Turning Data Into Inspiring Storytelling (Transcript)

Shana Medel:

Good morning and welcome to the Nonprofit Virtual Tech Lab hosted by Storyraise. My name is Shana Medel and I run our content department. For those of you who don’t know, Storyraise is a solution for nonprofits helping them create personalized digital impact reports. And today Storyraise is hosting a summit with four sessions. This is the first one, and all of our sessions are designed for nonprofits that are looking to use technology for fundraising, for donor engagement, and to really just show their impact.

In each session, we’ll have leading professionals in the tech for good and nonprofit space, and each of these interactive sessions are going to explore the latest trends, the latest strategies to help your organization succeed. This morning, we have three incredible panelists with us. A big thank you to Sarah, to Cheryl, and to Angie for being here this morning. I’m going to have each of you give a brief intro just to quickly explain where you work, what your role is, who you are, and then we’ll dive into our questions. Sarah, let’s go ahead and start with you.

Sarah Livingston:

Hi, my name is Sarah Livingston and I am the director of Member Engagement for the Academic Engagement Network, and we fight antisemitism on college campuses by working with a network of faculty, about 1200 faculty members on more than 300 campuses across the US.

Shana Medel:

Thank you. Angie?

Angie Joens:

Hi, I’m Angie Joens. I am a consultant and strategist with the Donor Relations Group, but recently in January, retired from the industry. I was with the University of California Davis and have had almost four decades. It makes me sound old! But I love doing this work of fundraising and donor relations and storytelling, so I’m just delighted to be here. Thank you so much for including me.

Shana Medel:

Thank you. And Cheryl?

Cheryl Weiner Rosenberg:

Sure. I am the Senior Director of Brand Strategy for Prizmah, which is a network for Jewish day schools across North America supporting schools and their missions. And I am so excited to learn alongside all of you.

Shana Medel:

Thank you all. We’re so excited that you’re here and I’d like us to start fairly broad and then we’ll get more narrow as we go with our questions. Feel free to chime in if you feel like you have something to say. Don’t feel compelled to answer each question. So when you’re trying to give your data meaning, meaning that goes beyond those raw numbers, why is storytelling so essential? Why is it a must in your process?

Cheryl Weiner Rosenberg:

I’ll jump in. It’s hard to think that we have to tell a story in order to win the hearts of donors, and yet that is the case. They need to feel connected to your vision for the future. They need to understand your plan for how to get there, and they also need to be able to understand anything about your plan, your mission, your vision that doesn’t on the surface maybe make sense to them. And so the way that you do that is through storytelling. Storytelling is where you capture the emotion, where you explain the why, and it’s something that you can’t achieve with just numbers and a dense strategy document.

Shana Medel:

Absolutely. Thank you.

Angie Joens:

I think one of the things that I find donors struggle with is understanding what the data means. So if we can bring that to light through a student or a program or a faculty member, they can understand that, but they don’t get what it means, like what donor retention means or they don’t really get how we’ve grown from here to here or why we need to grow from here to here. So being able to put it in a way that they can understand, we are supposed to understand it as professionals, right? That’s our industry. So it makes sense to us. We just have to make it make sense to them too. So I just wanted to add on to Cheryl’s comment just with that. And so that’s why I think storytelling has just been so critical as part of what we do.

Sarah Livingston:

And I’ll add that data is something that our audience can become desensitized to. When we look at the data about antisemitism on campus, you can say antisemitism has skyrocketed 700% in the past 18 months, but that’s nameless. It’s faceless. It’s just a number. So when we tell the stories of these antisemitic incidences and we tell them in a way that is authentic and vulnerable, then we create the impact of the story beyond the data. So it’s maybe we call it pulling heartstrings or what have you, but it makes the way to make the impact is through that vulnerable and authentic human interaction. And it really does change the way people process the data because then it’s not a nameless faceless number. It’s one plus one plus one equals 700%.

Shana Medel:

Thank you. It’s really important to put faces to these numbers because otherwise, like you said, Sarah, right? It’s nameless. It’s faceless. What is really the impact? What is the problem or how do we go about creating the solution? And I’d like to stay with that facts and emotions thought right now. And so when you’re telling a story, whether it be through a blog, maybe a newsletter, maybe you’re giving a speech at a gala, it’s a digital report, any type of medium that you may be using, how do you go about telling that story while making sure that you’re balancing the facts with the emotional component as well?

Sarah Livingston:

This is when I think being authentic is absolutely essential. The data and the facts need to be direct and really punchy, but while you share that vulnerability of the human experience, it gives the data a vehicle to make the impact on whoever your audience is.

Angie Joens:

I might add that we have so many things coming at us with information all day long that if we can find something that’s memorable, so mixing the facts with something memorable, something that’s going to stick, something that’s going to, as Sarah said, pull at your heartstring, something that’s going to just land there. I think I have a senior leader that I worked with and he goes, “At an event, I want you to make them laugh, and I want you to make them cry.” He wants the full range of the emotions, and you can use all of your data to do that, but I think it’s just, for me, it’s about what kind of a memory, what’s the lasting impression I want them to have from that blog, that video, that event. Right.

Shana Medel:

Definitely. Thank you. And I know our attendees are curious to hear some real on the ground examples from you all. So if you could share just some experiences, one, maybe even two, of how you’ve used storytelling in action to engage those stakeholders, to engage those donors.

Cheryl Weiner Rosenberg:

Yeah, so we have used story to build a case for support for our national marketing campaign for Jewish day schools. And it’s been a really beautiful way to showcase both the emotional piece and the details. It doesn’t have a ton of facts, although we do have data in there. So we’re able to share the data of what’s happening in the field, what’s happening in the world, and generally what’s happening in each day school. And we’re also able to tell the story of why this campaign is important and use pictures and visuals to show what it’s going to look like and bring it to life and focus on the budget and details that all together in a PDF or a simple document would be very overwhelming. But when you weave all of the stories together and then make the case, it’s a really beautiful picture of the global and then the local. And then how does this connect to you as a donor, and what are we actually asking for from you?

Shana Medel:

Great, thank you.

Sarah Livingston:

I’ll also say that our audience is looking for their community, right? They’re trying to find others that have their same sort of values or their same sort of mission and purpose-driven work. And when you’re trying to reach faculty, you have to connect them with other faculty. We love using video and photo storytelling. So when we engage with Storyraise specifically for our Faculty Against Antisemitism Movement, we’re looking for those really impactful stories that resonate with a really large amount of faculty. So we do interviews with specific faculty members on antisemitism on their work and how their work or their research is impacted by antisemitism. So it’s really fascinating what we’ve been able to create, and I do it not just with my work with Storyraise, but in February we hosted a speaking tour in New York to launch Black History Month on black and Jewish allyship. It was, we called it Bridge Building, a speaking tour with a fascinating black and Jewish professor from Spelman College. And his story is what draws people together to build those bridges. So it’s the ability to see that shared humanity above and beyond the data of, I can say that 15% of the American Jewish community are Jews of color, but that doesn’t impact people the same way as a black Jewish man standing up there saying, let me tell you about my story.

Angie Joens:

The only thing I might add is one of the big philosophies we have is, and I’m sure all of you think about this, but when you have a great story like the professor from Spelman and maybe you captured on video or you write a great paper on it or an article about it, we always think about how can we create that story and then recreate it and use it other places? We call this, we have an acronym core, create it once and repurpose it everywhere. How can that story then become a social media campaign or that if it’s a blog, how can it go into an impact report? Or if it’s a video, could you take snippets of it and use that to reach different audiences that a 32nd reel will capture their attention versus a three minute video and how can you repurpose that in other ways? So that’s something I’m always thinking about. If I’m going to put the effort or my team’s going to put the effort into finding this amazing story, and we have all this great data, where can I reuse that or use it again?

Shana Medel:

It’s a great point, Angie, and our motto, I think at Storyraise, or at least within the content department, is repurpose, repurpose, repurpose. Because you have great content and so often it gets stuck living in one media. Maybe it’s just in a digital report or it’s just on social media and you can repurpose it for so many different outlets, so many different channels that you’re using. And Sarah and Cheryl, I think you touched on this too, talking about visuals when telling a story, it’s not only the words, unfortunately, that’s not enough to engage people anymore. You need videos, you need infographics, you need candid shots. No one wants to see all the grip and grin photos. It looks too post. It doesn’t look authentic. So when you’re thinking about drafting reports, Cheryl or maybe Sarah, social media posts, positioning faculty to get those videos or Angie repurposing all that content that you’ve already gathered, what role do the visuals play? What role do the infographics or the photos or the videos play in making your data stand out?

Cheryl Weiner Rosenberg:

I think one thing we think about a lot at Prizmah, and I’m sure you all do as well, is our branding and the way that weaves into the visuals. So we are creating a story not only with the pictures and the words and the videos and the data, but our brand was really carefully crafted because of our audience, which is outside of donors. School leaders are our primary audience. And so we’re always trying to carefully balance the playfulness of a school and the creativity that we want to see with the professionalism that we also want to see in our schools. And the brand consistency and the way they craft communications so that their brand really shines through so that people understand who they are just from looking at the branding on the page. And this is something we actually have to balance when we think about donors because we want the donors to see the professionalism, and yet we still want that creativity to come through. And so when we’re thinking about our visuals, we really think about all the ways to weave our brand and the thoughtfulness of that balance into the communications

Angie Joens:

And what do they say? A picture’s worth a thousand words. And we have the mentality of a goldfish. That’s how long our attention span lasts. So we got to capture them fast and we got to capture them immediately. So a photo can do that, a video, a little reel. I mean, I could spend hours on my phone looking at reels and getting drawn in and getting influenced and stuff. Why are we not doing that for our nonprofits? We could just lean into that so much more. And I’ve worked in a lot of higher education. There are kids coming out of school that are native to this and they are the best people to hire to do this work for you because it’s just natural to them that they don’t know what they’re doing is so brilliant and helping with our brand or helping tell a story better in a way that is grabbing new audiences or engaging audiences. We’ve been trying to find something new to do with. So

Sarah Livingston:

I like everything you guys said, and I think that consistency of brand recognition, I think one of the things that has been really interesting with working with Storyraise and connecting the visuals and the videos and the pictures and everything is how consistent use of the logos and the colors in what’s created with infographics and things like that draws attention to the name for recognition. So just how many different people on campuses know that Faculty Against Antisemitism Movement exists in part because we have that phenomenal star logo that’s so easy to find. 

Speaking of visuals, and I think that there’s something about that consistency of everything from color to shapes of things. Everything impacts the visual component in recognition, which draws even more attention to your brand and what your ask is, which ultimately is at the end of every story should be some sort of call to action. So donate money or I don’t do development. So for me, a lot of my calls to action are “Get Involved.” You want to do this on your campus and saying “Reach Out” because we want to bring this to you and making change happen that way.

Cheryl Weiner Rosenberg:

I want to add that something I learned from our incredible graphic designer who has taught me so much is that hierarchy of information is so important. And so often when we think about infographics, well at least I see these infographics with 50 pieces of data and little icons everywhere, and no one knows where to look first. And so I think part of telling the story is taking people along a journey and not sharing all your data in a way that no one can digest. No one understands what’s really the most important piece of data here. What should I focus on? What do you want me to focus on? So making sure that you have a hierarchy and a flow of information that people can digest, they can understand, and the visual piece of that is huge. I’ve seen on LinkedIn and other places these examples of there’s a call out box and then there’s a big heading and smaller text, and they show exactly where your eye goes first and second and next. And making sure that you take your users on a journey is just crucial to them. Understanding what you want from them and what you want them to know.

Shana Medel:

Absolutely. Thank you all really, really great points. Good food for thought. And I think we’ve sort of started talking about this without actually naming it, but what are some of the common mistakes that you’ve seen from different nonprofits when they’re trying to turn their data into stories? And I know the three of you are well-versed in trying to do this, and also our team at Storyraise, we see this too. We’re like, wow, this nonprofit is doing great things and they get it. And then we see other nonprofits that we know need a helping hand and need some coaching and guidance in that manner. And I’m sure you all have seen that too. So any of those big common mistakes that people make that they should know is a no-no. Stay away from those

Sarah Livingston:

Forcing it. Trying to force the connection between the data and the story. It needs to be smooth. You have to make natural connections between the data behind the story. And if you force your data into some story or a story doesn’t align with the data, it ruins the message. You’re not making an impact. Your call to action won’t be answered. You can’t force it. It has to be a real natural fit.

Angie Joens:

I might add, and I’m kind of plugging in on what Cheryl said, I mean it has to be short and pithy. It has to be, I mean, you have to know the kind of vibe of your organization. Where I just left, UC Davis, had this kind of quirky, funny way about them. And so we could lean into humor and but everything had to be short. We had to have lots of white space. We had to, the biggest mistakes I see are not being true to who you are as an organization. Sarah, you see what other nonprofits are doing, so you try to be that, but it’s not who you are, right? Cheryl, she’s like at day schools, she can’t be higher education if they’re elementary or younger people. You got to stay true to who you are. And I think that’s one big thing I see. The other thing is getting the timings wrong. So you get much, you get tied up and wrapped up in knots on getting leadership approval and then you’ve missed your window. And I think those are two of the biggest things. Like the content’s too long. They’re not being authentic to who they are as an organization or they don’t know, maybe they just don’t know who they are as an organization and they just miss the window.

Cheryl Weiner Rosenberg:

Totally relate to the white space conversation. It’s something that’s a personal pet peeve of mine is when people just try to fit everything on one page because they think that means it’s shorter and then the new really can’t read anything. I’ll speak about, it’s not even a mistake, a learning that I’ve had. We just published a report about Jewish Day School alumni on campus and how connected they are to Judaism and to Israel, and we included percentage information. So I have it up, I’m going to read it. So we included the fact that 53% of Jewish day school alumni attend Jewish events regularly compared to 23%. Alright, that number is fine. You read it. I don’t think too much about it, but in the same infographic, we included it in a different way, which was two times as many Jewish day school alumni engage in Jewish life on campus regularly and totally different. It feels totally different to say two times rather than to give two percentages that people have to grapple with. So just sharing the data out front in a way that they don’t even have to think about it or do the math is so meaningful. And that’s something I learned just through putting the exact same data in the same report and seeing which things people were sharing and connecting to.

Shana Medel:

That’s a great point. I want it to be a low barrier entry to figuring out what these numbers mean and letting them sit with you. I know we are closing in on 10:30, so we will ask a few more questions and then we’ll get to the wrap up point. I want to talk a little bit about how in our world we constantly hear the words measure success. How are you going to measure that success? What are the results of that success? How are you measuring this? It’s something that we think about every day. So how do you all measure the success of a data-driven story? What are the metrics that you track? We could take it in the silo of social media or if you’re putting together a digital report, Cheryl, what does that look like in terms of those metrics? How are you keeping track of if your stories are actually working or maybe we need to go back to the drawing board and start from scratch and think of a different strategy.

Cheryl Weiner Rosenberg:

So I’ll say that we track all the normal stuff. So we track impressions, we track how many clicks and our click-through rate, and we go through it and we see what could be done better. And we use it at the end of the year to decide what we should budget for next year. If a report got three clicks, thankfully none of ours did this year, we wouldn’t use that tool again. But the fact that we can measure how many people are using it is a great thing and how long they’re spending on it and how much they’re reading. But really the thing that’s been eye opening for us is that a few of our recent data reports have gotten a ton of press. And so for us, the press and the re-sharing by schools. Schools shared our report widely. We didn’t ask them to, they just did it because it was a great case for Jewish day schools. Being able to see the data go wide means to me that it resonated with people enough that they’re going to share it, that they’re going to report on it, that it’s a big story. So for me, tracking success of how we share our data is a lot about the resharing and the press also.

Shana Medel:

Great point.

Sarah Livingston:

I really second the resharing for us. So we do donor reports on how we do our jobs to our funders. And I always feel like that measuring the metric of when our funders are sharing our success as evidence of the validity and success of their funding. So they’re saying to their people, this is exactly where we should be putting our money. Look at all the great things they did. So the re-sharing model is really important. I know that Storyraise tracks social and web metrics for us, and we’re really constantly reassessing and reevaluating the impact of that. And we also talk a lot about the web user experience. So what is being clicked on? What isn’t being clicked on? Is this in the right place or is this accessible? Is it not accessible? Just like last month, I think we had Shauna completely redo where the links were on our website because it made more sense to have them in a different pattern based on what people were looking for. And I think we just really need to listen to those metrics more than anything else. I think you can measure all you want. There’s a lot of different ways to measure metrics like that, but can you hear what people are saying when you’re looking at those standard metrics of resharing and follows and things like that? So what’s happening, who are they? I mean, I’m very grateful for the sort of demographic metrics that we receive because knowing who the audience is changes how the story is portrayed.

Angie Joens:

And just to add on, you also can’t be afraid to ask people what they think, right? Like a short survey, what did you think of that article? Give us your feedback on social media and track some of those things. So you can do that. Any big impact report we send out, any kind of donor communication we send out, we should also be sending some kind of a survey and digital is the easiest for them, but hit the donor where the donor is some print. So just being open to asking them for feedback and then being willing to make the changes. Our first digital report that we sent out, we started to notice how long people were spending. We were spending months getting it ready and they were spending three and a half minutes looking at the report, well, you know what that told me I got to pull back. I am creating way more of an experience and they’re not really reading it. I got to make it shorter. So you can use all of this data, but I like to lean in and ask the donors, what are you liking? What are you reading? How do you want to see it? And I think a lot of us forget to do that. And it’s a great stewardship opportunity if you ask people their opinions. They love it.

Shana Medel:

Thank you all. I think that is a great note for us to end on and just to give everyone some things to think about on this Friday morning. So again, thank you Cheryl, Sarah, Angela, thank you so much for joining the Nonprofit Virtual Tech Lab today. It was really wonderful to hear from you all and thank you to everyone who joined on LinkedIn.