We often write about the importance of storytelling as the path into donors’ heads and hearts.
Here, courtesy of fundraiser Fraser Green, is one more exclamation mark on the point!
Says Fraser:
“The ‘magic moment,‘ as I call it, is when the audience stops being an audience – and becomes a part of the story. Total involvement. Total engagement. Every writer worth his or her salt strives for this kind of mastery of art and craft …
Your cause, your organization and your donors have a myriad of untold stories. And within each one of them is a magic moment. Find that moment. Express it in all its human drama. See what happens.”
Amen.
Tom
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Tom, I am so passionately in agreement with Green’s sentiment that the “magic moment” in fundraising is when the audience stops being an audience. But what Green goes on to describe is something short of total involvement and total engagement:
What he describes is great copy writing, no doubt. But even an enraptured audience…
…is still an audience.
In real fundraising magic, the donor becomes part of the story. Literally.
Think of Habitat For Humanity. The engagement doesn’t come from the donor being able to smell the sawdust as they read the mesmerizingly moving appeal for funds. It comes from Habitat stuffing a hammer into your chest and challenging you to build a home, because we each have a personal say in making sure no one goes homeless in our sphere of influence.
That’s why Habitat is one of the fastest growing and most recession-proof charities of our time.
When the donor is transformed into the actor and the nonprofit is transformed into the platform for action–when, in other words, the donor smells like sawdust and doesn’t just smell sawdust in his mind’s nose, so to speak–that’s when fundraising magic has happened.