This entry is in conjunction with the multi-blog campaign, 10 Ways to Support Charity Through Social Media, which A Storied Career is participating in. Some of the 10 Ways mentioned are already story-driven — such as sharing stories with others and supporting causes on “awareness hubs” (because one of the ways these hubs raise awareness is though stories), Here, I talk about more story-related ways to support charity through social media:
- Garner support for your charity (or a charity you believe in) through storytelling. As I’ve mentioned ad nauseum in this space, Andy Goodman is the best-known evangelist for helping nonprofits gain support through stories. He and many others hammer home the point that data points and stats don’t work nearly as well to endear an audience to a cause as stories do. Learn more here.
- Collect and share stories of those affected by your cause. Some recent discoveries that effectively share these stories: Fonografia Collective, which brings “local and international stories about human rights and social issues to a wider audience. By combining traditional approaches with multimedia storytelling, we focus on how important global issues like development, economic trends, health care, immigration, or poverty affect people’s everyday lives” (one of the collective’s stories is pictured at right); the StoryTelling & Organizing Project (STOP), a community project collecting and sharing stories about everyday people taking action to end interpersonal violence; the Digital Media and Learning Hub of the Global Fund for Children, which put on a “wor
kshop … to give youth the tools to document best practices used by grassroots groups and to provide youth with a medium through which they are able to express and share their own perspectives” (the foregoing link takes visitors to the videos created in the workshop); and the Stories and Experiences section of Brown Bagging It for Calgary’s Kids (link goes to “Joanne’s Story”), which prepares lunches for hungry children in Calgary’s schools. - Tell compelling stories with video. The 10 Ways entry lists video as one of the ways to support charity. While telling your charity’s story in video is effective, other compelling stories, like this one from the Peruvian Cancer Foundation get the message across, too.
In what other ways might we use story to support charity through social media?