Feb. 17, 2026
Is Your Storytelling Built for Results?
We hear all the time about how important it is to tell client stories. But we seldom get much more guidance than that. And the truth is that number one, client stories are only a small part of the overall storytelling toolkit for Nonprofit leaders. And number two, even with client stories, simply telling them does not guarantee any sort of a result or impact.
Storytelling can be an incredibly powerful tool in your advocacy toolkit, IF you build your stories for results. Like every other part of our advocacy work, our storytelling needs to be strategic. And that means that every part of any story you decide to tell should be designed to produce a specific result.
How are you using storytelling in your advocacy work right now? If you're not currently designing your storytelling from that strategic perspective, this episode is for you.
In this episode, we share:
- The five most common storytelling mistakes you may be making that rob your stories of impact
- Four key ingredients to a story that produces results
- Questions to ask yourself to identify the strategic job(s) a story needs to do in a given situation
- How to create relatable imagery that will reliably engage a decisionmaker’s emotional center
- How to integrate your bits of data and facts into an engaging story
- The four-step process to build a story that gets results
Help spread the word! If you found value in this episode, I’d be grateful if you would leave a review on iTunes or wherever you listen. Your reviews help other nonprofit leaders find the podcast. Thanks!!
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You're listening to the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
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In today's episode, we help you answer the question, is your storytelling built for results?
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So stay tuned.
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If you wanna have real and powerful influence over the money and policy decisions that impact your organization and the people you serve, then you're in the right place.
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I'm Kath Patrick, and I've helped dozens of progressive Nonprofit leaders take their organizations to new and higher levels of impact and success by building powerful influence with the decision makers that matter.
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It is possible to get a critical mass of the money and policy decision makers in your world to be as invested in your success as you are, to have them seeking you out as an equal partner and to have them.
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Bringing opportunities and resources to you.
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This podcast will help you do just that.
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Welcome to the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
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Hey there folks.
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Welcome to the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
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I'm your host, Kath Patrick.
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I'm so glad you're here for today's episode, because we hear all the time about how important it is to tell client stories.
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But we seldom get much more guidance than that.
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And the truth is that number one, client stories are only a small part of the overall storytelling toolkit for Nonprofit leaders.
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And number two, even with client stories, simply telling them does not guarantee any sort of a result or impact.
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Storytelling can be an incredibly powerful tool in your advocacy toolkit if you build your stories for results.
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Like every other part of our advocacy work, our storytelling needs to be strategic.
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And that means that every part of any story you decide to tell should be designed to produce a specific result.
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How are you using storytelling in your advocacy work right now?
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If you're not currently designing your storytelling from that strategic perspective, this episode is for you.
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Let's talk about how we can make storytelling produce results in the context of our advocacy work and engaging decision makers.
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First and foremost, every story should have a purpose or a job to do.
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A story's job can be a lot of different things.
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It can be to produce an aha or allow the decision maker to consider an idea from a different perspective or from deeper understanding.
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Its job can be to disrupt an unhelpful belief or inspire action or teach a lesson.
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Often you can design a story to do multiple jobs.
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In addition to the jobs your story is doing, all stories, regardless of their strategic purpose, must engage emotions.
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And should paint a vivid picture of what's happening in the story, which in turn also engages the senses of the listener.
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If we don't have that full immersion in the story by the listener, by the decision maker, we're leaving a whole lot of influence on the table.
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So is your storytelling doing all that?
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If not, chances are you may be making one or more of some pretty common mistakes.
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There's actually two categories of mistake that get made in the storytelling universe.
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There's strategic mistakes and then there's mistakes in how you tell the story itself.
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The most common strategic mistakes are telling a story that doesn't have a clear strategic purpose.
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A super common example of that is sort of the basic client story Let me tell you about Suzy Q.
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She's a typical client.
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She came to us with X, Y, Z problem and she got our services, and now she doesn't have the problem.
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Things are much better and her life is much better and she's really happy.
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And here's how Suzy Q describes that in her own words.
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And then you have a little pull quote from the client.
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Now let me be clear.
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There's nothing wrong with those pieces of story.
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They're fine.
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We want to make good use of client stories.
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But often what I see happen is folks telling client stories, and the elements are kind of the same all the time.
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And there's not a lot of strategic design behind it.
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There's a bunch of assumptions going on.
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And that's most common mistake number two, is assuming that client stories will automatically be the right story, or even that client stories will automatically be engaging.
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No guarantee on either one of those.
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But those are mistakes I see happen all the time, and they lead you away from a strategic approach.
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Now, there's also a number of common mistakes in the actual telling of the story.
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Some really common ones are adding unnecessary details that wind up obscuring the key point or lesson, and take you away from the job that the story is supposed to be doing.
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Rushing through the story to get to the end.
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There's a lot of causes for this.
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It's the same as the causes for any other kind of rushing that we do when we're with decision makers.
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It's worrying that we're bothering them, worrying that maybe they're not as engaged as we wanted them to be.
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And if they're not engaged, well now we're nervous about it, and so we're hurrying to get to the end, which just causes more disengagement.
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And then the other one that I see come up a lot is folks telling stories, but sounding more like a reporter who's reciting facts, than a storyteller who is relaying something in a way that is utterly captivating and the listener can't wait to hear what's next.
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So how do we get out of the mistakes and get to consistently creating stories that are going to do the job we need them to do?
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The first thing, I'm just gonna borrow a little from good old Stephen Covey.
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Begin with the end in mind.
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Figure out what result you're trying to achieve with your story.
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You have to know what the story's job is before you can craft it to do that job effectively.
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That only makes sense, right?
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So to get to that, ask yourself some questions.
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What does this decision maker need to understand right now?
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What unhelpful beliefs have they got that are maybe getting in the way?
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What action do you want them to take and what's in the way of that?
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And when you've gotten clear on some of those kinds of questions, then that begins to tell you, okay, well this is what we need our story to do for us.
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Maybe we need to shift a belief.
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Maybe we need to change their perspective of our value.
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Maybe we need them to fully grasp the incredibly high level of impact that our work has.
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Could be any number of things.
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And you'll notice as I list those out, that it's very similar to the kinds of questions we ask ourselves around any strategic messaging for advocacy.
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It's the same basic set of concepts.
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The truth is storytelling is just another aspect of advocacy messaging, so we wanna be absolutely strategic with that as well.
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There are some key ingredients to a good story, and those include connecting to universal human experience.
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That's part of what makes it feel relatable for the listener.
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The right balance between detail and brevity.
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You don't wanna go on forever, but you need to have enough detail for them to be able to get the picture you're trying to create for them.
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And connected right to that is the use of vivid imagery that engages the senses and emotions.
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We wanna paint a absolutely vivid picture of whatever story we're telling or a vivid movie, if that's your preferred metaphor in your mind.
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And the other piece is your voice.
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Making sure that there's vocal variety and letting emotion and feeling be present in your voice.
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Again, we wanna tell a story that captivates.
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Not relay facts like a reporter.
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And you've probably heard a story that was shared in reportorial mode.
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It's not very interesting or engaging.
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I mean, if you think about it, every news article you ever read is in fact a story.
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Now, some of them are written in an engaging and compelling way, but a lot of them are written in sort of a, here are the facts, here's what's going on.
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And we read them because we want to know what's going on, but we're not necessarily riveted by it.
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We're just like, okay, good.
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That's good to know.
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Great, thanks.
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Moving on.
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And here's a clue, if you find yourself skimming headlines and not bothering to read the article.
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Or skimming the headline and maybe grabbing the first paragraph and going, yeah, okay, good enough.
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I got it.
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This is not that compelling, not that interesting.
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That kind of mental scrolling is going on all the time with decision makers too.
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And so if we want them to not only hear the story, but take it in.
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And have that story do the jobs we assigned it to do, we built it to do.
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We have to tell it in a way that pulls that decision maker in and has them almost literally on the edge of their seat wanting to know what's next.
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A lot of that comes from your voice.
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It's also about how you structure the story, but a lot of it is your voice.
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So let's talk about how we build this story that's gonna get you the result you were looking for.
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Lemme give you an example of how you would build a story using all the pieces I've talked about.
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Let's say you're bringing a new decision maker into your shop for a program visit.
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This is this decision maker's introduction to the work that you do.
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They may have some notion of what you do, but this is your opportunity to really help them understand it in significant detail.
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But there's an additional piece of context that's really important in this imaginary scenario.
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There are a couple of other decision makers in this person's orbit who believe that your services are too expensive.
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And you wanna make darn sure that this new decision maker does not adopt that belief.
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So you've got a bunch of strategic objectives for your storytelling.
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You want to create a deep understanding of your work and its impact and the value of that impact.
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That's a three parter.
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You also want to disrupt and discredit the notion that your prices may be too high.
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So in this situation, a great way to construct your story is to tell a composite client story.
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Not just one person because you've got a lot of things you gotta convey here.
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So you may need a composite of a number of different client experiences that will allow you to weave the story you need to weave to make the impact you want.
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So you put together a composite client story that weaves in some critical facts, a little bit of data, and a comparison that creates a price anchor.
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Those are gonna be your key story elements.
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If I lost you for a second, hang on.
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I'm gonna flesh this out into more of a story to give you a sense of what I'm talking about.
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With your composite story, remember, we're painting a vivid painting of what's going on.
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So you wanna be able to describe in a sensory way, and a relatable way, the experience that most or many of your clients experience the problem.
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This is what it feels like to be in the problem that you ultimately solve.
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Here's what's going on in their life.
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This is what they're not able to do.
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This is how this problem is impairing the quality of their life in real terms.
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And so what we don't do is say, this problem is impairing their quality of life.
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I don't know what that means.
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We don't want decision makers filling in those kind of blanks.
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We wanna paint the painting.
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So we might say, you know, if it's a healthcare issue, this is what this person is able to do.
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But there's so many things they can't do.
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They're not able to work full-time, they're not able to walk their kids to the bus stop.
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Whatever the impediments are that are keeping this person from living a full and robust life.
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You want to describe the daily reality of experiencing that problem.
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I'm just gonna borrow a healthcare example'cause it's what's in my head and it's really handy.
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So they're unable to do these various things and then in addition they feel crummy because they have pain or they have nausea, or they have whatever they've got going on, and here's how that impacts.
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But when you say things like, they've got this constant pain, or they've got this constant low grade nausea that just makes it hard to even eat at all.
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Nevermind eat right You fill that out just a little bit.
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And what you do when you're doing that is you're now creating relatable imagery.
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You bring it to what is universal in the human experience.
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Every human understands pain, every human understands nausea.
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Every human understands physical sensations.
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Every human also understands core human emotions like worry, and fear and anxiety and despair.
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And on the flip side of that, hope and optimism and pride.
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So we talk about what it feels like physically and emotionally to be in the problem, and we paint that in just enough detail to give them a pretty clear picture of what this person's life is like.
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And then you talk about how your services change that.
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And you don't have to go into extreme detail about the mechanics of your services.
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If you have them in your shop, and you can show them some pieces of the mechanics, that's really cool.
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Depends on what you do and whether that's appropriate.
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But the details of how you get it done are not as important.
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What you do wanna highlight is what distinguishes your services from others.
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What is your secret sauce that makes your outcomes so much better.
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And you do talk about that a little bit.
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You don't have to give a lot of detail about that because the focus is on the problem and the transformation that you create for the client.
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And the value that that transformation has in the world, both to the client and to the community and the systems and all of that.
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So the how is not as important.
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You do wanna mention your secret sauce and talk about that a little bit.
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And if it's really unique, you might briefly describe, and you would still do this from the client perspective.
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You would talk about how maybe a lot of your clients have been somewhere else first.
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They've gone other places to try to get their problem solved.
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But it only solved it halfway.
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Or maybe it didn't hardly do anything, but they spent time and energy trying that solution and it didn't help.
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And then you can say, but when they come here, that problem gets solved for real.
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And these are the kinds of transformations we get.
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And the reason that we get these transformations and that our clients rave about our services is that we do something no one else does.
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And then you say what that is, but you always keep the focus on that client experience and what that transformation feels like physically and emotionally, and how it changes their daily life.
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And you could spend an hour doing all of this, or you could spend a paragraph.
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This should be concepts that are infinitely expandable and contractable.
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And you have to get very disciplined about being able to tell that kind of story in a pretty tight package.
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Because not every encounter with a decision maker will give you the opportunity to go on at length.
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Those are the core elements of what you want to talk about with the client.
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The problem they're in, the fact that your services create a transformation, what that transformation is, what it looks like in the client's life, how their physical and emotional experience of life changes.
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And then if you say something like, and that's why clients absolutely rave about the results they get with our services.
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We have tons of testimonials.
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And you might just leave that at that.
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The testimonial's not really part of the story.
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They can ask about it, but it's not part of the story, and you don't wanna distract with that.
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Because you're taking the decision maker on a journey here with the story.
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The story doesn't end with the client's transformation.
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There's another piece.
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And that's the ripple effect of the transformation on the client's family, on their community, on their workplace if that's part of the picture, on the entire social services system.
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Almost always, if you're having that high impact, there is also a really good ROI happening there as well.
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And so you can weave a bit of your ROI into that conversation.
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This is how you drop little bits, little breadcrumbs of data and facts into the story that is essentially about the client and their experience.
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But you can say, when a typical client comes to us, this is what's going on for them.
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And the costs to the system or the costs wherever are this, this, this, and this.
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And then you take them on the journey, the transformation.
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And you say, and when they come out the other end, they're now able to do things they weren't able to do before.
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Their lives are transformed in these very positive ways that you describe.
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And then you say, and one of the amazing additional results that happens because of that transformation is that now they're costing the system far, far less.
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And you add numbers to that as appropriate.
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So they come in the door costing this much, and they come out the door costing far less.
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And in fact, often, in many cases, contributing back in, in ways that they weren't able to do before.
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You'll obviously fill in all the blanks of that, but that's how you construct that so that you're sprinkling that information in, but it's in service of the story.
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It's keeping the decision maker in the story of a real live human who's having a human experience that's relatable to the decision maker.
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And it's relatable, not because the decision maker was once in that situation themselves.
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I mean, maybe they were, but that's pretty unusual.
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More often what's relatable for them are those universal human elements.
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The physical sensations and the emotions that go with having the problem, with living in the problem, with suffering the side effects of the problem.
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And then the shift and the physical and emotional experience of putting that problem behind you and having so much better a life as a result.
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All of that is deeply relatable as part of the human experience.
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And that's where you wanna live with a lot of this.
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Is keeping it relatable for the decision maker.
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So you've done that.
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And now we gotta disrupt the notion that your prices are too high.
00:20:09.564 --> 00:20:15.604
One of the problems you have to deal with is the decision maker being tempted by your cheaper competitors.
00:20:16.186 --> 00:20:23.686
Because there's always, always somebody offering to solve the problem cheaper than the way you solve it.
00:20:24.317 --> 00:20:30.797
And 99 times out of a hundred, the cheaper solution isn't as good.
00:20:31.757 --> 00:20:35.176
It does not produce the same quality of outcome.
00:20:35.207 --> 00:20:39.527
It does not produce the same impact, and therefore the ROI is lower.
00:20:40.076 --> 00:20:44.682
First of all, there is a cost to not fully solving the problem, and that has to be factored in.
00:20:45.515 --> 00:20:52.174
The cheap solution might say, oh, well we have a great ROI,'cause you only have to spend a nickel on our stuff and then we save you$5.
00:20:52.674 --> 00:20:59.154
It's like, okay, but actually now this person is still costing the system a hundred dollars.
00:20:59.694 --> 00:21:00.924
So woo-hoo.
00:21:01.015 --> 00:21:10.152
You spent a nickel to get a$5 return, but oops, you forgot to account for the fact that you still have a hundred dollars cost on the ledger that nothing happened to.
00:21:10.541 --> 00:21:21.355
Whereas when you invest in your solution, there's both the immediate ROI, but then there's also the down the road ROI as those additional costs that were being paid are no longer being incurred.
00:21:22.211 --> 00:21:26.291
You might even have exited your story at this point, but you're connecting back to it.
00:21:26.531 --> 00:21:31.321
Because once you've painted that picture in the decision maker's head, they've now got a reference point.
00:21:31.682 --> 00:21:40.142
And so now you can shorthand reference that and you can say, well, so you know, there are other services that offer a solution that costs less than ours.
00:21:40.642 --> 00:21:43.061
But it doesn't have anywhere near the impact.
00:21:43.241 --> 00:21:45.432
And a lot of times it leaves the person still in the problem.
00:21:45.912 --> 00:21:50.922
So they're still experiencing this physical aspect, this emotional aspect, et cetera.
00:21:51.071 --> 00:21:53.951
It doesn't really bring them fully out to the other side.
00:21:54.372 --> 00:21:57.402
Whereas when we do that, the problem is really solved.
00:21:57.771 --> 00:22:00.902
That has huge implications for the person's quality of life.
00:22:00.902 --> 00:22:04.061
But it also has huge implications on the cost spectrum too.
00:22:04.852 --> 00:22:13.632
So when you compare genuine ROI, we wind up being far more cost effective than the other solutions on the cheap side of the ledger.
00:22:14.951 --> 00:22:19.122
Now to further move the decision make's thinking on the issue of price.
00:22:19.451 --> 00:22:22.838
You can also introduce a price anchor.
00:22:23.588 --> 00:22:30.038
That is designed to establish a cost of solving the problem that is higher than your cost.
00:22:30.482 --> 00:22:35.012
You know, full acknowledgement, there are also solutions out there that cost a lot more than what we do.
00:22:35.836 --> 00:22:43.196
Here's what one of those is, and you know, you could spend three times what we cost to get a similar result, but why would you do that?
00:22:43.196 --> 00:22:53.186
I don't wanna spend a lot of detail on price anchors here because we just covered this in great depth in the last episode in episode 1 32.
00:22:53.576 --> 00:22:58.497
So if you haven't listened to that yet, I encourage you to go back and catch up on that.
00:22:58.527 --> 00:23:06.567
'cause that'll walk you through the whole concept of setting price anchors that will really help make your stuff look like the true best bargain.
00:23:07.505 --> 00:23:10.845
So you pull that together, you tell that story in that way.
00:23:11.845 --> 00:23:15.775
And by the time you're done, you've done the things you said you wanted to do.
00:23:15.865 --> 00:23:17.934
You've introduced them to the work that you do.
00:23:18.434 --> 00:23:23.369
You have disrupted the idea that your services are too expensive.
00:23:24.210 --> 00:23:39.680
You have planted a clear notion of the ROI and you've planted a price anchor that says that the more expensive solution is a lot more expensive, and why would you do that?
00:23:39.710 --> 00:23:43.549
So you've done all those things with your story.
00:23:44.049 --> 00:23:50.200
And you have created a reference point in that decision maker's mind because you painted such a vivid picture.
00:23:50.440 --> 00:23:58.609
That will stay with them far more than if you had presented a series of facts and data to them in, God help us, a slide deck.
00:23:58.609 --> 00:24:03.109
But even if you had just chatted with them and shared all of your facts and data.
00:24:03.799 --> 00:24:08.000
So much less impactful than if you can build most of it into a story.
00:24:08.690 --> 00:24:12.710
But your story won't do that for you if you don't build it to do it.
00:24:13.517 --> 00:24:18.696
So fundamentally, we're talking about a four step process.
00:24:19.297 --> 00:24:20.737
That's pretty simple.
00:24:21.237 --> 00:24:24.086
Step number one is you identify the result you want.
00:24:24.596 --> 00:24:33.819
What is it you need this encounter with this decision maker to result in, informed by the ultimate result you want from that decision maker.
00:24:34.453 --> 00:24:39.696
In what ways do you want to move, shift this decision maker and their thinking?
00:24:40.696 --> 00:24:42.856
And obviously to what ultimate end.
00:24:42.906 --> 00:24:56.876
If you're driving toward wanting them to invest in your program at a particular level, then every time you engage with them, you are building support in their mind for why that's a good idea, why you are a great investment.
00:24:57.626 --> 00:25:04.126
Step two, identify the jobs the story needs to do that are directly related to that result.
00:25:04.856 --> 00:25:09.376
Step three, pick out the story elements that will get you there.
00:25:09.963 --> 00:25:11.344
Do we need a client story?
00:25:11.534 --> 00:25:16.094
Very likely there will be a piece of a client story involved or a composite story.
00:25:17.084 --> 00:25:26.189
And it will build in all other pieces that will do the jobs that you need them to do based on the result you want.
00:25:26.892 --> 00:25:28.806
And then step four.
00:25:29.093 --> 00:25:32.212
you build your story using those elements.
00:25:33.136 --> 00:25:38.537
Those are basically just the four steps of building a story that's strategic and designed to get you results.
00:25:39.497 --> 00:25:43.321
Then you do have to tell it in a compelling way.
00:25:43.561 --> 00:25:46.112
You have to be engaging, you have to be captivating.
00:25:46.112 --> 00:25:57.355
And that you do by how you structure the story by appealing to universal human experience and emotion, by creating vivid imagery so that it sticks in their mind.
00:25:58.355 --> 00:25:59.615
And by using your voice.
00:26:00.377 --> 00:26:16.787
Now both of these pieces, the process of building a story strategically to create a desired result, and all the how of, how you tell a good story, how you use imagery and your voice to bring that alive.
00:26:17.646 --> 00:26:22.326
All of that is stuff that we work on constantly in my coaching programs.
00:26:22.747 --> 00:26:31.790
Because while the concepts are simple, doing it well takes some practice, takes some skill building.
00:26:32.191 --> 00:26:33.540
These are all skills.
00:26:34.471 --> 00:26:40.471
So don't beat yourself up if you go out and try all this, and it's not perfect the first time.
00:26:40.500 --> 00:26:40.711
That's okay.
00:26:41.777 --> 00:26:46.048
With this as a guide, it can help you build stories that are really gonna work for you.
00:26:46.618 --> 00:26:51.239
And I've given you some touch points of what to focus on as a storyteller.
00:26:51.239 --> 00:26:57.628
How to build your skills as a teller of stories in addition to a builder of stories.
00:26:57.808 --> 00:27:00.499
Gotta do both, but you gotta start somewhere.
00:27:00.739 --> 00:27:03.229
So wherever you're starting from, add these in.
00:27:03.729 --> 00:27:05.679
And watch your results improve.
00:27:06.567 --> 00:27:13.817
And I promise you, once you've practiced this some and you start to get the hang of it, the process starts to flow quite naturally.
00:27:14.570 --> 00:27:18.800
Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode right here on the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
00:00:00.050 --> 00:00:02.540
You're listening to the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
00:00:02.810 --> 00:00:08.720
In today's episode, we help you answer the question, is your storytelling built for results?
00:00:09.109 --> 00:00:10.460
So stay tuned.
00:00:16.699 --> 00:00:25.609
If you wanna have real and powerful influence over the money and policy decisions that impact your organization and the people you serve, then you're in the right place.
00:00:26.210 --> 00:00:39.229
I'm Kath Patrick, and I've helped dozens of progressive Nonprofit leaders take their organizations to new and higher levels of impact and success by building powerful influence with the decision makers that matter.
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It is possible to get a critical mass of the money and policy decision makers in your world to be as invested in your success as you are, to have them seeking you out as an equal partner and to have them.
00:00:52.460 --> 00:00:55.250
Bringing opportunities and resources to you.
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This podcast will help you do just that.
00:00:58.429 --> 00:01:01.460
Welcome to the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
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Hey there folks.
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Welcome to the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
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I'm your host, Kath Patrick.
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I'm so glad you're here for today's episode, because we hear all the time about how important it is to tell client stories.
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But we seldom get much more guidance than that.
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And the truth is that number one, client stories are only a small part of the overall storytelling toolkit for Nonprofit leaders.
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And number two, even with client stories, simply telling them does not guarantee any sort of a result or impact.
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Storytelling can be an incredibly powerful tool in your advocacy toolkit if you build your stories for results.
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Like every other part of our advocacy work, our storytelling needs to be strategic.
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And that means that every part of any story you decide to tell should be designed to produce a specific result.
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How are you using storytelling in your advocacy work right now?
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If you're not currently designing your storytelling from that strategic perspective, this episode is for you.
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Let's talk about how we can make storytelling produce results in the context of our advocacy work and engaging decision makers.
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First and foremost, every story should have a purpose or a job to do.
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A story's job can be a lot of different things.
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It can be to produce an aha or allow the decision maker to consider an idea from a different perspective or from deeper understanding.
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Its job can be to disrupt an unhelpful belief or inspire action or teach a lesson.
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Often you can design a story to do multiple jobs.
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In addition to the jobs your story is doing, all stories, regardless of their strategic purpose, must engage emotions.
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And should paint a vivid picture of what's happening in the story, which in turn also engages the senses of the listener.
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If we don't have that full immersion in the story by the listener, by the decision maker, we're leaving a whole lot of influence on the table.
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So is your storytelling doing all that?
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If not, chances are you may be making one or more of some pretty common mistakes.
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There's actually two categories of mistake that get made in the storytelling universe.
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There's strategic mistakes and then there's mistakes in how you tell the story itself.
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The most common strategic mistakes are telling a story that doesn't have a clear strategic purpose.
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A super common example of that is sort of the basic client story Let me tell you about Suzy Q.
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She's a typical client.
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She came to us with X, Y, Z problem and she got our services, and now she doesn't have the problem.
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Things are much better and her life is much better and she's really happy.
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And here's how Suzy Q describes that in her own words.
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And then you have a little pull quote from the client.
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Now let me be clear.
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There's nothing wrong with those pieces of story.
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They're fine.
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We want to make good use of client stories.
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But often what I see happen is folks telling client stories, and the elements are kind of the same all the time.
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And there's not a lot of strategic design behind it.
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There's a bunch of assumptions going on.
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And that's most common mistake number two, is assuming that client stories will automatically be the right story, or even that client stories will automatically be engaging.
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No guarantee on either one of those.
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But those are mistakes I see happen all the time, and they lead you away from a strategic approach.
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Now, there's also a number of common mistakes in the actual telling of the story.
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Some really common ones are adding unnecessary details that wind up obscuring the key point or lesson, and take you away from the job that the story is supposed to be doing.
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Rushing through the story to get to the end.
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There's a lot of causes for this.
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It's the same as the causes for any other kind of rushing that we do when we're with decision makers.
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It's worrying that we're bothering them, worrying that maybe they're not as engaged as we wanted them to be.
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And if they're not engaged, well now we're nervous about it, and so we're hurrying to get to the end, which just causes more disengagement.
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And then the other one that I see come up a lot is folks telling stories, but sounding more like a reporter who's reciting facts, than a storyteller who is relaying something in a way that is utterly captivating and the listener can't wait to hear what's next.
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So how do we get out of the mistakes and get to consistently creating stories that are going to do the job we need them to do?
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The first thing, I'm just gonna borrow a little from good old Stephen Covey.
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Begin with the end in mind.
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Figure out what result you're trying to achieve with your story.
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You have to know what the story's job is before you can craft it to do that job effectively.
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That only makes sense, right?
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So to get to that, ask yourself some questions.
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What does this decision maker need to understand right now?
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What unhelpful beliefs have they got that are maybe getting in the way?
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What action do you want them to take and what's in the way of that?
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And when you've gotten clear on some of those kinds of questions, then that begins to tell you, okay, well this is what we need our story to do for us.
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Maybe we need to shift a belief.
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Maybe we need to change their perspective of our value.
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Maybe we need them to fully grasp the incredibly high level of impact that our work has.
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Could be any number of things.
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And you'll notice as I list those out, that it's very similar to the kinds of questions we ask ourselves around any strategic messaging for advocacy.
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It's the same basic set of concepts.
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The truth is storytelling is just another aspect of advocacy messaging, so we wanna be absolutely strategic with that as well.
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There are some key ingredients to a good story, and those include connecting to universal human experience.
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That's part of what makes it feel relatable for the listener.
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The right balance between detail and brevity.
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You don't wanna go on forever, but you need to have enough detail for them to be able to get the picture you're trying to create for them.
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And connected right to that is the use of vivid imagery that engages the senses and emotions.
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We wanna paint a absolutely vivid picture of whatever story we're telling or a vivid movie, if that's your preferred metaphor in your mind.
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And the other piece is your voice.
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Making sure that there's vocal variety and letting emotion and feeling be present in your voice.
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Again, we wanna tell a story that captivates.
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Not relay facts like a reporter.
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And you've probably heard a story that was shared in reportorial mode.
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It's not very interesting or engaging.
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I mean, if you think about it, every news article you ever read is in fact a story.
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Now, some of them are written in an engaging and compelling way, but a lot of them are written in sort of a, here are the facts, here's what's going on.
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And we read them because we want to know what's going on, but we're not necessarily riveted by it.
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We're just like, okay, good.
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That's good to know.
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Great, thanks.
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Moving on.
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And here's a clue, if you find yourself skimming headlines and not bothering to read the article.
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Or skimming the headline and maybe grabbing the first paragraph and going, yeah, okay, good enough.
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I got it.
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This is not that compelling, not that interesting.
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That kind of mental scrolling is going on all the time with decision makers too.
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And so if we want them to not only hear the story, but take it in.
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And have that story do the jobs we assigned it to do, we built it to do.
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We have to tell it in a way that pulls that decision maker in and has them almost literally on the edge of their seat wanting to know what's next.
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A lot of that comes from your voice.
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It's also about how you structure the story, but a lot of it is your voice.
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So let's talk about how we build this story that's gonna get you the result you were looking for.
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Lemme give you an example of how you would build a story using all the pieces I've talked about.
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Let's say you're bringing a new decision maker into your shop for a program visit.
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This is this decision maker's introduction to the work that you do.
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They may have some notion of what you do, but this is your opportunity to really help them understand it in significant detail.
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But there's an additional piece of context that's really important in this imaginary scenario.
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There are a couple of other decision makers in this person's orbit who believe that your services are too expensive.
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And you wanna make darn sure that this new decision maker does not adopt that belief.
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So you've got a bunch of strategic objectives for your storytelling.
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You want to create a deep understanding of your work and its impact and the value of that impact.
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That's a three parter.
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You also want to disrupt and discredit the notion that your prices may be too high.
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So in this situation, a great way to construct your story is to tell a composite client story.
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Not just one person because you've got a lot of things you gotta convey here.
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So you may need a composite of a number of different client experiences that will allow you to weave the story you need to weave to make the impact you want.
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So you put together a composite client story that weaves in some critical facts, a little bit of data, and a comparison that creates a price anchor.
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Those are gonna be your key story elements.
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If I lost you for a second, hang on.
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I'm gonna flesh this out into more of a story to give you a sense of what I'm talking about.
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With your composite story, remember, we're painting a vivid painting of what's going on.
00:12:08.881 --> 00:12:20.602
So you wanna be able to describe in a sensory way, and a relatable way, the experience that most or many of your clients experience the problem.
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This is what it feels like to be in the problem that you ultimately solve.
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Here's what's going on in their life.
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This is what they're not able to do.
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This is how this problem is impairing the quality of their life in real terms.
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And so what we don't do is say, this problem is impairing their quality of life.
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I don't know what that means.
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We don't want decision makers filling in those kind of blanks.
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We wanna paint the painting.
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So we might say, you know, if it's a healthcare issue, this is what this person is able to do.
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But there's so many things they can't do.
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They're not able to work full-time, they're not able to walk their kids to the bus stop.
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Whatever the impediments are that are keeping this person from living a full and robust life.
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You want to describe the daily reality of experiencing that problem.
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I'm just gonna borrow a healthcare example'cause it's what's in my head and it's really handy.
00:13:13.740 --> 00:13:27.490
So they're unable to do these various things and then in addition they feel crummy because they have pain or they have nausea, or they have whatever they've got going on, and here's how that impacts.
00:13:27.669 --> 00:13:36.985
But when you say things like, they've got this constant pain, or they've got this constant low grade nausea that just makes it hard to even eat at all.
00:13:36.985 --> 00:13:40.293
Nevermind eat right You fill that out just a little bit.
00:13:40.682 --> 00:13:46.510
And what you do when you're doing that is you're now creating relatable imagery.
00:13:47.010 --> 00:13:49.951
You bring it to what is universal in the human experience.
00:13:50.280 --> 00:13:53.910
Every human understands pain, every human understands nausea.
00:13:54.150 --> 00:13:56.850
Every human understands physical sensations.
00:13:57.211 --> 00:14:04.880
Every human also understands core human emotions like worry, and fear and anxiety and despair.
00:14:04.941 --> 00:14:10.620
And on the flip side of that, hope and optimism and pride.
00:14:11.160 --> 00:14:23.490
So we talk about what it feels like physically and emotionally to be in the problem, and we paint that in just enough detail to give them a pretty clear picture of what this person's life is like.
00:14:24.225 --> 00:14:28.154
And then you talk about how your services change that.
00:14:28.654 --> 00:14:33.934
And you don't have to go into extreme detail about the mechanics of your services.
00:14:34.325 --> 00:14:38.975
If you have them in your shop, and you can show them some pieces of the mechanics, that's really cool.
00:14:39.304 --> 00:14:41.975
Depends on what you do and whether that's appropriate.
00:14:42.975 --> 00:14:48.062
But the details of how you get it done are not as important.
00:14:48.611 --> 00:14:54.405
What you do wanna highlight is what distinguishes your services from others.
00:14:55.099 --> 00:15:00.849
What is your secret sauce that makes your outcomes so much better.
00:15:01.658 --> 00:15:03.323
And you do talk about that a little bit.
00:15:03.823 --> 00:15:13.063
You don't have to give a lot of detail about that because the focus is on the problem and the transformation that you create for the client.
00:15:13.364 --> 00:15:22.754
And the value that that transformation has in the world, both to the client and to the community and the systems and all of that.
00:15:23.520 --> 00:15:26.581
So the how is not as important.
00:15:26.730 --> 00:15:29.880
You do wanna mention your secret sauce and talk about that a little bit.
00:15:30.380 --> 00:15:38.931
And if it's really unique, you might briefly describe, and you would still do this from the client perspective.
00:15:39.350 --> 00:15:44.650
You would talk about how maybe a lot of your clients have been somewhere else first.
00:15:45.051 --> 00:15:47.811
They've gone other places to try to get their problem solved.
00:15:48.620 --> 00:15:50.030
But it only solved it halfway.
00:15:50.030 --> 00:15:56.331
Or maybe it didn't hardly do anything, but they spent time and energy trying that solution and it didn't help.
00:15:56.870 --> 00:16:01.640
And then you can say, but when they come here, that problem gets solved for real.
00:16:01.821 --> 00:16:03.951
And these are the kinds of transformations we get.
00:16:03.951 --> 00:16:13.120
And the reason that we get these transformations and that our clients rave about our services is that we do something no one else does.
00:16:13.466 --> 00:16:24.676
And then you say what that is, but you always keep the focus on that client experience and what that transformation feels like physically and emotionally, and how it changes their daily life.
00:16:25.485 --> 00:16:29.535
And you could spend an hour doing all of this, or you could spend a paragraph.
00:16:30.056 --> 00:16:33.566
This should be concepts that are infinitely expandable and contractable.
00:16:34.331 --> 00:16:39.760
And you have to get very disciplined about being able to tell that kind of story in a pretty tight package.
00:16:40.270 --> 00:16:44.880
Because not every encounter with a decision maker will give you the opportunity to go on at length.
00:16:45.880 --> 00:16:49.270
Those are the core elements of what you want to talk about with the client.
00:16:49.301 --> 00:17:01.267
The problem they're in, the fact that your services create a transformation, what that transformation is, what it looks like in the client's life, how their physical and emotional experience of life changes.
00:17:02.267 --> 00:17:08.281
And then if you say something like, and that's why clients absolutely rave about the results they get with our services.
00:17:08.781 --> 00:17:10.882
We have tons of testimonials.
00:17:11.382 --> 00:17:12.612
And you might just leave that at that.
00:17:12.925 --> 00:17:14.915
The testimonial's not really part of the story.
00:17:15.875 --> 00:17:19.895
They can ask about it, but it's not part of the story, and you don't wanna distract with that.
00:17:20.719 --> 00:17:24.108
Because you're taking the decision maker on a journey here with the story.
00:17:24.971 --> 00:17:28.332
The story doesn't end with the client's transformation.
00:17:29.142 --> 00:17:30.355
There's another piece.
00:17:30.855 --> 00:17:45.547
And that's the ripple effect of the transformation on the client's family, on their community, on their workplace if that's part of the picture, on the entire social services system.
00:17:46.547 --> 00:17:53.884
Almost always, if you're having that high impact, there is also a really good ROI happening there as well.
00:17:54.576 --> 00:17:59.990
And so you can weave a bit of your ROI into that conversation.
00:18:00.656 --> 00:18:10.257
This is how you drop little bits, little breadcrumbs of data and facts into the story that is essentially about the client and their experience.
00:18:10.856 --> 00:18:15.386
But you can say, when a typical client comes to us, this is what's going on for them.
00:18:15.942 --> 00:18:21.162
And the costs to the system or the costs wherever are this, this, this, and this.
00:18:21.662 --> 00:18:23.761
And then you take them on the journey, the transformation.
00:18:24.332 --> 00:18:28.261
And you say, and when they come out the other end, they're now able to do things they weren't able to do before.
00:18:28.311 --> 00:18:31.521
Their lives are transformed in these very positive ways that you describe.
00:18:32.392 --> 00:18:44.251
And then you say, and one of the amazing additional results that happens because of that transformation is that now they're costing the system far, far less.
00:18:44.642 --> 00:18:46.501
And you add numbers to that as appropriate.
00:18:47.001 --> 00:18:51.261
So they come in the door costing this much, and they come out the door costing far less.
00:18:52.057 --> 00:18:56.676
And in fact, often, in many cases, contributing back in, in ways that they weren't able to do before.
00:18:57.247 --> 00:19:07.717
You'll obviously fill in all the blanks of that, but that's how you construct that so that you're sprinkling that information in, but it's in service of the story.
00:19:08.076 --> 00:19:17.092
It's keeping the decision maker in the story of a real live human who's having a human experience that's relatable to the decision maker.
00:19:17.481 --> 00:19:23.061
And it's relatable, not because the decision maker was once in that situation themselves.
00:19:23.301 --> 00:19:25.731
I mean, maybe they were, but that's pretty unusual.
00:19:26.152 --> 00:19:31.971
More often what's relatable for them are those universal human elements.
00:19:32.132 --> 00:19:41.796
The physical sensations and the emotions that go with having the problem, with living in the problem, with suffering the side effects of the problem.
00:19:42.185 --> 00:19:51.476
And then the shift and the physical and emotional experience of putting that problem behind you and having so much better a life as a result.
00:19:51.986 --> 00:19:56.709
All of that is deeply relatable as part of the human experience.
00:19:56.828 --> 00:19:59.372
And that's where you wanna live with a lot of this.
00:19:59.872 --> 00:20:02.241
Is keeping it relatable for the decision maker.
00:20:03.165 --> 00:20:04.586
So you've done that.
00:20:05.365 --> 00:20:08.695
And now we gotta disrupt the notion that your prices are too high.
00:20:09.564 --> 00:20:15.604
One of the problems you have to deal with is the decision maker being tempted by your cheaper competitors.
00:20:16.186 --> 00:20:23.686
Because there's always, always somebody offering to solve the problem cheaper than the way you solve it.
00:20:24.317 --> 00:20:30.797
And 99 times out of a hundred, the cheaper solution isn't as good.
00:20:31.757 --> 00:20:35.176
It does not produce the same quality of outcome.
00:20:35.207 --> 00:20:39.527
It does not produce the same impact, and therefore the ROI is lower.
00:20:40.076 --> 00:20:44.682
First of all, there is a cost to not fully solving the problem, and that has to be factored in.
00:20:45.515 --> 00:20:52.174
The cheap solution might say, oh, well we have a great ROI,'cause you only have to spend a nickel on our stuff and then we save you$5.
00:20:52.674 --> 00:20:59.154
It's like, okay, but actually now this person is still costing the system a hundred dollars.
00:20:59.694 --> 00:21:00.924
So woo-hoo.
00:21:01.015 --> 00:21:10.152
You spent a nickel to get a$5 return, but oops, you forgot to account for the fact that you still have a hundred dollars cost on the ledger that nothing happened to.
00:21:10.541 --> 00:21:21.355
Whereas when you invest in your solution, there's both the immediate ROI, but then there's also the down the road ROI as those additional costs that were being paid are no longer being incurred.
00:21:22.211 --> 00:21:26.291
You might even have exited your story at this point, but you're connecting back to it.
00:21:26.531 --> 00:21:31.321
Because once you've painted that picture in the decision maker's head, they've now got a reference point.
00:21:31.682 --> 00:21:40.142
And so now you can shorthand reference that and you can say, well, so you know, there are other services that offer a solution that costs less than ours.
00:21:40.642 --> 00:21:43.061
But it doesn't have anywhere near the impact.
00:21:43.241 --> 00:21:45.432
And a lot of times it leaves the person still in the problem.
00:21:45.912 --> 00:21:50.922
So they're still experiencing this physical aspect, this emotional aspect, et cetera.
00:21:51.071 --> 00:21:53.951
It doesn't really bring them fully out to the other side.
00:21:54.372 --> 00:21:57.402
Whereas when we do that, the problem is really solved.
00:21:57.771 --> 00:22:00.902
That has huge implications for the person's quality of life.
00:22:00.902 --> 00:22:04.061
But it also has huge implications on the cost spectrum too.
00:22:04.852 --> 00:22:13.632
So when you compare genuine ROI, we wind up being far more cost effective than the other solutions on the cheap side of the ledger.
00:22:14.951 --> 00:22:19.122
Now to further move the decision make's thinking on the issue of price.
00:22:19.451 --> 00:22:22.838
You can also introduce a price anchor.
00:22:23.588 --> 00:22:30.038
That is designed to establish a cost of solving the problem that is higher than your cost.
00:22:30.482 --> 00:22:35.012
You know, full acknowledgement, there are also solutions out there that cost a lot more than what we do.
00:22:35.836 --> 00:22:43.196
Here's what one of those is, and you know, you could spend three times what we cost to get a similar result, but why would you do that?
00:22:43.196 --> 00:22:53.186
I don't wanna spend a lot of detail on price anchors here because we just covered this in great depth in the last episode in episode 1 32.
00:22:53.576 --> 00:22:58.497
So if you haven't listened to that yet, I encourage you to go back and catch up on that.
00:22:58.527 --> 00:23:06.567
'cause that'll walk you through the whole concept of setting price anchors that will really help make your stuff look like the true best bargain.
00:23:07.505 --> 00:23:10.845
So you pull that together, you tell that story in that way.
00:23:11.845 --> 00:23:15.775
And by the time you're done, you've done the things you said you wanted to do.
00:23:15.865 --> 00:23:17.934
You've introduced them to the work that you do.
00:23:18.434 --> 00:23:23.369
You have disrupted the idea that your services are too expensive.
00:23:24.210 --> 00:23:39.680
You have planted a clear notion of the ROI and you've planted a price anchor that says that the more expensive solution is a lot more expensive, and why would you do that?
00:23:39.710 --> 00:23:43.549
So you've done all those things with your story.
00:23:44.049 --> 00:23:50.200
And you have created a reference point in that decision maker's mind because you painted such a vivid picture.
00:23:50.440 --> 00:23:58.609
That will stay with them far more than if you had presented a series of facts and data to them in, God help us, a slide deck.
00:23:58.609 --> 00:24:03.109
But even if you had just chatted with them and shared all of your facts and data.
00:24:03.799 --> 00:24:08.000
So much less impactful than if you can build most of it into a story.
00:24:08.690 --> 00:24:12.710
But your story won't do that for you if you don't build it to do it.
00:24:13.517 --> 00:24:18.696
So fundamentally, we're talking about a four step process.
00:24:19.297 --> 00:24:20.737
That's pretty simple.
00:24:21.237 --> 00:24:24.086
Step number one is you identify the result you want.
00:24:24.596 --> 00:24:33.819
What is it you need this encounter with this decision maker to result in, informed by the ultimate result you want from that decision maker.
00:24:34.453 --> 00:24:39.696
In what ways do you want to move, shift this decision maker and their thinking?
00:24:40.696 --> 00:24:42.856
And obviously to what ultimate end.
00:24:42.906 --> 00:24:56.876
If you're driving toward wanting them to invest in your program at a particular level, then every time you engage with them, you are building support in their mind for why that's a good idea, why you are a great investment.
00:24:57.626 --> 00:25:04.126
Step two, identify the jobs the story needs to do that are directly related to that result.
00:25:04.856 --> 00:25:09.376
Step three, pick out the story elements that will get you there.
00:25:09.963 --> 00:25:11.344
Do we need a client story?
00:25:11.534 --> 00:25:16.094
Very likely there will be a piece of a client story involved or a composite story.
00:25:17.084 --> 00:25:26.189
And it will build in all other pieces that will do the jobs that you need them to do based on the result you want.
00:25:26.892 --> 00:25:28.806
And then step four.
00:25:29.093 --> 00:25:32.212
you build your story using those elements.
00:25:33.136 --> 00:25:38.537
Those are basically just the four steps of building a story that's strategic and designed to get you results.
00:25:39.497 --> 00:25:43.321
Then you do have to tell it in a compelling way.
00:25:43.561 --> 00:25:46.112
You have to be engaging, you have to be captivating.
00:25:46.112 --> 00:25:57.355
And that you do by how you structure the story by appealing to universal human experience and emotion, by creating vivid imagery so that it sticks in their mind.
00:25:58.355 --> 00:25:59.615
And by using your voice.
00:26:00.377 --> 00:26:16.787
Now both of these pieces, the process of building a story strategically to create a desired result, and all the how of, how you tell a good story, how you use imagery and your voice to bring that alive.
00:26:17.646 --> 00:26:22.326
All of that is stuff that we work on constantly in my coaching programs.
00:26:22.747 --> 00:26:31.790
Because while the concepts are simple, doing it well takes some practice, takes some skill building.
00:26:32.191 --> 00:26:33.540
These are all skills.
00:26:34.471 --> 00:26:40.471
So don't beat yourself up if you go out and try all this, and it's not perfect the first time.
00:26:40.500 --> 00:26:40.711
That's okay.
00:26:41.777 --> 00:26:46.048
With this as a guide, it can help you build stories that are really gonna work for you.
00:26:46.618 --> 00:26:51.239
And I've given you some touch points of what to focus on as a storyteller.
00:26:51.239 --> 00:26:57.628
How to build your skills as a teller of stories in addition to a builder of stories.
00:26:57.808 --> 00:27:00.499
Gotta do both, but you gotta start somewhere.
00:27:00.739 --> 00:27:03.229
So wherever you're starting from, add these in.
00:27:03.729 --> 00:27:05.679
And watch your results improve.
00:27:06.567 --> 00:27:13.817
And I promise you, once you've practiced this some and you start to get the hang of it, the process starts to flow quite naturally.
00:27:14.570 --> 00:27:18.800
Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode right here on the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
