Non-Profits: How to Deepen Relationships with Constituents
This podcast audio served as the source for the blog post “Attention Non-Profits! Deepen Your Relationships Using Storytelling.”
The transcript was rewritten to produce the blog post, which is the cornerstone of the Shortcut Content system.
Shayla: You are listening today to the Shortcut Content Podcast and I’m talking today with Dave Young, who is the founder at Shortcut Content. And, Dave, tell me a little bit about deepening our relationship with our constituents by blogging.
Dave: By constituents, when I say that instead of the word customer, I’m kind of thinking about non-profits or educational institutions, things like that where you’ve got a couple of different audiences. Often times, in a non-profit or an educational institution, you do want to deepen relationships with your customers, so your students, the people that you’re actually helping in your non-profit, but very often, you also want to influence people that may be donors, that may be contributors or people that are going to help spread the word even about the cause that you’re marketing, so using a blog as a way to deepen relationships with constituents means telling stories, telling about the impact that you’ve had with more than just your constituents, the reason that you got started in this, the people that you’ve helped, the way that they’ve responded, the way that their lives have been changed by what you’re doing in your organization.
Those kinds of stories will make your constituents feels good about you. They’ll make it easier for you to ask them for either help with volunteering or help with donating money or even helping to get other people to do those activities with you as well. And I think that’s something that people lose track of. They think that people just get it; that people might read your homepage and go, “Oh yeah, that looks good. Let’s jump in and volunteer and become a part of this.” And often, we need to hear stories. We need to understand the impact that you’re having and see how we can contribute or even get involved in it so that we have our own story to tell.
Shayla: And there’s something to be said for having something tangible to share with your friends. I mean, word of mouth is great, but having that story in writing or something to listen to to share with your friends is really powerful.
Dave: That’s true. And I think a lot of organizations need to pay a little bit more attention to the power of story telling. They may send out a newsletter, but they don’t tell stories in it. They just hey, here’s an event that we have coming up. And I think your outreach to constituents, to students, to beneficiaries of your service, needs to be a little bit deeper and telling stories is a good way of accomplishing it.
Shayla: And tell me, Dave, if someone wants to start telling stories to their constituents, how do they do that and how do they get in contact with you?
Dave: Shortcut Content is all about enabling our customers to tell those stories and to do it in the most easy way possible, which is verbally. We exclusively create content by interviewing out customers and pulling those stories out of their mouths and then repurposing them in the form of videos, podcasts, and blog posts. And so the easiest way to get started on that is to go to ShortCutContent.com and contact us, either by phone or email. We’re pretty easy to get a hold of.
Shayla: Thanks, Dave.