StoryBrand Framing 101
The human brain is hardwired to prefer narrative stories over logic—it’s fiction over facts up there. From The Hunger Games to Harry Potter, the hero’s journey is a tried and true formula for telling compelling stories. If you’re not familiar with it, the formula goes: A hero leaves their ordinary life to pursue an adventure. Along the way, they find a guide. Trials and tests ensue, and eventually after overcoming obstacles, they work their way back to their ordinary life. Cue the triumphant homecoming.
So what if we applied that framework to organizations instead of fiction stories?
Donald Miller’s StoryBrand framework does just that. StoryBrand is a popular messaging tool that helps companies and organizations consider their message through the lens of the hero’s journey framework to make marketing resemble our favorite stories. I want to take framework one step further: What does StoryBrand framing for nonprofits look like?
When you think about your nonprofit through the lens of the StoryBrand framework, you’ll open your organization up to invaluable insights on everything from messaging to audience needs and content development. There are two options nonprofits can pursue when they consider their StoryBrand framing.
- Option 1: The mission-based method is a fairly common nonprofit framing that puts an organization at the center, framing the nonprofit as the hero. The donors, in this case, are guides called to action through advocacy or donations.
- Example framing: A food aid organization is the hero, and the nonprofit’s donors are guides that help the hero address hunger.
- Option 2: The engagement-driven method puts a nonprofit’s audience at the center of the story, framing them as the hero. This method is a bit newer in the nonprofit space, and if implemented correctly, it can invite deeper interest, engagement, and action-oriented results from your audience or members.
- Example framing: The donors of a food aid organization are the hero, helping to solve hunger and they’re aided by the nonprofit along the way.
There’s no right or wrong way to frame your nonprofit’s story, but in this article, we’re going to explore Option 2. It’s a little more novel, but it invites a lot of engagement, meaningful interactions, and fulfilling experiences for your audience.
Seven Steps to Practice StoryBrand Framing for Nonprofits
Step 1: Who’s the hero of your nonprofit story?
The heart of and the first step in the StoryBrand framework involves understanding your nonprofit’s audience and their current involvement in your work. In other words, does your audience primarily engage through donations, membership, advocacy, or something else?
To deepen engagement and understanding, it’s important to continue seeing your audience as more than just donors. They can be supporters, advocates, partners, stakeholders, external organizations. No matter your issue area or their unique role—your audience is on the front lines of your organization’s cause, driving solutions with you.
By clarifying your audience’s role, you’re taking the first step toward positioning them as the hero and driver in the narrative. You also tee up your organization as the catalyst and guide in the story. And when your audience is framed as the hero of a story, they can feel deeply involved and embedded in your work. You’re strengthening their sense of connection to their own goals and values. This way, it’s not “our organization’s story,” rather it’s “our (the organization + the audience’s) story.”
You work through things together, you’re partners. In creating a partnership mindset with your audience, you can better serve their needs, bolster their engagement, and strengthen your work toward your mission.
In practice: A practical way to implement this first step is to conduct a brand strategy workshop with your team to define your mission and your audience.
Step 2: What does your audience want?
Next, you’ll need to understand what your audience is looking for—what do they really want from their involvement with your organization? This means it’s time to tap into their needs, their motivations, and their challenges.
When you define what your audience wants, you should look at some basic human needs: the needs for connection, community, resource sharing, self-actualization, safety, or relationships. Why are people involved in your nonprofit? Is it because of the tight-knit member community you’ve established? Maybe because you’re addressing a cause they feel threatens their safety, like climate change. Or, if they’re more removed from your issue area—say they’re donating to a school overseas—their involvement might speak to their sense of self.
Good stories revolve around a central tension: will the hero get what they want? When you’re building your nonprofit’s brand story, you need to understand why your members come to your organization. Giving them what they want is the foot in the door—it’s the foundation for addressing the problems you both want to solve together.
In this step, you should also consider the ways in which their intrinsic needs may align with your organization’s goals. If there’s a gap, how do you bridge that through your partnership to ensure that your audience continues to flourish. Don’t forget to look inward, too: Why are you a part of your organization? What brought you to work there? You’ll likely share some of those basic human needs—community, action, or self-actualization—with your audience.
Step 3: What is the problem your audience faces?
When you’re defining your audience’s problem in the StoryBrand framework, you should make sure that the problem is specific, singular, relatable, and concrete. A feeling won’t suffice, and a large, nebulous issue won’t quite work either. For example, saying that your audience’s problem is that they are upset about climate change isn’t quite specific enough. Instead, a more specific problem could be that your audience opposes new fracking plans in your state.
And in the StoryBrand framework, the problems facing your audience should have three levels: internal, external, and philosophical. Let’s look at those with that fracking example in mind.
- External Element: These are the real world, concrete elements of a problem. So, for example, the audience doesn’t want water pollution, habitat destruction, or any of the many other consequences that coincide with fracking. I don’t want fracking in my backyard.
- Internal Element: The internal level addresses a person’s sense of self and their role in solving the problem. How do I make a difference? Can I actually stop the fracking and improve our situation?
- Philosophical Element: This level invokes the overarching good vs. evil divide. Does the problem address a societal wrong or injustice that’s worth righting? I should have a say in my community’s development.
Once you’ve defined your audience’s problem with these elements in mind, you can start to understand how you’ll solve it together.
In practice: Try designing an audience or user journey workshop to better understand your audience’s point of view.
Step 4: Who is the guide?
This is where your organization enters the story. You’re the guide that aids your audience on their hero’s journey. This is your nonprofit’s time to shine by demonstrating your mission, work, impact, goals, and achievements.
In the StoryBrand framework, a hero’s guide should possess two core characteristics: empathy and authority. Lucky for you, nonprofits often have an excess of both! Now, we just have to make sure that we’re adequately sharing that side of our nonprofit brands.
Empathy is likely an integral piece of your nonprofit organization. Your organization harbors a deep understanding of the stakes of your issue area as well as a desire to help.
Authority comes from your nonprofit’s competence and history. How much have you done in the past to address this issue and how well do you understand the problem at hand? Have you helped other heroes (audience members) down the journey of solving this problem before?
In the nonprofit space, that means communicating to your audience exactly how members are treated and how those relationships are cultivated, what you’ve done in the past for your cause, what channels your audience has to communicate with you. And as you do this, put yourself in your audience’s shoes. What would you see, think, and feel about your nonprofit brand after receiving a fundraising email or newsletter?
Once you better understand your audience’s journey, and the lens through which they view your brand, you can better position your organization as their supporter. Your nonprofit can and should be the guide in their journey to meet their desires and address their problems.
In practice: Defining the “guide” in this framework could require a revision of your mission or vision, auditing your organizational development and social impact goals, developing a new strategic plan, or resetting communications goals and standards.
Work to paint a picture of a brand that will guide your audience with empathy and competence in order to meet their needs and achieve success addressing the problems you both want to solve. Be clear about how you can execute these goals—whether that be through research, lobbying, advocacy, or enrichment—and show that you’re the right organization to partner with to solve your audience’s problems.
Step 5: What is your organization’s plan?
Now that you have a concrete idea of your mission and goals, it’s time to highlight the necessary steps on your hero’s journey. Your audience will be looking to you to guide and educate them on what their involvement looks like and how that coincides with your organizational processes.
Start by articulating the terms of engagement for your audience’s relationship to your nonprofit. That means, you should demonstrate things like: where your audience’s donation goes (is it more overhead or more cause-oriented), how they can take direct action (volunteering or petitioning), how their engagement and your guidance breeds change, and how they can measure or track that change.
The next piece of your organization’s guiding plan is to define your organizational processes—outline what you can 100% guarantee to your audience. This is of course easier in the for-profit space, where you actually can make a 100% guarantee that your customer will receive an order they placed. For nonprofits, your guarantees should communicate the promises you make to your stakeholders and how you plan on delivering on those promises.
Think about what you can actually promise your audience. Will you send regular newsletters or updates? Will you promise to continue to lobby on a certain issue? Will you commit to providing funding for constituents? Above all, you should make and commit to honesty, transparency, and ethics every step of the way.
And this part is exciting. You build on the foundational work you’ve done so far to define your audience and your organization, you weave together their engagement steps and your promise, and in doing so, you create your theory of change. Your nonprofit theory of change lives at the heart of your nonprofit’s story: What steps will you help your audience make, and how will those actually make a difference?
In practice: When you’re working this out with your team, don’t be afraid to get granular. You can always scale back for your public messaging.
And by defining your process, your audience will gain a better understanding as to the ways you’re thinking about putting these methods into action to make the impact they’re seeking, as well. This not only clarifies your own internal operations, but it allows for building a network of trust with your audiences, partners, stakeholders, and more.
Step 6: What is the call-to-action for your audience?
Next, you’ll want to consider how you’re calling your audience—your heroes—to action. This can be done in one of two ways: directly or transitionally.
Direct calls-to-action are what we typically think of in asking for donations, offering an option to volunteer or fundraise, or providing a contact form. This is the ideal action you’re calling them to take after they’ve understood your work, processes, and how all of it ties into their own goals.
And the beauty of the StoryBrand framework for nonprofits is that, by the time you’re calling your audience to action, they’ll already understand their role, your role, how you’ll help them meet their needs and solve their problems, and the steps you’ll take together. It’s so much easier to sign onto something when you have this background and context.
Still, a newer audience member might not be ready to dive into action—and that’s okay, too! That’s where the transactional calls-to-action come in. These can take the form of additional resources, informational blogs, industry-based webinars, downloadable content, community hubs, and more. Essentially, you’re providing more ways for your audience to be involved with your organization without requiring a large time or financial commitment. It’s a dip in the water, not a full cannonball.
This stepping stone also builds trust, it lets you re-emphasize both your empathy and your authority as a worthy guide.
In Practice: Consider the ways in which you’re communicating with your audience and how you’re calling them to action at present. Make sure that your direct calls-to-action are direct and simple. Ask questions like: Is a donate or get involved button featured prominently on your website? Also, take the time to audit your site through the lens of someone who’s never visited or heard of your nonprofit before.
As for transactional calls-to-action, try tracking conversions on your marketing and communications to see what’s actually working to bring people into your cause and community.
Step 7: Communicate the stakes
A good nonprofit StoryBrand message demonstrates the stakes of your audience’s engagement. What does the world look like when they’re involved? And what does it look like without them?
This can be one of the most poignant parts of your nonprofit story. Think about a nonprofit that provides free textbooks to students from under-resourced communities. With your hero’s engagement, these students have access to a critical tool they need for their education. Without your hero, the story looks a little different. It’s a fine line, though. We need to communicate the stakes without fear-mongering. Your hero can make a tangible difference for your cause, but they shouldn’t be made to feel like the whole world is on their shoulders, and without their engagement, it’ll all come crashing down. Don’t be scared to communicate real problems, but don’t forget to live in the solutions.
Your hero should understand that their engagement is important and their involvement is invaluable for addressing your shared problems.
In Practice: FrameWorks institute has some excellent resources on how to effectively communicate the stakes, solutions, and potential success for your nonprofit audience.
Take the time to audit your messaging, your mission, and theory of change to make sure that the stakes are adequately addressed without fear-mongering.
Step 8: What does success look like?
At the end of all of this, your audience should feel empowered to take the next step—either directly or transactionally. And once they’re ready, it’s incumbent on you, their guide, to show them what success looks like. Think back to their wants and the problem they hope to solve.
Does their engagement meet their need for connection, community, resource sharing, self-actualization, safety, or relationships?
Also, does your journey together address their problem? Did you win a huge legislative victory or stop fracking in their community? If so, paint that picture for them.
Before anyone embarks on a journey with you, they’ll need to see how great your partnership can be—all the good you can build together. At the end of your hero’s journey, your audience should feel strongly connected and engaged with your work. And they should also feel unique in what they can bring to the table, because your work and your cause truly depend on their engagement.
In practice: Showing success can take many forms, from annual reports to audience audits, your organization should take the time to objectively review how you’re communicating your victories and success to your audience. And don’t forget to consider that from the perspective of placing your audience at the center of the action.
Key Takeaways
There’s a reason why marketers love the power of storytelling: the human brain is hardwired to prefer stories. This powerful StoryBrand framework for nonprofits will help you make your message easier to understand and remember, so your audience pays attention. A compelling story has the power to attract the right audiences to your organization, engage and hold their attention, and persuade them that you are the guide to help solve their problems.
“Engagement-Driven” StoryBrand framing centers your audience at the heart of your nonprofit, drives alignment, and engages your community. By following this framework, you’ll better understand your audience and they’ll better understand you! Together, you’ll have the potential to start movements, build community, and move mountains thanks to the clear, compelling story you’ve braided together.
Resources:
- StoryBrand by Donald Miller
- “Building a StoryBrand Summary | Book by Donald Miller” by B2B Video School
