Over 60 million Americans regularly volunteer for the organizations they care about, which means your nonprofit probably relies on volunteer power.
If so, you already know that these programs need strategy and prioritization to thrive. You likely already have a concrete recruitment strategy, management tools, and volunteer engagement techniques to create a more enjoyable and organized volunteering experience—great!
But how effectively do you connect with and retain these valuable supporters?
The best way to build meaningful relationships with volunteers is to lean into the power of storytelling. When you infuse your communication approach with storytelling techniques, you’ll build a more engaged volunteer community, boost retention, and have an easier time staffing all your programs and events (not just the most fun ones).
How? Let’s take a look at a three-step framework you can use to begin more intentionally centering volunteer stories in your communications.
1. Develop a volunteer storybank.
To use and share volunteer stories, you first need to collect them.
A storybank or library of volunteer testimonials, interviews, and videos will be extremely helpful for making storytelling a continued emphasis in your communications. Consider these tips:
- Make it exciting. It’s one thing to ask around for anecdotes and quotes, but it’s another to put out a formal request for submissions for your new initiative, an oral or community-written history of your organization’s work. Treat your storybank as a real project rather than a quiet side task—the goal is to use the stories for public-facing communication, after all.
- Ask for stories on social media. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X/Twitter can be great places to source stories from both current and past volunteers. Grab attention with a compelling announcement of your request for submissions and provide additional details, like submission guidelines (written private message, DM, or video/audio clip of certain lengths) and a list of questions (how you found our organization, why you support it, your favorite part of the organization’s work, etc.).
- Brand the storybank to your organization. Consider publishing your storybank on your website as a living repository for volunteer stories. Fully brand the page to your organization to ensure it coheres with the entire experience created by your website.
- Get permission as needed. As you ask for submissions, make sure supporters understand that submissions will likely be published or used in other materials. If you curate the submissions to highlight on a public web page, you might directly reach back out to those individuals to confirm publishing permission beforehand.
Of course, it’s up to you whether you want to publish your full library of stories, but the main idea is to begin intentionally collecting them in one way or another.
Keep in mind that the upfront investment of time to create this kind of resource can pay dividends for your entire nonprofit marketing strategy beyond just your volunteer program. With a central place for stories and oral histories, you can easily expand it over time with submissions from donors and constituents, making it even more useful in your communications.
2. Categorize your stories and create content series.
Put your volunteer stories to work for your program’s goals by developing a few distinct content series.
Start by organizing the stories you’ve collected (and continue collecting as part of your ongoing management process) by the points they best illustrate. These points should be recurring messaging priorities for your volunteer program. For example, you might sort stories by how well they convey:
- Your organization’s and your volunteers’ impact
- The volunteer experience
- How volunteers found your organization
- Why volunteers choose to keep supporting your mission
- Any event- or program-specific stories
By gathering these resources in advance, you’ll be able to quickly flesh out your promotional campaigns with compelling material whenever needed.
For example, let’s say you identify retention as a problem for your volunteer program.
Drawing from volunteer stories that highlight why volunteers choose to keep returning and what your mission means to them, you can put together a quick content series for use on different channels. According to eCardWidget’s retention guide, highlighting the personal benefits of volunteering can be highly effective in combating retention lapses. Gather a few stories or ask for new input from volunteers about how their experiences helped them develop skills, make new connections, or improve their well-being.
Content marketing with nonprofit stories helps support your volunteer goals because it’s low-cost, authentic, and often more compelling than straightforward appeals. By creating ready-made collections of stories about key strategic themes, you make it even more time- and cost-effective.
3. Infuse stories into multi-channel marketing streams.
Next, determine how you’ll deliver the stories in your stream. You’ll need to develop content in various formats for different channels, like email, social media, and blog posts.
Give your promotional push a strategic edge by following typical digital marketing campaign best practices for nonprofits. Think through these essentials:
- Your audience. Who exactly do you want to reach with your marketing stream and volunteer stories, and why? What action will you ask them to take?
- The funnel position of your messaging (top/awareness, middle/consideration, or bottom/conversion). How ready is your audience to take your target action? This readiness should impact your messaging to create a smoother marketing journey.
- Your channels. Where are you most likely to reach your target audience? Which are your nonprofit’s most and least successful marketing channels?
- Content formats. Based on your audience, goals, and channels, what kinds of content will work best for delivering your stories—text, video, audio, infographic-style combinations of visuals and text?
- Measurement. How will you measure the success of your messaging push? What’s the specific KPI that will show you you’ve successfully asked folks to take your target action?
Segmenting your audience is particularly important to maximize the impact of your stories and messages. In some cases, you may just want to cast a wide net to boost visibility, but when your goals are more targeted, your approach should be, too.
For example, you may want to specifically reach long-time volunteers, one-time volunteers who’ve lapsed, or donors who’ve never volunteered but have the age and engagement markers of dedicated volunteers. Tailoring your messages and presenting stories, testimonials, and interviews targeted to these specific groups will make your asks more compelling. Note that effective segmentation requires the right insights, though—solid volunteer management practices will ensure you continually learn and record key insights about your relationships and supporters.
If you’re not a digital marketer, don’t worry. Once you understand these core concepts, it’s easy to put together an initial messaging strategy. Fifty & Fifty’s digital marketing guide for nonprofits covers all these essentials and more to help you get started. The beauty of digital marketing is that it’s iterative—learn the basics, craft your stories into engaging multi-channel content streams, and keep improving as you go.
Stories humanize your brand and its messages. What better or more fitting place to put stories front and center than when promoting your volunteer program?
With these core steps, you can begin more intentionally collecting and using your stories to strengthen your volunteer appeals. Plus, focusing on authentic storytelling shows supporters you value their experiences as true partners in your mission. So, start some conversations with volunteers—you might be surprised to see where they take you!
