Creative

Brandon Stanton, better known as Humans of New York (HONY), shares photos and stories of the individuals and visitors who populate Manhattan daily. HONY’s exquisite photography catches the eye … and then the emotional stories behind the photographs draw the viewer in.

What can fundraisers take away from Stanton’s success? The power of consistency. Stanton never lets a day go by without sharing a photograph and story. Find your medium — and stick to it, like glue.

One of my "soap box" topics has always been share more stories about the impact of your work. A great story versus a so-so or ho-hum story can make the difference between keeping your donors and volunteers connected and losing them to the next good cause. Make sure to put a face on your work often. Here are seven rules about stories.

Back in 2011, former Pixar artist Emma Coats tweeted a series of rules for great storytelling that she'd picked up from her colleagues. Dinolgnacio has now painstakingly superimposed all 22 over images from Pixar's films as a means to remember them. They aren't all directly related to fundraising, but they make an important point — great storytelling is about getting an audience to root for your hero.

Halloween costumes are a $28 million industry. Even if you haven’t bought yours yet, I bet you’re weighing your options. (After the Red Sox’s big win over the Detroit Tigers Sunday night I’m thinking of going as a bearded cop with his arms raised in victory!) Here’s something else you should be thinking about. The most popular costumes offer valuable insights for nonprofit marketers and fundraisers on what trends are real or an apparition.

Like everything else in life there are only two attributes that all successful writers share: 1) a little talent and 2) a lot of hard work. And the talent is really just a bonus.

It can be all too easy to take the readers of our nonprofit’s newsletters and blog posts for granted, and to write for them the same way that we do for our professional partners, readers of grant proposals, etc.

The truth is, supporters of nonprofit organizations are a very different audience than those “in the business,” so to speak. As such, they have different needs and expectations that writers should be conscious of. Here are a few things to keep in mind when writing for your nonprofit audience.

Messaging is one of the first and most important tools nonprofit communicators need in their tool kits. Whether you're out to drive donations, inspire actions, attract volunteers or recruit participants, it all starts with a clear understanding of what story you need to tell and how to tell it.

But it can be almost impossible to boil all of your nonprofit's information down to get your message across. Here’s a little trick that might help you see the forest in spite of all those trees: Focus on the "musts."

I get it. Sometimes it’s really, really hard to come up with an attention-grabbing e-mail subject line or headline. That’s why we came up with a list of 50 fill-in-the-blanks to get you started, most of which are inspired by sensational headlines on consumer magazines. You can make that selling power work for your cause too!

You aren't offering anything tangible, so your case has to be pretty powerful.

As much as we writers love and depend on our own rituals, we love reading about those of other writers even more.