Nonprofit Storytelling: 3 Tips to Engage Volunteers

It’s no secret that volunteers are essential to nonprofit work. According to Double the Donation’s volunteer statistics report, volunteers make up approximately one third of the nonprofit workforce, allowing organizations like yours to accomplish significant goals even with limited budgets.

To effectively attract and retain volunteers, you’ll need to develop a solid communication strategy. By incorporating storytelling techniques into your messages, you can engage your volunteers’ emotions more effectively than you would with facts alone, inspiring them to get involved with your nonprofit’s opportunities.

In this guide, we’ll cover three tips for engaging your nonprofit’s volunteers through storytelling, including how to:

1. Tailor Your Stories to Your Communication Objectives
2. Tell Stories Across a Variety of Channels
3. Ensure Authenticity in Your Storytelling

As you consider how to tell your nonprofit’s stories, first think of how stories are told in novels, movies, and television series. Each of these fictional narratives features one or more main characters and a conflict that is (usually) resolved. Then, use this framework to communicate the real impacts your volunteers have made on your community—let’s dive into how to do just that!

1. Tailor Your Stories to Your Communication Objectives

In most cases, the overarching goals of your nonprofit’s stories will be to 1) demonstrate how your volunteers have made your mission-related achievements possible and 2) inspire them to begin or continue their involvement with your organization. However, each of your volunteer communications will have a different, more specific objective, and the way you tell a story in a particular message needs to match its purpose.

Here are a few potential objectives for volunteer communications and some corresponding storytelling strategies for each:

• Expressing gratitude: Lean heavily into the impact of your work and emphasize that these achievements wouldn’t have been possible without your volunteers. For instance, an animal shelter might thank its adoption event volunteers by telling the story of an undernourished stray cat that is now happy and healthy in its forever home, which only happened because of their hard work running the event.
• Recruiting for specific opportunities: Reflect on your nonprofit’s previous successes with similar opportunities, then include a clear call for volunteer signups. If your organization is planning its annual silent auction, you could share testimonials from satisfied participants in last year’s auction that called out your volunteers’ efforts. Then, state that you’re expecting even more attendees at this year’s event and list the roles you need to fill to ensure they have a positive experience.
• Re-engaging lapsed volunteers: Tell stories about the initial achievements from new volunteer opportunities that have launched since the volunteer disengaged, but be clear that there is still more work to be done. For example, an environmental nonprofit may tell the story of a teenager who was inspired to start a composting initiative at her school after hearing a presentation by a volunteer from the organization’s new youth education program. However, these presentations have only been given at 20% of schools in the nonprofit’s region so far, and they’ll need more volunteers to reach every local student.

Most of your nonprofit’s stories should relate to the impact volunteers have helped achieve in your community. In some of your re-engagement or recruitment communications, you might include stories highlighting the benefits of participation for volunteers themselves, but always pair these with goal-oriented stories to stay focused on how volunteers help your organization make a difference.

2. Tell Stories Across a Variety of Channels

In addition to adapting your storytelling strategies to various messaging purposes, adjust your approach based on your chosen marketing channel. Each communication method will attract a different audience and lend itself to a unique content format, which your stories need to reflect.

• Your nonprofit’s website. As the central information hub for your organization, your website offers a variety of storytelling opportunities, from in-depth blog posts on the successes of volunteer opportunities to embedded video testimonials by community members who have been impacted by your volunteers’ efforts.
• Social media. Social media platforms typically lend themselves to visual storytelling and are ideal for recruiting new volunteers since it’s likely that both supporters and non-supporters will see these public communications.
• Email marketing. Segment and personalize your email communications so you can share different stories with the volunteers who would be most interested in and inspired by them. Your segmentation criteria might include volunteers’ ages, length of time volunteering with your nonprofit, or the initiatives they’ve supported.
• Direct mail. Since direct mail messages can be slightly longer than emails or social media captions, they’re excellent for telling detailed stories accompanied by photos or infographics to help bring them to life.

Include relevant calls to action alongside all of your stories so volunteers can sign up for new opportunities while they’re feeling emotionally connected to your cause. Match the format of each call to action to its channel—for instance, you could add a QR code that leads to an online registration form to direct mail messages or direct social media users to a signup link in your nonprofit’s profile.

• Include firsthand perspectives whenever possible. Testimonials are a highly effective form of nonprofit storytelling because audiences get to hear from real people about their experiences, whether through a quote in a social media post or a video interview on your website. If you can’t obtain a testimonial or the format doesn’t align with your goals, at least ask subjects for consent before using their names and photos in your communications.
• Support your stories with concrete facts. Review the data your nonprofit has collected to find accurate statistics that help ground your stories in reality. For instance, the animal shelter we previously mentioned might back up the story of the adopted former stray cat by saying that it was just one of 50 cats who found their forever homes through the adoption event that their volunteers did an excellent job staffing.
• Incorporate your nonprofit’s visual branding. Feature your nonprofit logo in all of your marketing materials, since volunteers will see it as a seal of approval showing that your stories are authentic to your organization. Using the same color scheme, typography, and image style across all communications also reinforces your stories’ authenticity while making your materials look more professional.
• Keep your messaging consistent. According to Loop, branding extends beyond visuals to the way your nonprofit represents itself in written content. Maintain a uniform writing style, tone, and word choice in all of your stories to reinforce your brand with your audience.

When volunteers perceive your stories as authentic, their confidence in your nonprofit will grow, and they’ll be more likely to continue engaging with your mission over time.

As you incorporate storytelling into your volunteer communications using the tips above, always keep your nonprofit’s unique audience in mind. Track interactions with messages that contain stories and ask loyal volunteers for feedback on your efforts. Then, use this data to continue honing your strategies and further engage your volunteers.