Case Study: Using Story to Bring Humanity Back to Organizational Communication

Client: Nonprofit Finance Fund Advisory Services

Founded in 1980, Nonprofit Finance Fund (NFF) unlocks the potential of mission-driven organizations through tailored investments, strategic advice and accessible insights. NFF functions both as a CDFI Lender and a provider of advisory and consulting services and helps organizations connect money to mission effectively, supporting innovations such as growth capital campaigns, cross-sector economic recovery initiatives and impact investing.

At a broad level, NFF works towards a world where capital and expertise come together to create a more just and vibrant society.

---

The Challenge

​As NFF’s consulting arm, the Advisory Services team has struggled to communicate its value effectively to nonprofits and funders alike. Over the past decade, Advisory Services’ offerings have evolved from relatively basic financial trainings and analyses to encompass complex, long-term engagements that touch every level of client organizations and, in many cases, their funders. While the offerings have evolved, the way the team communicates about their work has stayed narrow and highly technical, focusing on financial analytics and tools over the human impact the team’s work has had both on individual organizations and, more broadly, on the sector as a whole.

As more consulting firms turn their focus to helping nonprofits build their financial management capacity, NFF Advisory Services is searching for a way to capture its value that resonates deeply and distinguishes it from the competition.

---

The Need

To support the creation of a new, more compelling narrative, NFF sought help in: 

• Collecting powerful stories from the 40 person Advisory Services team;
• Examining these stories to surface shared narratives, themes and values;
• Using the stories and shared narratives to form the core of a new way of communicating about Advisory Services;
• Empowering team members to integrate storytelling into their presentations, pitches, and client engagements.

---

The Approach

Working with NFF’s Director of Knowledge and Communications, Managing Director of Advisory Services, and Vice President of Advisory Services, I designed an engagement that combined virtual strategies to involve Advisory Services team members located across the country and a 2 day in person workshop at NFF’s headquarters in New York. 

Part I: Engage the Full Team
The engagement kicked off with a 30 minute webinar for the Advisory Services and Knowledge and Communications teams. The webinar aimed to establish a shared understanding of what  exactly story is, how it functions in building communities and teams, and why telling powerful stories is so important. The webinar also laid the groundwork and framing for asking team members to complete a fairly extensive set of three questionnaires designed to solicit specific stories and reflections that delved beneath old ‘Financial Services’ to reveal the human core of the team’s work.

At the close of the webinar, the full Advisory Services team received links to the surveys along with a deadline of one week to complete them.

By the deadline, 60% of the team had completed the surveys. This response was, frankly, better than anticipated!

Part II: 2 Day Facilitated Workshop
The workshop, attended by 12 leaders from both Advisory Services and Knowledge and Communications, flowed through four sections:

Re-discovering the power of story gave participants the chance to connect with and experience the power of storytelling by developing, sharing, and reflecting on their own narratives. Starting with experiential work set a frame and foundation for the remainder of the workshop.

Reflecting on questionnaire responses allowed the group to delve into their colleagues’ experience, reflect on any surprises or common themes that emerged, and begin to piece together the core of a new way of communicating about Advisory Services;

Crafting the ‘Myth’ of NFF and Advisory Services combined the first two sections. Working in small groups, participants built and shared a new narrative for the organization from its origins to the present. 

Examining the NFF in relationship to the competitive landscape again gave participants the chance to explore the responses to the questionnaires, integrating findings from earlier sections, to identify NFF’s ‘secret sauce’ and begin to create strategies to highlight it in communication efforts.

The final hour of the workshop was dedicated to review and establishing concrete next steps.
​​

---

The Impact

The immediate impact of the engagement was to reveal the human side of the team’s work in concrete, easily accessible narrative ways. One participant shared that the workshop had changed her understanding of storytelling as a tool to convey complex ideas more efficiently than data and freed her from using ‘wonky, conceptual language’ to explain her work. Another said that a door had been opened and that it was now up to the team to walk through it.

At the close of the engagement, NFF had built a library of powerful stories, had a much stronger (and story-validated) sense of the value its work brings to its wide range of clients, and felt empowered to begin telling the story of Advisory Services differently.

In the longer term, the NFF team has committed to sharing the findings of the experience and working to build a culture that empowers team members at all levels to build and share their stories as a core practice and way of connecting both with each other and externally. 
​