Buckets of impact: organizing stories to inspire action

Jaclyn Uloth:
Welcome to How to Market Your Nonprofit, the Counterintuity podcast featuring interviews with experts in marketing, fundraising, strategy, and leadership who offer how-tos and inspiration about how you can help your nonprofit succeed and grow during a time of chaos and change. Bringing his 25 plus years of experience in marketing, strategy, and nonprofit management, here’s our host, Lee Wochner.

Lee Wochner:
Okay. I want you, I really, really want you to get your story out about what you and your nonprofit do. Right now in our society, we’re at a crucial intersection, a point where crisis meets opportunity. Crisis because of dramatic changes affecting everybody and not always in ways they like. And opportunity because crisis always creates opportunity.

In this case, the opportunity for nonprofits to step in and address real needs, needs that have grown more urgent given how government attention and government funding priorities have shifted. You’re already focusing on a number of things, but there’s a lot more that’s going to need you and all of us. To step in and address those needs, those opportunities to make a bigger difference than you already are, to impact even more lives than you already are,

to even more fully engage in a life of meaning, the sort of life with impact, to do more, you’ll need more revenue. And to get more revenue, you’ll need to get more known. And social media is where people and organizations get known instantly. It’s now where we learn everything immediately on social media.

and then determine how we feel about it and if we trust it. Social media is a mixture of immediate and constant information, entertainment, and alarm. Want to get better known to widen your circle of donors and funders and connectors and partners and to get better funded? Social media is the place to go because it’s the place to know. It’s a big network with plenty of tools you can use. In an earlier episode of this podcast, a recent solo cast,

we laid out how to craft a nonprofit content strategy that works. And if you’ve missed that episode, you can find it in the library wherever you’re listening to this one, or on our website, counterintuity.com, under the podcast, Crafting a Nonprofit Content Strategy That Works. Note how cleverly we titled that. We laid out in depth in that episode how our process works at counterintuity, a process that starts.

Lee Wochner:
by establishing a social media strategy, one that incorporates goals, but also meaning and messaging and communications and all sorts of things, a GPS system of sorts that keeps you on your route and reaching your destination while avoiding hazards and going off the cliff. So if you haven’t listened to that episode yet, you might give it a try, but you can also go back to it after this. Our hope here is that

Both of these will help you, of course, because we’re committed to helping nonprofits seize the day. So today, we’re building upon that episode by talking about content buckets. Content buckets. What are content buckets? Well, we know what content is. It’s the editorial matter that you put into your social outreach. I hate the word content. I mean, is Shakespeare content?

I guess Tolstoy and Picasso and Dali and Beethoven are content too. But that’s the word we have, content, some sort of creative expression that fills social media. Content buckets are specific categories or themes that group your content by topic, purpose, or audience interest. They help you organize your content strategy by breaking down what you post into clear, repeatable types.

I started my career in newspapers and obviously that was a millennium ago. I started as a reporter and then an editor in newspapers. Content buckets are like the different sections of a newspaper. Front page news, local news, opinion, sports, comics and so on. And yes, even the digital newspapers still follow that format. Or you could say it’s kind of like a menu. Here’s appetizers, here’s main courses, here’s add-ons you can get, here’s the drinks menu, et cetera.

So content buckets are like those different areas. We’re addressing content buckets today because establishing content buckets helps you plan out a mix of interesting content that will appeal to your audience, make an impact, and help you build support for your mission. They provide a way to organize your storytelling. And remember, as we recently said in that solo cast, and as we pretty much say all the time, storytelling is at the heart

Lee Wochner:
of nonprofit communication. Tell your story, meet your goals so that people see that, fulfill your mission.

Content buckets help you organize your content strategically, making it easier to plan. Ensure that you’re not repeating the same type of content or overlooking key areas. Hey, look, did we hit this recently? Did we talk about the appetizers or the lunch specials? Streamline, they help you streamline your content creation by providing a repeatable network instead of staring at a blank screen, which is the horror of any creative type.

you know the types of posts you’ll need, and then your brain helps you create those to slot those in. Content buckets help you ensure consistency and relevance. They improve audience engagement. They help you track performance by category. Hey, look, people are really interested in these human interest stories we’re doing. They’re not so interested in how many additional crises we solved, although I think that’s not going to be the case.

Content buckets help you simplify content calendars, reinforce your brand messaging, and do a whole bunch more. Trust me on this. The human brain is dedicated to organizing things, to categorizing and sorting, so that we can extract and extrapolate. Content buckets help you do just that, categorize and sort. And they do that not just for you in the creation of content, but also for your audience. So your audience can make sense of it all.

and act on it by spreading the word about who you are or what you do, by sharing the post that spreads the word, by making a donation or a grant or volunteering or joining your board or otherwise getting involved. Okay, so now that we know what content buckets are, what are some examples? And by the way, I share all this with you after we at Counterintuity have just done precisely this episode.

Lee Wochner:
and I’m sorry, this exercise. We have just done this exercise for the 11 billionth time of creating content buckets for a notable and noteworthy nonprofit we work with. In this case, it’s a nonprofit dedicated to helping the communities it serves through community building, early education, crisis support services, oh, really, really important, and the stories are amazing, and more. So really good people doing really important work.

So I’m gonna give you some scenarios, but please know that we’re gonna share three or four examples that one way or another should work for the organization you’re leading drawn from our 19 years and counting of doing this kind of work. So first, let’s start with a generic example and then I’ll share some variations. And so if you have a pad and a pen, you might wanna write this down, but also we’re going to grab a whole bunch of this stuff. We will put a complete transcript on our website.

under this podcast, the show notes, and also we’ll probably pull these out and communicate this as well. So take notes if you like, I’m a note-taking person, or check out the transcript on the Counterintuity website. Here you go, here are nine topic buckets that will work for most nonprofits. Number one, mission and impact stories. And yes, we’re gonna break each of these down. So number one was mission and impact stories. Number two, behind the scenes.

Number three, educational content and awareness. Number four, calls to action. Number five, events and campaigns. Number six, partnerships and collaborations. Number seven, user generated content and community highlights. Number eight, gratitude and celebrations. And number nine, advocacy and policy updates. I’m gonna read those super quick again.

Mission and impact stories, behind the scenes, educational content and awareness, calls to action, events and campaigns, partnerships and collaborations, user generated content, gratitude and celebrations, and advocacy and policy updates. And I’m willing to bet that just the names of those are suggesting stories to you. But let’s dig into each of those. So mission and impact stories, they show how your organization’s making a difference.

Lee Wochner:
client or beneficiary stories, before and after impact, case studies, testimonials. So you might have a photo and a story of a family helped by your housing nonprofit. And we have those for one of our clients. Behind the scenes. They humanize your organization and build trust. When we have worked with performing arts centers, for instance, we like to do behind the scenes posts.

And we like to take people behind the scenes as part of an event wherever we can. And it always works out really well for the organization. So humanizes your organization and builds trust. You do staff spotlights, you do volunteer experiences, you do a day in the life, you do office or field work footage. And by the way, everybody has a lot of fun pulling these things together. You might do a short video of staff preparing care packages, as we’ve seen at a local church, we have some involved.

Number three was educational content and awareness. They inform your audience about the cause that you’ve taken on. So you’re going to share statistics and infographics, myths versus facts, and I’m sure there’s a bunch of myths, how to’s or tips, history of the issue. And so you might include an infographic showing the rise in food insecurity in your community. If you’re a food bank, a local service organization, that sort of thing.

Calls to action. Calls to action encourage people to take tangible steps. Click here to donate. Volunteer to sign up on Saturday to help us clean up after this event. Event registrations. Come to our opening. Come to our gallery. Petition sharing. We’re collecting signatures for or against such and such. You could also say, for instance, $25 provides clean water for a family.

donate today. And I will tell you that I have recently repeatedly been giving small donations to an issue I care about that keeps hitting me up for more. And I’m on their side. Events and campaigns. Events and campaigns would be where you promote your fundraising or awareness efforts. Gala announcements. Virtual events. I don’t see as many of those recently, but they’re still out there. It depends on what you’re trying to do.

Lee Wochner:
Campaign countdowns, event recaps. So a lot of people we work with, of course, do events. And so one of them might be join us Saturday for our annual Walk for Clean Water. And then the link, of course, is either a Learn More or Sign Up to Register. Partnerships and collaborations. These are really important.

These are all important, but we are big, big fans of partnerships and collaborations right now. They’re strength in numbers. So you can highlight your allies and you can do a sponsor shout out. You’ve got somebody who is sponsoring what you’re doing, a company or a person who really believes in it, you give them a shout out. Collaborations with other nonprofits.

You know that, your post there might be a thank you post to a local business that sponsored your fundraiser. And that’s always a wonderful thing. And it keeps people involved and it helps them feel some attachment to your cause. And you recognized them. User generated content. So this is where you’re going to pull things in from others and community highlights.

So you’re gonna feature supporters and participants. And again, you gain by being in a partnership of sorts with them on your issue. So donor spotlights, volunteer photos, stories submitted by followers. And yes, you vet them first. You wanna moderate those. And if it’s on social, you’re gonna look at it and read it carefully before you share it, but most cases it’s okay. And reposts of people engaging with your mission. So as an example, you might share

a supporter’s post from a fundraiser using your hashtag. Gratitude and celebrations. And celebrations are always a great thing. And gratitude is always a great thing. Fully endorse both of those. Acknowledge milestones and show appreciation. Donor thank you posts. Volunteer appreciation. Celebrating organizational wins. We did it. We collected X to do Y.

Lee Wochner:
we helped clean up X and now it looks like this, which is Y, which is far better, so forth. It’s a celebration and anniversaries. So it might be opposed, thanks to you, we reached our goal of raising $50,000. Or thanks to you, we were able to help these folks off the street and here’s what it looked like before. And now they live in clean, affordable housing and here’s what that looks like. I mean, just before and after photos are so powerful. And then finally,

advocacy and policy updates. If you’re involved in systemic change, lots of people are, legislative updates, action alerts, advocacy campaign news, contact your representative to support bill 234 that protects foster youth as an example. Now that’s nine of these buckets. And they’re examples. You’re not gonna hit all nine of these in any month.

But what you can do is you can rotate these buckets throughout your content calendar to keep things engaging and mission aligned and to make it more interesting for you and your audience. So let’s do this again, but this time we’re gonna get a little more specific for certain types of nonprofits, again, in the hopes of being helpful. There’s gonna be a lot of similarity, a lot of overlap.

But our thought was if we share lots of examples, then you go, oh, of course, this is how I might fit in. This is what we might do. So let’s start with a food bank, because we’re certainly aware of food banks all around the country and have some awareness of what’s going on with food banks. I have volunteered at food banks and so a bunch of other people here at Counterintuity. So for a food bank, content buckets should reflect your mission of fighting hunger.

serving the community, mobilizing support. Here’s what their content buckets might look like. Client and community impact stories. Showcase how your food bank makes a difference. Again, individuals or individual families served. without highlighting individuals who don’t want to be seen on social, et cetera, collecting food at a food bank, you have to be sensitive to the issue, of course.

Lee Wochner:
quotes from recipients if they’ve given you a quote, a day in the life feature from those who benefit, but also from those who are stocking the shelves. So you could theoretically do meet this person who now has access to healthy food thanks to your donations. And you and that person can decide if she wants to be profiled. You certainly would be posting about hunger education and awareness.

Help your under help your audience understand food insecurity. There’s a lot of food insecurity around the country local hunger stats myths versus facts about hunger the difference between food insecurity and hunger Do you know what that is? One is being hungry. The other is not being sure where you’re getting it or how you have access to it and I learned that

about 10 years ago in one of our major metropolitan cities where there are big food deserts. There’s no grocery stores. That was appalling. The nutritional challenges of low income families, some of them, that some low income families face. So you might share, for instance, one in six kids in our community goes to bed hungry. And here’s how we’re helping. And here’s what you might do. Volunteer and staff.

Spotlights, highlight the people behind the mission. Volunteer testimonials, group volunteer recaps. Here’s John, who’s volunteered every Friday for the last five years. Donation and support appeals. Here’s what 10 or 25 or $50 of a donation can do. Can you click here and help us? Food drive announcements, recurring donation calls, and a wish list that can be filled online or in person of pantry needs.

How about a post that says we’re low on canned proteins? Here’s how you can help. Events and campaigns, promote initiatives to support your food bank, food drivers, food drives, fundraisers, holiday campaigns, community events, sponsor led initiatives, Giving Tuesday, Hunger Action Month. Join our fall food drive, help us collect 10,000 pounds of food. I mean, that’s…

Lee Wochner:
That’s quite a number, 10,000 pounds of food. I would be curious to know how many people that feeds and for how long. There’s a lot you can do with that sort of thing. And then you can have the online equivalent of the old thermometer thing as it fills up as you reach the 10,000 pounds of food. It becomes fun and interactive. Behind the scenes, of course, we’re gonna hear a lot of behind the scenes. We are big advocates of this. Show your food banks daily operations and authenticity.

The sorting or distribution where the footage of you guys collecting, sorting, and distributing food. Warehouse organization. Delivery and prep stories. Kind of like how we make it all happen. You could do time lapse. Time lapse video of volunteers sorting a truckload of donations. Partner and donor recognition. You could do, you could acknowledge the organizations and people who support you, and you should.

Thanks to ABC Corporation for donating 500 pounds of fresh produce. Donor thank you shout outs and such. Advocacy and policy. If you choose to do that, local or federal food policy updates, calls to contact representatives to support specific initiatives or legislation, advocacy campaigns. Example, the farm bill affects millions. Here’s how it impacts local families.

please do this or don’t do this. Nutrition and food updates and tips. yeah, food tips, recipes using pantry staples, tips on stretching food buckets, how to read nutrition labels. Here’s how to make a hearty chili with these three pantry ingredients. It would give people a sense of what it’s like to need something from the pantry and not have it.

or to have to cook from limited ingredients. Gratitude and celebrations, celebrate milestones and express appreciation, NW impact reports, volunteer appreciation week. Thanks to you, we’ve distributed 50,000 meals this summer. So how might we take that generic list we started with and now the food bank list, how might we amend that either one of those?

Lee Wochner:
to let’s say an afterschool program. So afterschool program, could celebrate the kids you serve and their growth with some parent permission, obviously. You could write about one without showing the specific person, but you could say, when Marcus joined our program, he struggled with reading. Now he’s reading chapter books and helping others. And Marcus is someone you might say or you.

blur the photo or you make up a person, but it’s a real person you’ve characterized anonymously. Parent and caregiver testimonials, for sure. I was a very involved parent and I wanted to know what my kids were doing and what the program was in and I would check them out and I would have things to say, positives generally. My kids were very lucky and I was very lucky. But I would give a testimonial that said something like,

I know my son or daughter is safe in your safe, supportive space. Thank you. You certainly want to talk about program highlights and daily activities. One of the places that my firstborn was in, I asked them to shoot some video of what the day was like there. And I learned a lot about what it was like to be a preschooler in that environment. And it was pretty terrific, actually. He turned out just fine. He’s in law school right now. And he was in the Army before that. So I’m pretty happy.

Staff and volunteer spotlights, again, focusing on the team, your team, your team that makes the magic happen. Let’s profile them. They are heroes on site. Let’s make them heroes in the wider community. Everybody wants a little heroism right now. Ms. Walker, our art teacher, has helped dozens of students express themselves through painting.

education tips and family resources, child development insights could fall under that, free community events for families, five ways to help your child build a homework routine at home. I that one would get read a lot. Donor recognition appeals, your donation of $25 provides snacks and supplies for one student for a week. Events and celebrations, come join us, celebrate our students at our annual spring showcase. I went to a lot of those.

Lee Wochner:
Community and school partnerships. Thanks to XYZ Bakery for sponsoring healthy snacks this month.

advocacy and awareness speak to the broader importance of after school programs. And then of course, people like, we want the heart based stories that make us feel good. We also want the head based stories that help us track results. And so things about numbers of students served, end of year recap on, any numerics you can fish up, anything like that milestones and all sorts of thanks and something like thanks to our supporters.

We served 120 students this summer. So if you were doing a very local environmental program, as an example, and I’m always on the lookout for those, we were involved in a tree planting here in Burbank, California. We’re a counter-intuitives headquartered. We sponsored a tree planting and I see those trees most days of the week and I’m pretty happy. They were saplings and now they’re huge. Makes me feel good.

So if you were doing a local environmental program, you might talk about your local nature and wildlife spotlights. Like that would be a bucket. Talk about the biodiversity of your local area, your native plants, what’s not native and a problem. I have a tree in my front yard that is not native. It’s a problem. It’s growing way out of scale for this neighborhood. By the way, it was given to me by the city 25 years ago. So kind of their mistake.

Eco facts about your local environment. Did you know this wildflower only blooms in our region during early spring? So a local focus because you have a local environmental program. You are still going to do the community impact and volunteer stories. Here’s how many pounds of trash we removed from the park, et cetera. Here’s Jasmine, meet Jasmine who planted 50 trees this year in our urban greening project and such forth.

Lee Wochner:
You’re gonna have a bucket that shares eco education and sustainability tips. You’ll have a bucket for events and workshops, certainly for partner and sponsor spotlights and your programs and advocacy. And then of course, the behind the scenes stuff. So think of these as a combination of fun and useful with a big overlap in your organization as if the center

of all of this information and all of this activity that makes people feel better and therefore they’re gonna wanna be involved and they wanna be involved in that through you.

Lee Wochner:
And then finally, I want to share one more and we had a little internal discussion and we decided to do a performing arts group. As I referenced, we’ve done a lot in the performing arts, particularly with dance and orchestral music and pop music and theater. And it’s all been great. It’s just been fantastic. Really smart, talented people that we got to work with. So we’re always a fan of these things.

And so let’s talk about content buckets for a performing arts group, like a symphony or dance or theater. So one would be performance highlights and teasers, rehearsal snippets. Let’s see a little rehearsal footage, backstage photos or short videos, program teasers, any sort of sneak peek you can do, clips of past performances. People don’t get to see the magic getting made.

and this is their opportunity. And again, when you get them to your venue, there is money to be made, opportunities seized in your backstage tour. If you figure out how you might package that or promote that to the right donor audience. I would of course propose that you do ensemble, artist and ensemble spotlights. Feature the people behind the performances. Your music.

musician, dancer, actor, bios, meet the artist interviews, quick facts, Qs and As, behind the scenes. Years ago, one of our very first clients was an art gallery and they had been under previous ownership, they had been buying very expensive advertisements and selling nothing through the advertisements. And our approach was to cancel all of that.

and just have artists come in, artists who are on display in the gallery. It seems obvious, right? But have artists who are on display in the gallery come in, talk about their work, and then also do workshops for other artists and aspiring artists. And you know what? It sold out the art. Every time we did it, we sold out the art. It was amazing. So bringing them in and inviting people in to meet artists who are important to them.

Lee Wochner:
Can have a huge impact for you and they don’t have to be Lady Gaga to be somebody huge somebody noteworthy It’s surprising who is noteworthy to different people I mean I’m a fan of the avant-garde theater director Andre Gregory and I’m sure almost no one listening to this Podcast has heard of Andre Gregory, but I’m considering going to New York to see the latest show He’s directed probably his last one because I think he’s 91 years old

So you may be surprised who a celebrity is to your audience. Audience and community engagement, I would certainly capture some of that. And I see some organizations doing a really good job of that lately. Audience reactions and testimonials. wow, we saw this, it was great. Photos from the lobby or the audience view, and then posts about what did you love most about our Swan Lake performance or whatever your performance was called, let us know. And you wanna do that

because that sparks engagement. When they’re interacting with you, it sparks engagement. It triggers the algorithm in a positive way for you. And here’s the little secret. It’s almost impossible for people not to respond. If they see it, their brain immediately triggers them to respond and more people than you might imagine will respond. This is why murderers get caught. Murderers get caught because they feel the need to tell one person.

And almost every time when a murderer gets caught, it’s because that person shared it with somebody because we have a need to talk. So let’s take that terrible evil and turn it over to goodness and ask questions and encourage people to confess and share their audience experience with us online. I don’t know why I just pulled up that dark fact, but it’s true. It’s true. Your education and outreach programs, if you do that, you probably are doing that.

My own theater company did a thing with LA Metro years ago, all the metro rail stations. You would get out of your subway car and there was a performance at different times. That was fun. We’ve done them in conjunction with large museums here and built around the art that we happen to be performing in front of. What does your performing arts organization do? How can you take it out to someone or somewhere? And how can you show your impact beyond the stage?

Lee Wochner:
So, you know, youth programs, workshops, master classes, things out in the community, community pop-up events, et cetera. So you would do a behind the scenes, of course. I’m making a big case for that. And taking people around, take them to the orchestra pit. Show them the rehearsal room or the dressing room when it’s clear and so forth. You’re going to post your season and show announcements, of course.

You’re going to thank donors and partners and sponsors on your social, thanks to our sponsor, Joe’s Bank for supporting live music in our community. Educational content and arts appreciation. So lots of facts to help people understand about the arts. They know they enjoy them, they don’t understand how they’re made. So composer or choreographer facts.

I’m fascinated by how choreography works and how the dancers can remember that because that’s remembering movement. It’s not how I’m wired. And I just love that. I would love to learn more about that history or cultural context of a piece, glossary of terms. You know, what does it what is a jete? What is a pas de deux? Did you know fun facts, things like that? And milestones, memories, legacy, hey, that we’re celebrating our 20th year.

And here’s what that means. Here’s some notable past performances. Here’s some, this recent artist that you know and love, here’s what she or he or they looked like 30 years ago. And then of course, calls to action. Ticket sales, volunteer recruitment, donation campaigns, newsletter signups, get people on your newsletter. Love the arts, help us keep the music alive. Donate today.

So you can kind of those, those performing arts buckets into promote, showcase, and engage. Promote, showcase, and engage. Those are like the master top line buckets. So there you go. That should help you organize a whole bunch of this content. So I know we raced through a lot here and this is an endless topic. This is like.

Lee Wochner:
What is storytelling and how does it work? But we wanted to share the basics of content buckets and how to actually use them, and probably more importantly, to foment your own ideas of what you could do with them, because the opportunities to use content buckets are limitless.

So what’s the next step here? I’m gonna propose that the next step is to choose a few that make sense for you and start building your content around them as opposed to, and I’m sad to say I see this all the time on social and so does the counterintuity team, a scattershot approach. I posted five times this week, one day it was every 20 minutes, and then next week, I only had time I posted once.

And there are ways around this. There are ways to improve that. You set up your content buckets and you set up your content buckets and then you organize what you’re doing and then you fulfill from there is a far better way to do this. Rather than a scattershot approach and by the way schedule them in advance through an app, through an online platform and there are a lot of them out there.

that will help you do that rather than a scattershot approach where you’re not sure you’re hitting all of your main messages and that you’re not conveying the point. So choose a few that make sense for you. Start building your content around them. It seriously makes planning so much easier. And if you’ve got questions or want help figuring yours out, just reach out. I’m happy to help. And we have a team at Counterintuity that does this. We want to be helpful. So now go forth.

and spread the word because what you do is important. So let’s tell more people about it. All right, see you next time. Thanks a lot.

Jaclyn Uloth: Thanks for listening. How to Market Your Nonprofit is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Please like and follow the show. Visit counterintuity.com to learn more.