STORYTELLING WORKSHOPS FOR NONPROFIT PHILANTHROPIES
AND NONPROFIT CORPORATIONS
To help all of your constituencies—be they colleagues, board members, funders,
or the public at large—to form a deep understanding of your organization’s mission
My workshops are customized to respond to your specific needs and goals.
DISCOVERING OUR STORIES
What is our story anyway? Working with groups of no more than fifteen people, I help you figure out how to rediscover and share the stories you didn’t know you knew.
TELLING OUR STORIES
This is a how-to workshop on storytelling technique for staff members who wish to incorporate storytelling into their presentations.
WRITING OUR STORIES
This workshop will help you incorporate stories into proposals, web sites, and cover letters.
COACHING SESSIONS
These one-on-one coaching sessions are customized for staff members who want some feedback on oral presentations or written proposals.
THE FUNCTION OF STORYTELLING IN CHARITABLE ORGANIZATIONS
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Why do we need stories when we have data, statistics, budgets, minutes, annual reports, and project descriptions? We need stories simply because they illustrate our work more effectively than anything else when we wish to capture its emotional impact and personal meaning.
Nonprofits and philanthropies take on our society’s most difficult problems. Whether we discover a cure for a dreaded disease or make life better for one child, the story needs to be told. The story invites outsiders in. It allows us to empathize with people we’ve never met and encourages us to support causes we might not otherwise understand. Sometimes we find echoes of the story in our own lives.
When we feel that our organizations are too small to solve all of the problems that confront us, we still need to tell our success stories. They are what keep us coming back. When we reach one child in crisis, one homeless person, one hungry family, one endangered species; when we open a new possibility for one teenager in a gang, one adult who can’t read, and one child in a war-torn country…we need to tell those stories. They matter. |
Susan Danoff learned about nonprofits firsthand when she founded and ran a nonprofit for almost twelve years. She discovered that telling the stories about the work was the most powerful communication strategy she had, and the start-up nonprofit grew rapidly and engaged the imagination of teachers, administrators, and foundations. Susan is currently working with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on effective storytelling practice.