedia, teamed up with Joe Schroeder of RAFI and Lora Smith of the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation to share their successes and helped attendees brainstorm their own strategies.

On any given day, 89 million Americans will watch 1.2 billion online videos; by 2016, the number of viewers is expected to hit 1.5 billion. The medium and audience are both already there, but your video will face fierce competition, the presenters said.

So how do you hook your audience? The most compelling stories revolve around universal themes – something like family, home – that everyone can relate to and that your audience will connect with emotionally. As Schroeder shared his experience trying to use impacts reports as advocacy tools, he confessed, “What I found out is that people don’t really get excited about impacts reports like I do.” He reached out to family farms and recorded their stories to share along with the reports, getting a much better reception.

A common pitfall is to try and squeeze too much into your video. Orr cautions, “You try to please everybody, you try to jam every mission, every goal, every impact number into the message … and it waters down the impact.” She and Rue suggest approaching your video with a carefully crafted plan to create a story that will move people and connect them with what you do.

The overwhelming emphasis was that your video is, above all, a story. If your audience can’t connect with your story, then they’ll watch someone else’s instead.

Submitted by Margaret Christoph