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The brilliance of creating nonprofit newsletters people want

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A few weeks ago I asked around for examples of nonprofit newsletters that bring joy. Are there newsletters you love, rely on, even look forward to opening?

I received a few enthusiastic, even joyous (well, that might be pushing it) responses.

And some not so enthusiastic responses. We’ve all seen (and not bothered opening) our share of boring nonprofit newsletters. ?

Regardless, the results offer some insights into effective newsletters and member communications.

[1] Have a point of view. Be relevant. 

Seems obvious but doesn’t often happen.

Just because your staff worked on something doesn’t make it relevant.

From our examples, it helps to have a close connection to readers – one that uses content and news to build a relationship and trust. Small groups should have an advantage here.

One colleague shared the newsletter of a local SURJ (Standing Up for Racial Justice) chapter with this note:

we are small and can deliver just the “news” our membership wants. We use the same format and categories every time and always have several relevant items in each – which I believe creates confidence in our audience that it’s worth opening.

In a small group, a few hundred to a few thousand people with a clear purpose, it’s easier to identify relevance. There are well-defined recruitment moments and processes. The mission is clear while member activities are connected to outcomes and (importantly) fundraising. Purpose and theory of change are on display, talked about, and reported on.

Larger organizations have more programs, more staff and a greater need to build and constantly replenish an email list. Recruitment is constant, everywhere and optimized for conversions. The long-term value of a supporter may be calculated but takes a back seat to short-term cost.

Newsletters become a place to promote programs, not meet the interests and needs of supporters.

Here are a few ways to rebalance newsletters – and communications – towards relevance:

Be clear at the start about who you are… 

…and what you’re doing and how people fit into change. Put a three bullet list of mission, priorities, outcomes (some combination of these) in your messaging – recruitment, actions, onboarding, fundraising, website, etc.

Cultivate people’s ideas and interests in the onboarding process. 

Run short surveys. Give people three action/activity ideas to respond to in a welcome message. Track responses, interests, feedback and which actions are chosen.

The Accidentally Wes Anderson newsletter offers an example of a newsletter (and social media user) survey. Several weeks after subscribing, receiving a welcome series and newsletters you’re invited to take a survey. Here’s a look at the flow.

Survey invite in an email:

A screenshot of an email from Accidentally Wes Anderson that invites readers to take a survey. An old black van is at the top of the image. Text says "Hey, Adventurers!" and describes the purpose of the survey.

Survey front page:

A screenshot of the introduction to a reader survey from Accidentally Wes Anderson. It says "Hey Adventurer! A few things before we start: Just a few minutes to complete, skip any question you want, and you'll get a small gift at the end."

The survey is around 25 questions. It’s long. But the questions aren’t complicated and the offer of a prize at the end is valuable and in keeping with the “quest for adventure” tone of other email and web content.

Post-survey thank you:

Screenshot of the thank you page used for Accidentally Wes Anderson reader survey.

Acknowledge the limits (and promise) of onboarding and engagement opportunities.

Many (most?) people aren’t going to respond to an onboarding survey or feedback campaign. This indirect cultivation won’t excite staff (and consultants) in organizations with metrics focused on fundraising. And that’s okay. 

The responses you receive will identify your most enthusiastic new supporters and their interests. This valuable info can feed into your email (newsletter) strategy. This is also an opportunity to test how to increase response. Engage people early and you’re more likely to keep them around.

Show people getting things done. 

Supporters like creating results whether you’re doing advocacy, training, direct service or even policy. A colleague shared the Trail News newsletter put out by Washington Trails Association. They said it works because it’s a consistent newsletter that has:

a monthly magazine format, a digest that has “candy” for the reader (like local hikes or events) and blends in accomplishments.

A screenshot of a Washington Trails Association newsletter. There are several photos of WTA members and supporters

[2] Don’t send to everyone.

This ties into relevance. If you’re a larger organization with 20k, 100k or a million addresses on your list, how do you know everyone wants your newsletter? But that’s what many (most) groups do. Subscribers get newsletters.

Despite our best intentions, many subscribers and supporters aren’t at a newsletter-ready spot in their engagement with our issue or organization. And a pretty general, broad and/or dense newsletter isn’t inviting.

Groups end up with lousy newsletter open and click rates. They conclude newsletters don’t work and either shut it down or (more likely) let it limp along without intervention which damages the whole email program.

Invite supporters to subscribe to your newsletter. Let them see samples that show what they’re getting before subscribing. Create newsletters that are clear, specific and have a purpose.

[3] Be at least a little amazing.

Another colleague shared newsletters from Mobilisation Lab and The Forge saying they worked because they are “scannable/readable, exciting, inspiring.” That’s high praise for communications coming from a movement or nonprofit organization. It’s high praise for any newsletter, really.

Readable, exciting and inspiring are good descriptors of all the favorite newsletters shared with me.

Relevance matters here (see above).

Having something to say is critical. Don’t just make people happy. Push people to think. Tell supporters something new (and/or newsworthy). Have a voice. Be opinionated. As Bonnie Raitt has been known to say: “give them something to talk about…a little mystery to figure out.”

Too often, newsletters equate “interesting” with visuals and graphic design. Splashy or attractive header images get more attention than readable fonts, colors, white space and informative/useful graphics.

Consider the full range of content design, not just logos and images. It’s no coincidence that a colleague used scannable and readable alongside exciting and inspiring to describe their favorite newsletters.

Images and graphics can (ideally should) inform and help tell a story given the brief time you have with your reader. A header serves the story, not just the logo or brand. Here’s a header from the Arkansas Times daily newsletter:

A screenshot of an email newsletter sent by Arkansas Times on Sep 14, 2023.

Sidebar: the dark header image of clapping middle age white guys amps up the grim headline. Indeed, who needs info about government corruption?

[4] Be brilliant for those who care. Others will show up. 

To sum it up…don’t try to create a newsletter for every reader (or every staff or board member). Be brilliant and passionate for those who care most. Be useful. Give them something to talk about and they will. Others will follow.

How content strategy builds relationships and grows revenue

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We’re looking at how organizations undervalue the first, and often only, thing people coming to them experience – their content. The articles, stories, blog posts, photos, videos, emails, and social posts are all opportunities for connection, not just attention. Here’s why that is and how to think strategically about content for connection.

Every website visit is an opportunity for real connection.

If we start from that point then we want to assume that people are coming to us for a reason. We are answering a question, solving a problem, or providing a service. We assume this person will return (or is coming back to us).

We want to know who this person is so we can ask them to join us or support us. And we also want to better meet their needs.

Our content is the terrain on which people discover and interact with us: blog posts, resources, news articles, case studies, action alerts, social media posts, photos, emails and even podcasts and videos.

Content strategy is has two key parts. First is understanding how to meet people’s needs with your content by making sure people can find and use content. Most content strategy work really focuses on things like search optimization. Too often it ends there.

The second piece of content strategy is relationship and community building. When you know about the person using your content you can meet their needs over time and help them help you by joining, donating, contributing, purchasing, volunteering or any of the other actions people can take.

A drawing of people standing in front of a purple building. The people are passing stars to each other. The person at the end of the line is putting stars on a blue easel.

What if we built for connection first?

Most organizations know how many people visit their site and which pages get the most visits (I bet you two of the top three include the home page, about page, and the careers or team bios page).

Meanwhile, groups spend time and money creating content with few tools for knowing who is reading and using it, the value it provides, and what people are really able to do when it comes to supporting, acting on and engaging with groups.

It’s inexplicable. And there’s a better way.

We can rethink web design, content and even emails and social media to optimize for direct connection. This would mean that we expect every visitor to tell us who they are and, at least implicitly, show us what they’re doing with our content, how they’re using it and what they can do to support its creation and our work.

I don’t actually expect every organization to get contact info for every visitor or be able to track every visitor with personally identifiable data.

But if we want to create content that’s useful to people then we need to know who people are and what they really think. And if we want people to support our group for the long haul then they need the best content, experience and relationship we can provide.

Data is not insight

Today’s organizations don’t have a clear idea who is using, visiting, reading or viewing any of the content on their sites, emails or socials. Most organizations have subscribers (an email address and maybe a name and physical address) or donors (email, name, address). And they have visitors who, unless they graduate to one of the above, are little more than electronic ghosts. Bits of aggregated data.

But wait, we have Google Analytics installed. We know which search terms people use to find our site. We know how many times a form is submitted. And we can see who clicks links in email, comes to our site and

True. But most site analytics are vague and general. They tell you how many people come to a page and, if you’re tracking an ad or email campaign, how they got there.

You don’t know who’s there. You don’t know why they’re there (though perhaps you can guess). And you certainly don’t know what they thought or if they’ll be back. A report saying that visits go up or down offers a data point. But it’s not necessarily actionable.

Content strategy vs the void

Organizations often have an engagement process that looks like:

  1. Many visitors to one or more websites and/or social media accounts.
  2. People click and read or view a second page or click from social to web.
  3. Someone fills out a form (subscribe, action, volunteer, event RSVP, survey). It’s only at this point we discover who the visitor is and we still don’t know if/when they revisit our content.
  4. A visitor becomes a supporter by donating or becoming a member.
  5. A person who attends an online event or training.
  6. Someone you meet at an in-person event.
  7. And the smallest group: sustaining donors, members and/or activists.

A lot of people hit the top of the list once, twice or multiple times. Most never advance past that point. And many that do move on won’t be able to tell us if or how the content is useful to them.

We build content with low expectations if we assume that a nameless visit and click is OK for 95% or more of visits.

We don’t have to approach content – be it web, social, email or audio/video – with the the presumption that “views” are what matter while actions and donations are a separate channel or group of people.

Make connection normal (if not required)

Here’s another look at that engagement process with direct connection as the goal:

Visitors => Frequent visitors => Multi-page visitors => subscribers or registered users => members (and/or donors and/or volunteers)

A connection emphasis could start by optimizing for form completion. Subscribing to an email newsletter is often the only form option.

Donating is another option. Organizations and consultants understandably test and optimize donation forms.

But there are countless other possibilities to present people with forms or even register as site users (a vastly stronger option for long term engagement).

The trick is in creating content that people need and value. And providing a user experience that makes forms simple.

About requiring connection

What if we valued our content enough to require payment for it? For most organizations this is a preposterous thought experiment. “We serve the community. Why would we limit access?” Fact is, most organizations have premium content for high level donors, board members, or task oriented folks like volunteers. We see those people as valuable so we create valuable content for them (and often only for them).

The point is not to restrict content to members or registered users or to set up paywall types of experiences. These are tools in the toolbox, of course.

What does matter, however, is the connection powerful content creates between people and organizations. Too often we invest a lot of time and money in content with little clear strategy. And less clarity about its relationship to revenue, membership or programmatic results.

Great content brings people in and keeps them there. It connects people. Invest in content strategy, not just content, and create systems for measuring the value of that content to your visitors and your organization.

Top image by Ivonne Navarro at The Greats and used via a Creative Commons-Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC-BY-NC-SA).

Give people stuff they can use

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In late-2021, Intuit completed its acquisition of the once wee newsletter provider Mailchimp. Intuit paid $12 billion in cash and stock.

Substack announced this week that newsletters hosted by the platform had over 20 million active subscribers and 2 million paid subscriptions.

Some folks think there is money to be made in email.

Given the financial structures needed to host, send and manage email, the culture of email is more commerce than community. Every morning your inbox has 97 new unread messages from companies and candidates that you’ll probably delete or ignore.

This is largely true in the nonprofit sector as well. Our metrics – and benchmarks – focus on response rates, donations and revenue. These metrics are at best awkward proxies for supporter satisfaction and value that email and other communications provide members, donors and others in our networks.

A commerce (or fundraising) role for email is essential for most groups. Nonprofits need money. More than once, I’ve advised organizations to build donation asks into their new subscriber welcome series. People want to give. Get them used to it. But a fundraising focus limits the scope of what’s possible with our content and community strategies.

Many people, including those creating emails in organizations, complain about email. It’s all dollars, doom and dashed hopes.

Candidates: My opponent is a bad dude who will do bad things. I’m good. Donate before tonight’s reporting deadline.

Organizations: The future is at risk. Click here to send an email to your congressional rep. Or click here to make your 5X match donation.

Companies: Everything is on sale. Click now! (person clicking: well, only the purple camo print joggers in size 6 are on sale. WTF?)

Too often we train our community to expect the least from our organizations.

Think bigger about email, content and community

If we expect more from our community could we design content strategies, including email programs, that meet those expectations?

Perhaps our metrics could be optimized for friendship or other relation-driven measures. Does this person volunteer? Does this person come to an event or invite a new supporter to an event? Does this person contribute an idea, photo or comment to a document, web page or report?

What if we viewed our advocacy and fundraising campaigns as products, like a shirt or a book, or services like visiting a restaurant or hiring a plumber? We could invite feedback and reviews. We could ask: “did this event, fundraising campaign or online action meet your expectations?” Or: “Would you recommend this campaign to a friend?”

These ideas are hypothetical. They’re a search for more informative metrics. But this product/service approach seems possible.

Most organizations occasionally send a survey to supporters asking for feedback on newsletters or other communications. But these are one-offs that reach only your most engaged supporters. Surveys don’t offer much insight into the impact or value of your ongoing email and other communications.

Content that helps people get things done

I’m most interested in how organizations are using email and other content to solve problems, meet their needs and otherwise get things done.

Email, especially when combined with hosted assets like video (and charts, maps, etc.), is a great teaching tool. Most organizations have loads of knowledge in their resource libraries, toolkits, and staff member brains. Many groups use webinars or trainings to teach volunteers. But these are events. They require someone to be there to engage in them. We’ve all registered for webinars knowing we won’t make it and will watch later but, realistically, we rarely “watch later.”

The New York Times has grown its email newsletter options. You can get morning or evening updates and email newsletters from your favorite writers or columnists. But the real growth in content (and revenue) has been in non-news email that is useful to people (Cooking and Wirecutter) or entertaining (Games and the Athletic). As Poynter wrote about last November, its about a bundle of information:

…the Times is heavily pushing what it calls internally “the bundle.” That is an all-access product that also includes Games and Cooking verticals, audio, the Wirecutter product information site and now The Athletic, which the Times purchased for $550 million in January.

CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said that the bundle costs roughly 50% more than a news-only digital subscription. Beginning this quarter, she added, the company plans to increase the price of single-product subs to news or other products, hoping to “compel people to take the bundle.” 

The New York Times is a newspaper. But most people today call it a “media company” and, well, a media company produces all kinds of media, not just reporting. We can debate the pros/cons here (I have many arguments for and against this) but it seems that:

  1. It’s hard/impossible to fund journalism with subscriptions and advertisements.
    It’s hard/impossible to fund nonprofits with donations and/or membership fees. Most organizations need more diverse revenue streams.
  2. People are willing to pay for good information and entertainment which helps fund journalism.
    People will pay for info, goods and services they need. Payments to organizations for information, training and other services could help fund programs.
  3. Info/entertainment opens the door to new audiences.
    Many (most?) organizations are not centered in a community. Their audience may be local, state, national or global in scope but its most likely virtual in nature. Lead generation limited to specific issues unnecessarily limits growth .

Most organizations aren’t media companies with the content depth or deep pockets of a New York Times. But they don’t need to be. A one off series of emails that dives into the insights from case studies and reports sounds dry (for real) but could have an audience. It may be possible to turn a staff or volunteer training series into a set of online videos paired with emails and other content for a self-paced training series open to broader audiences.

Given the breadth and scale of nonprofits out there the options are endless. I’d love to see a funder or seven experimenting, testing and reporting back on content aimed at audience and revenue growth. And, of course, funding such work.

Boom goes the Twitter: 5 lessons about content and community as Twitter implodes.

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Two toy storm troopers made of Legos hold a mobile phone charging cord. Photo by Will Porada via Unsplash.

Many of the nonprofit-oriented email lists and Slack groups I am on have had multiple threads titled (more or less): what are you doing about Twitter? 

So far, the smart money isn’t betting against Twitter: “don’t leave…wait and see…maybe set up over on Mastodon or something…download your Twitter history…surely it will exist in some form so keep your group/personal account on there.” 

That’s useful advice though it comes with an eye-catching caveat: remaining on Twitter means engaging on a platform whose owner overtly accommodates anti-semitism and white supremacy.

Most nonprofits have put a lot of time and treasure into Twitter over the years. It’s become a way to reach supporters and the media. Here are a few follower numbers: ACLU = 1,900,000 followers / Sierra Club = 379,000 followers / Feeding America =464,000 followers / Nature Conservancy = 996,000 followers.  

My suggestion is to develop a content strategy built upon platforms you control and stories about, by and for your community. Social media platforms are advertising and marketing businesses. As such, their interests may not align with yours and their model can change or go away altogether.

Perhaps you or your organization aren’t impacted by Twitter’s changes. Chances are you’re using Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram and other networks. All present the same existential challenges. We’re all at risk. 

Five Lessons

Here are five lessons for nonprofit communicators and community builders as we consider Twitter. 

[1] Understand who was in your Twitter community, what the needed from you and how they engaged with each other.

The value add of Twitter (or any network) is the people out there in your community. You could reach people and get them talking. A “viral” tweet was that moment of people talking to other people on your behalf. I wouldn’t call that community building. But it shows the value of networks.

[2] Twitter was an entrance to community. What other “doors in” do you have?

Community has doors in, doors out, and places where the work happens. Twitter was a big “doors in” platform. You could find people interested in similar topics by sharing your knowledge, searching for hashtags and engaging through replies and retweets. Communities could engage on Twitter but for most it offered an entry point or a way to stay updated.

There are a few communities for whom Twitter was a central meeting and learning place. See this about people working in the California legislature or the value of Twitter to the public health community. That level of community engagement may be hard to replace. But it’s not the norm for many nonprofits.

[3] Craft online community to outlast platforms.

Building a community that outlasts a platform means meeting people where they are, providing tools and training that let people use your content on the platform, and acknowledging people and their efforts.

The role of content and platforms in a community is not dependent on what you put out there or how many people you reach. What other people say and do is what turns a list of people (or subscribers or members or followers) into a community. People look for social proof and social cues. One is more likely to talk about an issue if they hear/see friends talking about it.

[4] Communities and their content, stories and legacy need control of the space in or on which they operate.

Communities don’t thrive over time on rented land. You can open the door to people on a proprietary platform like Twitter (or TikTok, Facebook, Instagram or even Slack). You can use a platform to distribute information and help organize people. 

But a platform can change owners, change terms and even close. This puts community connections at risk. It also means the loss of content, stories and community infrastructure like stories, documents, links and more. 

What content and communications channels can you control? That probably includes your website (articles, reports, hosted videos and more) and email (including advocacy, fundraising, newsletters and other material). It may include videos on a YouTube page, though that hosting and its interfaces are not under your control. It could include webinars and in-person content – material delivered at events and meetings.

[5] Running social media without a content strategy is irresponsible.

At least it’s a fixable problem. Support a cross-department team to develop, implement and iterate content strategy.

Almost every organization using Twitter and other social media platforms rely on them as a marketing channel. Organizations create content and they tweet about it. The goal is to let followers know and, hopefully, get followers to tell others about the content. This could be web posts, online reports, events, video, or just native social content – tweets or Facebook posts, for example.

The demise of Twitter, constant questioning of Facebook’s ethics and algorithms, and the potential political perils of TikTok are just a few examples of why organizations can’t equate a social media program with a content strategy. Creating content and posting to social media without an underlying content strategy is at best reckless and at worst financial malpractice.  

An orange starburst image.

“What should we do with our organization’s Twitter account?” is not the question to ask right now. Instead, ask who was getting value from your Twitter, what was that value and how was it delivered? The answers to those questions will give actionable insights to immediate next steps. More important, those answers help inform a content strategy that connects your storytelling, audience and the impact you and your community need to have on the world. 

It’s possible that your content strategy will point towards investing in content you own on platforms your community accesses and can use to engage with your organization and others. This could mean rethinking email to make it more personal, deliverable and successful. It may mean investing in programs that look like organizing so that you have a better picture of your community, its needs, interests and skills. You may create more how-to articles and videos, webinars and volunteer training programs. Perhaps it’s something completely different. So long it isn’t investing in followers on a platform you don’t control simply because it is there.

Community Language

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A look at how language builds community, can leave people behind and and ways to open up community language.

We moved around a lot when I was a kid. Every new classroom and school meant entering a different community. There were new ways of working. Different rules. Another set of norms and pre-existing relationships to sort out.

Finding a place in the community meant not just meeting people but learning their language: the unwritten ways of being. Of course, for many kids, this process means learning a spoken language. That’s another layer that adds complexity to the inner language.

Everyone has these experiences of joining a community, neighborhood school, workplace and trying to understand how it all works. But communities often don’t consider the complexity and power of their internal language. And people who aren’t able to pick up on the language will feel their exclusion. Some won’t engage. Others leave. The community is lesser for it.

Understanding the role and use of language will help any community or membership group thrive. Language is a currency of community.

Photo of signs painted on the Tijuana border wall by Barbara Zandoval on Unsplash.

Investing in language to grow community

Language grows community. Stories of community history, purpose and vision for the future are built of shared words, events and symbols. Community members speak to each other about actions, events, learning and the future. Language allows us to interact, learn, share, and build the tools and institutions that hold community together.

Language is a connective tissue and circulatory system. Like any system, language can put up barriers to entry. It can also decay if it doesn’t learn how to evolve and regrow over timer.

One challenge of community is defining not just language but its access points and capacity for change. A language that doesn’t change can’t thrive. Neither can its community.

Here are some ideas for opening community language to others in a way that grows and strengthens community.

Collective and transparent

Make your common terms, symbols, visuals and history accessible and easy to explore. Create opportunities to learn and ask questions about stories and the language used in them.

Stories and language should also be clear. A community that grows will be one that makes clear what it’s about and what it’s trying to do.

Space for difference

Growth is longer lasting when stories and people are networked together. A member who is connected to one other, or to just one story or campaign, is more likly to leave the community than a member who knows multiple people, participates regularly, and has their questions answered.

This means recognizing that not every member will agree with or engage in every aspect of community. Allow people to bring their questions and differences to the table. Look for events that allow conversation in many forms, not just broadcast messages.

Difference and change are (usually) good for community

A community can restrict difference and disagreement by controlling language. We see this in national or group censorship. Propaganda and misinformation are also used to control language and protect power.

But you can also create and shift stories by opening up language. Think of language and the opportunity to use and learn it as a source of abundance, not a threat.

Some ways to think about language that grows community:

  • Express shared principles, values and processes for engaging in community.
  • Help people build relationships and trust with multiple community members, not a single person or narrative.
  • Show people they have a role in communications and storytelling. Ensure they see themselves represented.
  • Help people participate in language formation. Community town halls, for example, can be forms of language formation. They give us reason to use and engage with community language. They expose members to language use by and with other members.
  • Accessibility. Keep language jargon-free.
    • Focus on language that fits the community, its norms, geography, vocation.
    • Language needs to be seen, heard, read, and used. Use communications platforms and methods that your community uses.
  • Teach. And do. Teaching (courses, webinars, how-tos, guides, etc.) offers the community ways experience language (and the community) to helps them meet their needs. “Doing” is similar. Do Something. Together. Include opportunities for the community to lead, engage and use language in service with others.

Content strategy for community

We hear about community strategy. And content strategy. But not much about the intersection of the two. Content strategy both creates and reflects community and the member experience.

In Building Brand Communities: How Organizations Succed by Creating Belonging, Carrie Jones and Charles Vogl write about two forms of community content: media and shared experiences.

Media includes the platforms and communications products on which content is dispersed and, one hopes, both read/viewed and acted upon.

Shared experiences are the activities and events at which members engage with the community, organization and one another.

Content strategy guides the words, visuals, and stories that appear on media and in/around events. One can have a newsletter or a Facebook page or a weekly meetup. But you also need the stories, content and processes for interacting with and using that content.

Have a content strategy that is for community and meets its needs. Marketing language, e-commerce and fundraising pitches are not, usually, community language.

  • Create content that defines norms, expectations, mission.
  • Understand how and when content informs and teaches community.
  • Provide stories and content that members can use to talk to other members and people outside the community.
  • Use origin stories to provide shared history and case studies to show community working.
  • Events and other gatherings have their own language that members use to understand the event, describe it to others and engage in the event. Make this language accessible, usable and able to be shared.

Folklore and memes

Want to dig deeper? I have some questions and suggestions. It would be interesting to talk about the role of folklore and fables in creating stories, language and ways of behaving. The Stith Thompson Folklore Motif indexes hundreds (thousands?) of common stories and narratives appearing in folk tales. These are the shared stories and language behind community beliefs and norms that weathered centuries of political change. At least in (mostly) Western folk history. Community language and content strategy could learn from a study of these motifs.

Another topic: Memes and viral visual language. What’s the impact of memes and virality on community language? How does visual language and mixed visual/audio/written language impact that growth, stability and sustainability of a community? Social media, including largely visual platforms like TikTok and Instagram, shape and drive language in particular ways that impact community.

Are communities with strong visual language, particularly visuals that travel fast on social media, looser or more cohesive? Do visuals spread knowledge and experience that communities use to bind and network? I don’t know. Visual language is part of community. Perhaps the speed of memes and quickly shared photos/video can grow community. But sustaining community is another layer of language development and use.

Too much content. Too few storytellers.

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The internet and social media disrupt the relationship between story and how we understand the world around us.

The other day I wrote this about storytelling and content strategy in a project brief for a potential client:

The candidate (or party, group, movement, government) who controls the narrative has an inside track on guiding people’s hearts, minds and passions. Even when people, on the whole, don’t believe in the narrative they often go along with what’s dominant and speaks to their basic needs.

Content strategy is simply the combination of actions that identify, deliver, market, test and measure narrative to achieve an impact on (or by) people in the audience. In a campaign, content strategy is woven together with communications, data, fundraising, events, storytelling and (most of all) organizing to connect people with powerful narratives and each other.

Simply having a compelling message is a necessary but insufficient condition for winning a campaign or sustaining a movement. Crafting a narrative with stories, data, and actions gives people hooks that connect a theory of change to their own experience. The narrative creates a route map. Like handholds and cracks on a climbing wall, we reach for stories to make sense the path forward (or up, if you like the climbing metaphor).

Content strategy is what ties it all together. It bolts stories to the narrative. It helps you give stories shape and color so that people can see stories, ask questions, connect stories to their own experience and connect your theory of change to their own needs.

Culture storytelling

But does storytelling and content strategy matter now?

The value of story in advocacy, politics and social change is in question. That may be difficult to imagine, even debatable, given that digital tools, social networks, and online media give us countless venues for finding, creating, sharing and immersing ourselves in stories.

Stories also seem central to the drumbeat of advocacy and news. We can find stories of immigrants traveling through Mexico, children separated from their parents in Texas, families losing their homes to fires in California and refugees of war stranded in North Africa. We see a thousand more stories each day in viral Facebook photos, memes on Twitter, messages passed through WhatsApp groups and email lists.

Stories that connect people to the politics of the day are in high demand. And the supply has never been greater. People are, generally speaking, confused by the chaos. Humans look to stories to make sense of the world because in story we find themes, morals, heroes with which we identify. We use language and symbols to organize data and facts into a new story about our day, community, and the time we’re living in.

Yet no story lingers in the public consciousness for more than a few days. Politicians and governments use constant storytelling and content to muddy the dominant narrative. When no story lasts more than a few day (or hours) one might even muddy their own narrative to control attention and sow confusion.

How can a story be valuable when our story supply and our story source are seemingly endless?

Maybe in our search for ever more stories we’re missing out on the role of interaction between storyteller and listener. (To be clear, I’m talking broadly about the act of storytelling and not referring to just oral, written, video or any other media. Today, and in the past, stories/content/information passes through many channels.)

Marshall Ganz wrote that one way storytelling contributes to movements is by helping people shape their identity. Storytelling gives us the tools to recognize our community and the work needed to support it. This happens, Ganz writes, through culture forging, a process of “constructing shared understandings of how to manage the risks of uncertainty, anomaly, and unpredictability grounded in recollection of how we dealt with past challenges.”

Before print, before radio and television, and certainly before the internet we used storytelling to learn from elders, parents, community leaders and others in positions of trust. Stories shared patterns that helped us learn about values, community norms, why the sun rose and set when it did, when to plant crops and how to find water. In other words, storytelling set up a culture. It also contributed to adaptations, new ways of thinking, even revolutions.

People, not words, are how stories shape culture

Today, we spend a far smaller proportion of our story telling and listening time in conversation. Social media, video, and other digitally mediated storytelling delivers us wave after wave of longreads, opinion pieces, and stories packaged as a few words above or under a photo. Pussy hats and Pepe memes are themselves elements of political storytelling.

The evolution of storytelling – as teller and receiver – is constantly evolving. We had thousands of years of oral storytelling, a few hundred years of print, and five or six decades of one to three television channels. We now have 25 years, give or take, of the public internet, including a decade of social media.

Stories about culture, norms, politics and social expectations are no longer delivered by a few familiar, trusted sources. And we no longer tell stories to family, friends and neighbors. We’ve opened ourselves to everyone on the planet.

It’s not just the nature of stories that has rapidly changed, it’s who we share them with. This has quickly blown up the role of storytelling and I don’t think we, as cultures, governments and community advocates, have recognized the speed of change.

In the same 2001 essay, Ganz wrote about how the people with whom we share stories shapes identity. Note this was written in 2001, not before the internet but before social media and YouTube:

Our individual identities are thus linked with those with whom we share stories – our families, communities, colleagues, faith traditions, nationalities – and with whom we enact them at our family dinners, worship services, holidays, and other cultural celebrations that institutionalize – or transform – their retelling

If storytelling – or, more simply, people’s stories – are to play an effective part in connecting people in support of movements we need to understand the role of storytellers and listeners, ritual and trust in storytelling.

Where to now?

I’d like to say we should (and could) get rid of 24 hour news channels and social media. I’m not sure humans have adapted to either. But going backwards isn’t a realistic option and regulating or recommending content changes to either opens the door to government-controlled news and storytelling.

Instead, we should look for ways to help change makers, storytellers, organizations and supporters better mediate storytelling. We should actively direct storytelling and content strategy for their power to forge and shape culture. Some ideas:

  • Teach storytelling. Teach listening. Show people the mechanics and the value of story and content. Show people the value of authenticity.
  • Help people tell stories about change and better futures. Develop storytellers who can be trusted by friends, family, and coworkers. Create scripts, help people generate ideas, highlight examples of powerful stories and empowering stories that give people agency.
  • Stop asking people to share their stories with you. These projects are weird for people, generate half-hearted stories, and rely on you/your org sharing stories. You become middleman, not a trusted storyteller. Instead, guide them in crafting their story and sharing it with their community.
  • Diminish the value of “viral” content. Social media can be gamed. The algorithms maximize for attention. These are narratives that support movements. They aren’t even stories. They’re bits of story that cause anger, fury, momentary hope.
  • Create communities built around trust in our work and organizations. Help people meet and learn from one another.

Community and political leaders are usually viewed as great storytellers. But it’s not the just the story, it’s the trust they develop telling the story. People become symbols for cultural understanding through their storytelling. Leaders understand this.

Organizations and campaigns can support their leaders through storytelling and content strategy. But they can also work to build up the craft of positive storytelling across their networks. In so doing, we return the power of people and relationships to storytelling.

The incentives are all wrong

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It’s normal to be exhausted by endless crises, a President who throws tweet bombs at 6 am every day and the non-stop punditry cycle. Unfortunately, wearing you out is a valuable, sometimes intentional, benefit to those who disagree with you.

A crisis a day makes good information go away

There’s a lot of fallout when multiple political and social crises go viral on social media every day. Journalists, analysts, politicians and activists get worn out sprinting on a nonstop treadmill of hot takes, misinformation, new details and (eventually) personal attacks.

More problematic to actual advocacy, governance and storytelling is that it all happens at a pace that doesn’t allow nuance. The incentive and reward system surrounding social media, and in effect storytelling, is dangerous.

We’re seeing a growing sentiment that journalists (and others) would be more effective at their work if they leave social media. Jeff Jarvis counters that it’s the duty of journalists to listen to their audience and engage in community conversations.

Journalists (and activists and anyone, really) tend to burn out when living life responding to constant outrage. Sometimes, people join in and share things later proven to be false. Or statements that deserve much greater nuance.

But I agree with Jarvis that those whose job it is to report the news can’t run from the public square. Same goes for those of us whose role it is to use stories to illuminate a path towards more just and equitable communities.

We can and usually should moderate the speed at which we act online. We can develop personal and organizational principles that outline our ethics and values with respect to information and personal data. Some of us (not all) can spend less time on social media and more in personal conversation.

Perhaps there are strategies for better using tools and networks to gather information and engage in community conversations. I’m a fan of Hearken and their approach to audience/reader engagement (and listening). It’s helpful, positive and structured. Not reckless. It complements social networks instead of depending on them.

Then there’s the Covington thing

All the above-described soul searching seemed to take center stage in the aftermath of about 1,508,000 hours of collective watching and punditry interpreting what went on when the Covington behaved very badly.

Any large and unsupervised group of teenage tourists wandering around a city rarely ends well.  Mob-like behaviors happen in groups. Decorum and self-reflection aren’t rewarded. The group, lacking any consensus, is quick to support quick if thoughtless action.

The longread, How I Knew the #CovingtonBoys Video Was Clickbait, posits that the video first shared wasn’t necessarily inaccurate but was intentionally edited to generate attention and outrage on social media. The implication: Americans spent a week attacking one another in response to a video intentionally crafted to do just that.

The article doesn’t excuse the behavior of the kids from Covington or anyone else in DC that day. But it does raise valuable questions about the failure of journalism, and storytelling in general, to function in an always on, hyperactive environment that rewards conflict and emotion instead of nuance and perspective gained over time.

How do nonprofits and activists navigate an environment that rewards going to extremes? As a sector, we’ve long highlighted worst case scenarios to raise money and get people to take action. It’s worth considering whether earning support requires driving people into a fury. If so, we can and should do better.

Talk about meeting people where they are

Ten million concurrent users (aka individual people) watched a live performance inside the video game Fortnite. The performance at Pleasant Park by DJ/Producer Marshmello (and AOC joining a fundraiser on Twitch livestream fundraiser to talk about transgender rights) may portend much of what’s to come in the world of supporter engagement and recruitment.
 

Stories about storytelling and social change

Screenwriter and systems change innovator Ella Saltmarshe in Stanford Social Innovation Review last year on the connection between storytelling and systemic change:

How can we empower generations of storytellers to use this most ancient of technologies to change systems for the better?

We need to develop new processes of collective storytelling to help us navigate these turbulent and polarizing times. As such, we need more stories about stories in the field of systems change. There are many more examples, tools, and ways of usingof stories to share. It is time for systems change practitioners and storytellers to work together in new ways to build a better world so that “living happily ever after” exists off the page, as well as on it.
 

The intersection of tech and doing good work

Professionally speaking, it can be hard to find the spot in the venn diagram where tech skills overlap with social good. I recently spoke with Noah Hart who runs Tech Jobs for Good. He shared with me that setting up the job board and email list grew out of many conversations with coders, project managers and others with tech skills who, like him, were frustrated in their quest to do work that benefits communities, not just investors. Check it out.

Who uploaded me?

Is your org uploading lists to Facebook without the express permission of people on that list? Facebook is setting up ways for people to figure out who uploaded their data, though I have little confidence Facebook will clearly present this info to people.

Couple things, though: The history of all in one software solutions in the CMS/CRM space is spotty at best, at least in the nonprofit world which isn’t far removed from local news imho. They better invest in implementation support, culture change, and sharing innovation across the sector. Also, despite what I just said about similar systems not working well in the nonprofit space, small orgs really need something like this (and the skills/support to make it work).

Many (most?) nonprofit content projects suck

That’s in part due to having too many cooks in the kitchen. Maybe it’s not too many cooks but confusion about who preps, who cooks, who tastes, who serves the meal. Ever watched a “restaurant wars” episode of Top Chef? Poor team management is where good food goes to die. Same for good content.

The DARCI accountability grid offers a way of helping teams know who makes decisions, who’s accountable for work and who implements. In other words, a content creator knows who will jump into the editing process and when. Content strategist Liz Murphy has a good piece on using DARCI in content projects – maybe it will help you out.

Events, stories and more goodness

No surprise to hear that subscription and membership models will become the key revenue focus for the news industry this year according to the annual Reuters Journalism, Media and Technology Trends and Predictions report. Also, look for online journalism to continue saying membership when they mean subscription.

This is a thorough list of user experience and design conferences around the world in 2019. UX and design is really all about how people interact with what they see and feel around them. So the language can differ but loads to be learned at some of these for the non-designer who works with content, storytelling or advocacy. The UX Collective newsletter is a good one, too, by the way.

The role technology plays in creating agency and power for the powerless, viewed through the lens of women in India documenting violence, sharing their experience, and changing systems.
 

Content is a forest. Don’t just count the trees.

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One piece of content strategy is knowing why, when, how (and if) you need to post your content in multiple places. That seems like a lot of extra work. A version of this topic about this popped up last week in a Slack community for nonprofit/NGO folks with which I’m involved. Someone posted this question:

Does anyone have any useful insight for blogging? I’m specifically looking at posting to our native website and cross-posting to other sites – Medium, Linkedin, WordPress, etc. Obviously each has their own strengths but it feels like overkill to post to all.

I love this. Where to put content, when, why, and what it should look like come up in every comms and digital program – regardless of whether or not there’s a clear content strategy. Every organization sorts this out. And the good ones ask the question over and over again. Talking through it presents a great opportunity to dig into about content strategy, staffing, planning, editorial style, marketing and more.

Isn’t putting our content in more than one place just extra work?

Pushing content into multiple channels is probably already happening. Your blog posts, articles, reports, and action alerts are all finding their way into social media posts.

A blog post you write today probably also has an accompanying Facebook post with a headline, text and photo optimized for Facebook engagement. It has a 200 or so character tweet and photo. Maybe it also has a one minute video – an interview with a staff member about the story that can go on YouTube or Instagram.

Doing this much is almost taken for granted. You want to raise awareness of the post, drive clicks to your site and so you create little versions of the story that entice people to click through to find out more.

Measure the forest, not just the trees.

Most of us focus on one featured piece of content – usually a blog post or other page on a website. We’re constantly planting new trees in our content forest. We care for each tree – at least for a day or two – by telling everyone “hey, go look at the tree.” We measure page views and Facebook likes, Instagram followers and retweets.

We’re often answering the “should I also put our content over there” using a cost-benefit equation that can’t be defined. Of course, we’re going to create the main post or piece of content. We have to do that. (You have to have at least one tree, right?)

How do we know if a tree on the website, on Medium, or on LinkedIn is worth it?

What if we could measure the value of the forest instead of each tree? We know a healthy forest needs different kinds of trees. Some live. Some don’t.

Some trees serve as home for squirrels and birds. Others produce twigs eaten by deer. Some create shade the keeps things cool and others drop leaves that replenish the forest floor.

Each person interacting with a story or piece of content (a tree) is getting something special from it. We just don’t have great ways of measuring individual value. But if someone important to us gets all their value from a Facebook tree then we better make sure that all the content they need is on Facebook. Other people might be email newsletter and Facebook consumers. Others get their nutrition from Medium. And maybe a little ego-soothing LinkedIn first thing in the morning.

A thriving forest is alive, evolving and growing. So is your content.

There’s no one way to care for a healthy forest. And what works today may not be worth doing a year from now. Know how people engage with content. Don’t just optimize the website for stickiness or assume you can create great Facebook posts that get people to go read the full article. Consider the people who spend most of their time in Facebook and make sure they get what you need them to get while there. If you can show that your people are on Medium then don’t look that as extra work, look at it as necessary and do it well.

Review your approach regularly. Don’t be afraid to shift gears, test, put more time into one part of the forest for a while.

Measuring the forest.

Figure out how to measure for the forest, not the individual trees. Don’t rely on page views, clicks, opens and raw audience size. That’s all great stuff. Do measure it. But don’t base your decisions about how to spend your time on it.

Here’s an idea: ask people qualitative questions about your content and it’s impact on their work, conversations with family or friends, their ability to take meaningful action. Ask them in January. Then ask those same people again in May and October. Do they recall content? Do they remember where they found it? Did they take an action or make a donation as a result? Did they change their own economic or political behavior? Did they send it to someone? How and why?

Many of these actions don’t happen at grandiose scales. The numbers may not wow you but tangible measures of action, empathy and engagement can be the difference between content that’s distributed and content that has impact. And that’s a helpful number to pin down when trying to define the difference between content strategy and content production.