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

4/25/2018

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.

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Open Letter to Social Impact Orgs: Here's a Powerful Way to Present Your Cause

4/23/2018

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A few months ago I attended a lovely event that honored a few local nonprofit organizations. The audience was fairly diverse. There were more than a few well-heeled folks in attendance.

In other words: the event presented a fantastic opportunity for these organizations to get in front of potential contributors and expand their community of support or at the very least raise their visibility.

All three organizations, two of which have decent sized budgets, whiffed. And all three representatives followed the same outline. It went a bit like this:

Thank you so much for this honor!
The [INSERT ORGANIZATION NAME HERE] is dedicated to [MISSION STATEMENT].
There are over [statistic] in Los Angeles and of those [statistic] [random fact].
If we were not there for them, the [target population] would [something terrible].
Thank you again for this honor.

I could feel the room going cold as each person spoke. There was no sense of connection or humanity. Just a bunch of words, ideas, and generalities. And no one included a call to action.

As each presenter spoke, I found myself getting unreasonably frustrated. These were great organizations doing important work and they were coming across as boring and inconsequential. There is NO REASON that every single person speaking on behalf of a nonprofit shouldn’t be able to deliver a 3 to 5 minute talk that connects with an audience, communicates not just what the organization does, but also why it’s important, and calls the audience to action, even if it’s just to visit their website.

Here’s a proven structure anyone can use that’s been used for hundreds of years to rally people to action:

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Mindfulness is More Than a Productivity Hack

4/22/2018

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Mindfulness meditation is having a Moment.

According to Fidelity Investments, 22% of employers offered mindfulness training progarms last year. That number is expected to double in 2017.

Harvard scientists have found that meditation conclusively and positively changes brain structure. And the Harvard Business Review reports that mindfulness meditation reduces stress and helps practitioners rely more on executive functioning over impulses.

Aetna, the health insurance company, calculated that it gained $3,000 in productivity per employee that went through a mindfulness program. That constituted a eleven to one return on investment!

As the research builds, apps that promise increased productivity, decreased stress, and deeper connection proliferate on mobile platforms: HeadSpace, Insight Timer, Simple Habit and others make expertly guided recorded meditations available anywhere and anytime.

This is all great. I’m a meditation and breathwork facilitator. I’m not going to say that more people meditating is a bad thing.

However.

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The Power of Generative Listening

4/21/2018

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Any time I lead an organizational or leadership storytelling workshop, I split folks into pairs and ask them to share a story with each other. Person ‘A’ goes first and Person ‘B’ is asked to simply listen without interjection. After the exercise, I ask everyone what they noticed about sharing and listening to the stories.

Based on what I’ve heard after facilitating this exercise hundreds of times, one of the most challenging parts is not telling the story, but listening without speaking. This makes a fair bit of sense: most of us have been culturally training to treat conversation like a tennis match. We listen primarily for an opening, a chance to return the volley, to share our own point of view.

What happens when we’re challenged to simply listen, to take in another person’s story without any agenda of our own other than being present?

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Case Study: Building Engagement Through Story

4/20/2018

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Recently, I had the chance to speak with two organizations who had both attended the same training as part of the Think Money First Accelerator program I co-presented with Social Sector Partners in October 2017. The storytelling part of the program was a half-day focused on storytelling for communicating with funders and, perhaps more importantly, transforming internal culture and core beliefs.

Six months after the training, many of the organizations reported not only retaining much of the information from our time together, but also implementing new strategies and approaches.

Two organizations in particular stood out. Both had implemented story-based strategies with the aim of increasing team members’ connection with themselves, each other, and the organization’s mission.

One reported great success, the other reported challenges with the process. Examining each organization’s approach reveals a few key best practices when it comes to moving organizations towards a Storytelling Culture.

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Articles + Case Studies

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

Open Letter to Social Impact Orgs: Here's a Powerful Way to Present Your Cause

Mindfulness is More Than a Productivity Hack

The Power of Generative Listening

Case Study: Building Engagement Through Story

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