Do you know? most fundraising individuals or organizations fail to efficiently catch the essence of people for their holy cause; even after providing facts & figures. In such kind of scenario, storytelling is their most suitable companion.
A well-crafted fundraising story can greatly inspire the audience, while also encouraging them to donate regularly. However, one question that arises here is – what kind of elements make a fundraising story perfect? Continue reading this blog till the end to find out the answer.
Key Elements That Make Up an Excellent Fundraising Story
Numerous key elements come together to form an excellent fundraising story, some of the major ones are as follows:
1. Clear Purpose or Objective
A good fundraising story is one that has a clear purpose/objective. It efficiently states the main aim of the fundraising program whether the campaign is being run for funding medical research, or for the assistance of people that got hit by natural disasters, and many more.
Besides this, the story should also tell how the collected funds will be used by the organizers in order to achieve the mentioned goals.
Providing this type of information clearly will help the donors to understand their contributions will be efficiently used for a holy cause.
2. A Compelling Narrative from Start
Most of you may have heard a famous saying – First Impression is the Last Impression. This also implies in our case here.
An excellent fundraising story grabs the audience's attention from the start and keeps them engaged & interested till the end. This is all because it is written by using attractive-to-read or emotional words and phrases and a proper sentence structure for a consistent flow.
The maximum interest and engagement of the audience will further increase the overall chances of donations – which is the primary goal.
3. Strong Personal Connection
We all know that the main intention behind a fundraising story is to inspire and encourage people to make donations. That’s why these often contain examples of individuals, communities, etc. whose lives were impacted positively due to the fundraising cause. This sharing makes the story more relatable, authentic, and persuasive.
Do you know? it is usually the donor’s psyche that they are more likely to donate when they see how their contributions can bring smiles to someone's life.
4. A Perfect Call-To-Action
Although a Call-to-Action (CTA) is a marketing element, but it is also used to make a perfect fundraising story. The story should have a clear CTA that efficiently guides the readers about the next action they should take. The action can be:
- Making a donation.
- Sharing the story.
- Volunteer for the organization.
And many more.
So, these are some of the major elements of a good fundraising story.
How to Write a Perfect Story for Fundraising
Below we have discussed a step-by-step procedure that you have to follow to craft compelling fundraising stories.
1. Get An Idea About The Targeted Audience
Before starting the writing process, it is crucial for you to determine the targeted audience of the story. This will involve understanding:
- Interest
- Values
- Concerns/pain points
Understanding all these will allow us to craft a story that is more likely to grab the attention of the readers.
2. Clearly Highlight The Hero
From here the writing process will take off – you will highlight the “HERO” first. Wondering what actually is it? It refers to someone who is directly impacted in a positive way because of the collected funds. Some common heroes are:
- Beneficiary
- Volunteer
The highlighting of the hero not only personalizes the overall story but also creates a sense of empathy in the donors – which is crucial to collecting funds from them.
3. Outline The Challenge
Once you have highlighted the hero of the campaign, you need to efficiently outline the challenge you are facing to help the hero (beneficiaries or volunteers). Explain you are making an effort for improvements but also need some external help – this is also one of the reasons you are asking for donations.
However, keep yourself brief and to the point so that the audience can quickly understand the main message without devoting much time & effort.
4. Introduce The Solution
Now, you should also introduce the solution for the challenge that you have described in the step above. You have to showcase the impact of your work such as the positive change it is bringing to the lives of beneficiaries. You should provide real-time examples of the individuals; this will show the tangible difference your organization is making.
Your provided solution will contribute to winning the trust of the audience. They will think you have potential, and their provided funds will not go in vain.
5. Add Call To Action (CTA)
As we already mentioned above, CTA can be a word, phrase, button, link, etc. that guides the readers about the next action they are encouraged to perform.
Some good examples of CTA that you can add to the story are: “Make a Donation,” “Share Story,” etc. However, you should add CTA at a place where the chances of clicking are higher. So, carefully decide.
Usually, a Call-to-action is added at the end of the last or closing argument/sentence.
6. Proofread & Edit
Finally – the last step. Once you are done with the writing process, it is now time to proofread to ensure every bit of detail is covered properly and the entire story resonates perfectly with the targeted audience.
Besides this, you also need to confirm that the story is free from any kind of grammar, spelling, or punctuation mistakes. If any are found, fix them.
AI Story Generator – One-Stop Solution
Creating a perfect fundraising story by following the steps discussed above will not only require good writing skills but also a significant amount of time and effort. So, if you lack any of these, then there is a one-stop solution available which is –AI story generators.
These work on advanced Artificial Intelligence algorithms to automatically create high-quality stories for a given topic. Not just this, these also provide an option to set story length, type, and creativity level.
To provide you with a better idea about how these tools work, we provided this topic: “Supporting Flood Victims in Africa” to an AI story generator, and the results we got can be seen in the attachment below.
As you can see, the tool has generated a compelling fundraising story for flood victims within seconds. So, you can do the same as well.
Final Words
Creating fundraising stories is the go-to option for individuals as well as organizations nowadays. This is because stories greatly contribute to inspiring the audience and encouraging them to make donations.
But remember, the story will only provide results when it is written perfectly. Multiple elements make a fundraising good. In this blog, we have explained some major elements in detail. Besides this, we have also discussed steps for writing a perfect story, hope you will find this article useful.
