Back to: Crowdsource and Share Your Community’s Stories
Importance of Community Stories
Community stories are essential for nonprofits. They create a sense of connection and belonging among the people you serve, whether they are patients, caregivers, advocates, volunteers, or individuals impacted by the issues your organization addresses. These stories are powerful because they:
- Build Community: Stories foster comfort and learning by allowing people to hear from others who share their experiences. This sense of connection strengthens the bond between your organization and the community it serves.
- Encourage Sharing: In today’s social media-driven world, people are more willing to share personal experiences. Creating a system for collecting and publishing stories enables this exchange and enhances the lives of those involved.
Technical Benefits of Publishing Stories
Beyond the emotional and communal impact, sharing community stories provides several technical and strategic advantages for nonprofits:
- Improved Search Engine Rankings:
- Stories often use natural, relatable language that aligns with how people search online, making them more likely to rank well in search engines.
- Unlike government or educational organizations that dominate search results, personal stories can resonate deeply with audiences and drive organic traffic.
- Boosting Visibility and Engagement:
- Exceptional stories often get widely shared, generating backlinks and increasing visibility.
- Personal, impactful narratives are highly shareable and can become pivotal for spreading your nonprofit’s message.
- Repurposable Content:
- Stories provide a content reservoir for social media posts, event materials, and website features.
- They can add a personal touch to your website, with quotes and excerpts enhancing static pages.
- During events, stories or their visuals can serve as slideshows or placeholders, enriching the experience for attendees.
Creating a Seamless Story Collection System
To maximize these benefits, it’s critical to have an efficient system for collecting and publishing stories. The process should be simple and intuitive for users, ensuring they feel comfortable and encouraged to share their experiences. When implemented effectively, this system not only enriches your content but also amplifies your organization’s impact across multiple platforms.
Importance of Community Stories
Brian: So let’s talk about stories. Um, if you’re in a working nonprofit, the chances are you’re advocating for a specific group of people. You have, um, somebody that’s really important to you. You have an ideal person that you’re really trying to help out. And you know, the way a nonprofit works is you really need to build a sense of community because it’s not just you and your team members, but it’s really everybody who volunteers, everybody who advocates, everybody who, if you’re on the medical side.
Is maybe some sort of patient or caregiver, if you’re on, uh, maybe more of like a social justice side, anybody who’s affected by the, the, um, issues that you’re really working on. So it’s really important to understand that this comes from a place of, uh, really building a sense of community. Um, and everybody often has stories to share.
They are usually, um, in the, in the world of, you know, social media and stuff, people are generally more used to sharing sort of their stories. And I think. People really love reading or hearing from other people who have been where they’ve been. Um, they get a [00:01:00] lot of comfort from that and they learn a lot from it.
So, you know, building a system for your nonprofit to enable the sense of sharing stories and publishing stories is super critical just for the benefit of making People’s lives better by helping them share or hear other people’s stories. But there are also some really great, um, benefits to it from sort of a technical perspective.
Number one is that, uh, you know, you can actually see, uh, stories published on your website as a tool to rank in search engines. And that’s because, uh, search engines right now are pretty competitive. It’s sometimes it’s hard to get your content. Uh, especially if there are. Government or educational, you know, organizations who are getting ranked higher than you because they have, um, you know, just a higher waiting from, from search engines for being institutions.
So the nice thing about stories is they’re very personal. They use language that people are actually using when they’re searching for things. So, um, it’s not just [00:02:00] about specific terminology, but a story is actually, you know, in the words of the people who might be searching for your organization. Yeah. To get involved or donate or whatever.
So, um, it’s really super helpful to publish these stories online in a way that search engines can, can actually index them. And we’ve seen a lot of traffic come from a few standout stories that really resonated and, uh, were shared widely and, and grew a lot of links and stuff. Um, and then the other big benefit of getting your stories online is that.
Content that is created for these stories. You know, the story is written, maybe there’s some, uh, photography or graphics that go with it or something, um, that can end up being repurposed. So we’ve seen organizations take stories, um, on their website, but then be able to use them on social media. So it helps provide content for social media.
Uh, it helps provide content for, um. Events, yeah, people like love seeing these stories or quotes from stories during events, um, used as like slideshows placeholders, that sort of stuff. And then [00:03:00] also throughout your entire website, it’s really nice to add that personal touch. If someone’s reading through your website and then here’s, uh, you know, a paragraph from an actual, uh, person’s story that relates to the content or something.
And so it really can build out content and stuff. So. It’s really important to have a really good system for collecting this information that makes it really painless for your end user.