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Finally, a newsletter designed for marketing and communications pros at community foundations.
5 Strategies to Help Community Foundations Find Good Stories
As marketing professionals at community foundations, the quest for engaging narratives can sometimes feel like searching for a needle in a haystack.
Yes, we have hundreds upon hundreds of nonprofits and people who benefit from our grantmaking. But how do we find that perfect story that will inspire the next million-dollar donor?
Here are six strategies to ignite your creativity and discover captivating stories within your community:
1. Dive deep into data streams.
Numbers, statistics, and data can serve as potent catalysts for storytelling.
We always start here because it gives us a good idea of the themes we may want to focus on in the coming months. It can be demographic insights of donors, scouring through keywords from grant applications, or looking at community needs assessments that our region has available, we try to leave no stone unturned.
For example, does the city or county have a key performance indicator (KPI) dashboard that measures the strengths and challenges of things like community health, education, etc.? If so, use that data to focus on the topics at either end of the spectrum – high need or high success.
Similarly, use a simple keyword search (or even better, use an AI model like ChatGPT or Copilot) to find the most common keywords used by grantees. Then take those key phrases or topics to start digging further.
2. Ask for access to your grant management software.
Make sure you have ongoing access to whatever grant management software your community foundation uses. Even if it’s just a shared folder on your server, you should have access and spend time skimming the applications from time to time.
Otherwise, you are reliant on your colleagues to review these applications. The challenge? They are not marketers so may not see the story beneath the data.
3. Schedule a standing meeting with Development and Program staff.
The colleagues you see every day almost always have a wealth of stories running in their minds, but because they are not marketers, they just don’t know how to communicate that to you.
Carve out time each month to ask them questions that will yield content for your stories.
- Did they recently meet a new donor who has an uncommon story about how they accrued their wealth?
- Did they recently hear about a nonprofit that is taking a new approach to an old problem?
- When was the last time they met someone who made them feel proud to work for a community foundation?
The more you ask these types of questions, the more you will (sneakily) train your colleagues to think like marketers. And at some point, they’ll be the ones coming to you instead of the other way around.
4. Tap into the power of human connection.
Behind every statistic lies a human story waiting to be told. We cannot overemphasize this one: Take the time to connect with nonprofit leaders and partners in person.
Each interaction is a potential treasure trove of narratives, offering insights into the challenges, triumphs, and aspirations of those you serve.
If your development colleague or program manager is visiting a donor or a nonprofit on-site, ask if you can join once per month. These relationships are gold.
Whether they recommend stories during your first conversation or they follow up the month after, we guarantee you will start seeing more stories hitting your inbox when you spend just an hour or two each month building relationships in the community.
5. Leverage partners and collaborators.
You don’t always have to do the work yourself. You work with dozens of nonprofits, funders, and partners that have their own marketing.
Be on the lookout for other organizations and other people who have strong marketing chops. Does a nonprofit post great videos on social media? Is a donor active on social media?
Forge partnerships with these local organizations and community influencers to broaden your storytelling horizon. Collaborative initiatives provide access to a wider network of stories, resources, and expertise.
Plus, they may also offer you deeper access to stories and content that you wouldn’t originally get.
6. Bonus! Embrace Diversity and Inclusion.
Every community is a tapestry woven with diverse threads of culture, identity, and lived experiences. Embrace the richness of diversity within your community and actively seek out stories that amplify marginalized voices and underrepresented perspectives.
This means you should continue to connect with new partners and reach out to emerging nonprofits when you search for stories. Don’t always go to the same people just because it is the fastest route to a story.
If everyone opts for the strategy that is the easiest to get a new story, we will never hear those untold narratives that deserve recognition. By championing diversity in your storytelling, you not only honor the mosaic of your community but also foster a culture of belonging and empowerment.
Top 10 AI Tools for Community Foundations to Elevate Marketing and Communications
As a marketing or communications professional at a community foundation, you’re always on the lookout for ways to make your job easier and your efforts more impactful.
AI is here to help you streamline your work, from creating content to analyzing data, allowing you to focus on what matters most—driving community impact.
Here are 10 AI tools that can immediately make a difference in how you communicate and engage with fundholders, donors, nonprofit partners, financial advisors and more.
Important! For all Generative AI tools, especially large language models like ChatGPT, never publish publicly anything ChatGPT generates without reading and reviewing the content, validating the information, and running it by your team.
AI Tools for Your Team
1. ChatGPT
If you’re juggling multiple writing projects, ChatGPT is like having a virtual assistant by your side. Whether you need help drafting press releases, social media posts, or even newsletters, this AI tool delivers human-like text in seconds. You can brainstorm ideas, get rough drafts, or refine existing content, making your workload lighter and faster to manage.
Why You’ll Love It.
If you’re working with a lean team or tight deadlines, ChatGPT gives you the extra bandwidth to produce high-quality, professional content without the hassle of multiple revisions.
2. Google Gemini Pro
Managing and analyzing large amounts of content can feel overwhelming, especially when you’re dealing with donor reports, impact videos, or extensive research. Google Gemini Pro is designed to help you tackle these challenges by processing up to 700,000 words or hours of multimedia content. Whether you’re diving into documents or video footage, this tool simplifies your review process, saving you hours of time.
Why You’ll Love It.
With Gemini, you can sift through complex information quickly, giving you the insights you need to make faster decisions and create stronger, data-driven communications.
3. Claude Sonnet
Consistency in your messaging is key, especially when you’re trying to engage donors and stakeholders across different platforms. Claude Sonnet helps you maintain that consistency by learning from your best-performing content and mimicking your community foundation’s unique voice. Whether you’re creating grant announcements, newsletters, or impact reports, Claude ensures everything sounds like it’s coming from the same trusted source.
Why You’ll Love It.
Claude saves you time by producing high-quality, on-brand content that matches the voice you’ve worked hard to cultivate. It’s like having your top writer on call whenever you need them.
4. Perplexity
Research is a crucial part of your role, whether you’re writing an impact report or crafting a campaign strategy. Perplexity is an AI-powered search tool that supercharges your research, helping you find relevant data and insights faster than traditional search engines.
Why You’ll Love It.
Perplexity cuts your research time in half, giving you more time to focus on what you do best – telling your community foundation’s story and creating campaigns that resonate.
5. Jasper
Creating content that’s both high-quality and aligned with your foundation’s mission can be a challenge, especially when you’re stretched thin. Jasper is an AI content creation platform that integrates your community foundation’s knowledge base to generate on-brand content quickly. Whether you’re writing blog posts, emails, or website copy, Jasper helps you create messaging that stays true to your goals and resonates with your audience.
Why You’ll Love It.
Jasper helps you streamline content creation, freeing you up to focus on strategy while ensuring your organization’s message stays consistent and impactful.
6. Descript
If you’re working with video or audio content, editing can take a lot of time and expertise. Descript makes editing simple by allowing you to point and click to create polished videos or podcasts. You can focus on storytelling rather than the technical side of production, and produce professional-quality multimedia content that showcases your impact.
Why You’ll Love It.
Descript empowers you to create engaging video or audio content without needing advanced editing skills. You can easily repurpose interviews, event recordings, or impact stories into shareable, polished media.
7. OpusClip
Your community foundation likely has hours of valuable video footage from events, interviews, or reports. OpusClip allows you to turn those long videos into short, engaging clips that you can share on social media, newsletters, or your website – saving you time and helping you repurpose existing content.
Why You’ll Love It.
OpusClip helps you maximize your video content. It allows you to create bite-sized clips that grab your audience’s attention and increase engagement without requiring a lot of extra effort.
8. rasa.io
Sending personalized newsletters to your donors, partners, or community members is a great way to keep them engaged, but customizing content for every subscriber can feel like a monumental task. Rasa.io makes it easy by using AI to automatically personalize newsletters based on each reader’s preferences and behaviors.
Why You’ll Love It.
You can send out newsletters that feel personal to each recipient, without spending hours customizing content. It’s a powerful way to keep your audience engaged and invested in your foundation’s work.
9. Lately
Social media can be time-consuming, but it’s a critical part of staying connected with your community. Lately helps you generate social media posts automatically from your existing content, so you can maintain an active presence with minimal effort.
Why You’ll Love It.
You don’t have to struggle to keep up with posting. Lately lets you repurpose blog posts, articles, or reports into social media content, ensuring you stay visible and relevant without spending all day on social.
10. Crayon
Keeping tabs on other nonprofits, foundations, or trends in the sector can help you stay ahead of the curve. Crayon allows you to track competitors’ online activity, including website changes, new initiatives, and more. This insight can help you refine your strategies and stay informed about what’s happening in your community or at the national level with commercial banks.
Why You’ll Love It.
Crayon gives you a competitive edge, helping you make informed decisions to adjust your strategy based on real-time insights from your peers and competitors.
Simplify Your Day-to-Day
By using AI tools like these, you can simplify your day-to-day tasks, allowing you to focus more on building relationships, telling compelling stories, and driving greater impact for your organization.
Whether you’re creating content, managing campaigns, or personalizing communications, these tools are designed to make your work easier and more effective.
At Foundation Voice, we’re continuously testing out new technology, including many of the tools listed above, to see how we can improve our work and be more impactful storytellers.
Start exploring new today to see how they can help your foundation achieve its communication goals more efficiently. Or, reach out to see how we can help.
4 Year-End Marketing Strategies for Community Foundations in 2024
As community foundations approach the crucial year-end giving period, the importance of effective donor stewardship cannot be overstated.
Whether you are engaging with high-end donors who care about the impact of their giving, or ones who also think about the timeliness of their contributions as it relates to key tax deadlines, when and how you talk with them is important.
First and foremost, the success of year-end giving campaigns most often hinges on the seamless collaboration between a community foundation’s development staff and its communications staff. While these departments may have distinct roles, their synergy is crucial when engaging high-end donors.
The development team:
- Brings deep knowledge of donor histories, preferences, and giving capacities
- Understands the nuances of cultivating major gifts
- Provides valuable insights into individual donor motivations.
On the other hand, the communications department excels in crafting compelling narratives, managing various communication channels, and ensuring consistent messaging across all platforms.
When these departments align their efforts, they can create a powerful, cohesive strategy that resonates with high-end donors. This collaboration allows for personalized outreach that combines the relationship-building expertise of development officers with the storytelling prowess of communications professionals.
Let me restate one key phrase in that previous paragraph – “personalized outreach.”
Below are four year-end giving strategies to engage your fundholders, donors, financial advisors and more during November and December this year.
- Impactful Storytelling.
High-end donors often want to see the tangible results of their philanthropy. The communications department can craft powerful narratives that showcase the foundation’s impact in the community. These stories should be data-driven yet emotionally resonant. Ask the development team which topics and programs their key donor targets care about the most. Then tailor your stories to those specific themes. - Tax Benefit Education.
As December 31 approaches, most high-end donors and their financial advisors are considering the tax implications of their giving. The development department, often more versed in the financial aspects of donations, can provide tailored information about tax benefits. They can also share the important year-end dates that you should communicate to donors so they know when to get their gifts in to receive the optimal tax benefits. Package that information into a quick infographic and share it with donors and financial advisors alike. - Personalize Impact Reports.
This strategy takes time and may not be for every community foundation. Especially those with limited capacity. But some of the best year-end giving strategies include customized reports and messages. If you are new to this, then we recommend testing it with 3-5 donors as a pilot. Ask the development team to share their top donor targets and create a custom report, infographic, or story based on their giving history or area of interest. Sure, it takes a lot of time to make it happen but trust us, your donors will love you! - Multi-Channel Approach.
Recognize that high-end donors have diverse preferences for how they receive information. Some may prefer in-person meetings, while others might opt for digital communications. The development team can provide insights into individual donor preferences, allowing the communications team to tailor the delivery method accordingly.
Most importantly, don’t wait to plan your year-end giving campaigns or messages. Financial advisors are already having conversations with their clients as we speak, so you should be doing the same.
Why an Editorial Calendar is Essential for Community Foundation Storytelling
In the ever-evolving landscape of content marketing, community foundations face unique challenges. With limited resources and a mission-driven focus, every piece of content must count.
However, creating impactful content doesn’t happen by accident; it requires careful planning, coordination, and foresight.
That’s where an editorial calendar comes in.
What is an Editorial Calendar?
In short, an editorial calendar is a schedule. And when created in tandem with other departments and strategies in mind at a community foundation, it can be a roadmap that boosts your results tenfold.
This calendar can be as simple as a spreadsheet or as sophisticated as a project management tool, but the goal is the same: to ensure your content is purposeful, timely, and aligned with your foundation’s goals. It outlines what content you will publish, when, and through which channels.
Strategic Alignment and Focus
For community foundations, staying aligned with your mission is paramount. An editorial calendar helps keep your content focused on your core objectives, whether it’s increasing donor engagement, promoting grant opportunities, or spotlighting community impact.
By planning your content in advance, you can ensure each piece supports your broader strategy, reinforces key messages, and contributes to your organizational goals.
Consistency is Key
Consistency is a cornerstone of successful content marketing. An editorial calendar allows you to maintain a steady flow of content, ensuring that your audience hears from you regularly.
This consistent presence helps build trust and keeps your foundation top-of-mind for donors, professional advisors, nonprofit partners, and community members.
With a clear schedule, you can avoid the pitfalls of irregular posting, which can make your foundation appear disorganized or inattentive.
Maximize Resources and Reduce Stress
Community foundations often operate with lean teams and tight budgets. An editorial calendar helps maximize these limited resources by allowing for better planning and coordination among team members.
When everyone knows what content is coming up, it’s easier to divide responsibilities, collaborate efficiently, and avoid last-minute scrambles.
Enhance Engagement and Relevance
Timely and relevant content is key to engaging your audience(s).
An editorial calendar helps you anticipate important dates and events—like National Philanthropy Day, local community events, or significant foundation milestones—and plan content around them.
Tracking Performance and Adapting Strategies
A well-maintained editorial calendar is a powerful tool for tracking content performance over time. By recording not just what you post, but also how it performs, you gain valuable insights into what resonates with your audience and what doesn’t.
This data-driven approach allows you to refine your strategy, adapt to changing audience needs, and continually improve your content’s effectiveness.
Get Started with Your Editorial Calendar
Creating an editorial calendar doesn’t have to be complicated.
- Start by outlining your foundation’s key goals for the upcoming quarter or year.
- From there, brainstorm content ideas that align with these goals.
- Consider your audience’s needs, the best channels for reaching them, and the optimal timing for each piece.
Fancy tools like Trello and Asana are good to work up to but if you don’t have the budget or you’re just starting out, we recommend Google Sheets. It’s free and they have new project management templates that make it incredibly easy to start.
Should Your Community Foundation Participate in GivingTuesday?
Two months from now, community foundations and nonprofits will send out a slew of emails urging donors to give what they can on GivingTuesday.
Some campaigns will be sophisticated and include multiple partners. Others will be more of a one-off message to drum up contributions.
Regardless of the type of GivingTuesday campaign, chances are those organizations started thinking about their campaigns right around now.
A successful GivingTuesday campaign starts in September, or earlier.
GivingTuesday, the widely recognized global day of giving, presents a unique opportunity for community foundations to engage donors and support their communities.
Yet deciding whether to participate and how to participate is a big question. And it’s one that depends a lot on the size of your community foundation and your annual fundraising goals.
First things first – the planning.
Starting at least two months in advance allows ample opportunity to develop a comprehensive strategy, create compelling content, and build anticipation among your donor base.
Starting early also provides a buffer for unexpected challenges and allows for thoughtful collaboration with community partners.
But before you get the development and communications teams together to start planning, you first need to decide what you want to get out of GivingTuesday. These are conversations that will inevitably generate a lot of opinions.
We’ve been in rooms where everyone wants to go hard into GivingTuesday and we’ve been in rooms where community foundation leaders prefer to take a backseat and let local nonprofits shine on GivingTuesday.
A lot depends on where you are and what you want to fundraise for.
So you should first ask yourself which category your organization fits into – should you fundraise for your own organization, spotlight local nonprofits, or pursue a combination of both?
While there is a lot of nuance that goes into the decision, one quick way to answer this is to gauge the size of your community foundation.
Smaller foundations may find much more value and reason to participate in GivingTuesday. Whereas larger community foundations have a larger infrastructure and the contributions that come in from GivingTuesday will be so much smaller than other annual giving channels that there is not a huge benefit to building a campaign for just a few hundred or thousand dollars in gifts.
Community foundations often use their position in the community to uplift their brand and the mission of others.
For example, a hybrid approach to GivingTuesday might involve creating a community fund that supports multiple nonprofits, with your foundation acting as the administrator. Whatever you decide, ensure that your strategy aligns with your long-term goals and resonates with your donor base.
Build a timeline.
And remember, engagement is key. Here’s a good timeline to model:
- Begin building anticipation approximately six to eight weeks before the event with subtle hints on social media and in your newsletters.
- As you move closer to GivingTuesday, gradually increase the frequency and intensity of your communications.
- Once you are about one month out, launch your campaign page and initiate email outreach to your donors. This is an excellent time to share stories of impact and explain how donations will be used.
- Two weeks before the event, ramp up your social media presence and send reminder emails.
- In the final week, consider daily countdown posts and a final push in your communications.
When appropriate, loop in the stories and messages of your nonprofit partners and those individuals who benefit from donors’ generosity.
Engagement isn’t solely about soliciting donations. It’s about creating a narrative that resonates with your donors and makes them feel integral to your foundation’s mission.
What’s your plan?
So what are your GivingTuesday plans?
We’d love to hear what you have planned and we are always here to answer questions about whether or not your organization should participate.
Stay tuned as well for more year-end giving strategies and tips.