There's no getting around it: To encourage people to support your organization financially, you’re going to have to share stories that show what you do, how you do it, and the impact of your work.
While you may do excellent work in your community, unless you find a way to share your story, it’s going to be difficult to generate revenue through cash donations or grants.
While you could rely on your social media posts to share details about your organization, most social media platforms are designed for short posts of just a line or two.
Social media venues such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are better at advertising your story than telling it. For telling your story, a website is the platform of choice.
Your website does not have to be complicated. For example, you could create a one-page website where you post your organization’s contact information, mission statement, links to your social media accounts, and descriptions of your services or program areas and not much else.
However, if you want to use your website to retain existing donors and attract new ones, a one-page site is not going to be enough. To educate potential donors about your work and keep current donors interested, you need to share compelling stories about how your organization is making an impact.
A blog is ideal for this kind of storytelling.
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Three Reasons Why You Should Start a Blog
In addition to being a good choice for storytelling, there are three reasons why we encourage you to add a blog to your website:
Documenting your accomplishments: You know you are doing good work, and maybe members of your immediate community know it too, but what about the larger community? A blog gives you the room to describe what your organization does, what it has achieved, and the obstacles it has (and has yet) to overcome. Through blog posts, you can show what you are doing through photographs and tell a story through words. Sharing details of your accomplishments can build support for your work in a way that simply posting numbers of "beneficiaries served” on social media accounts cannot.
Building connections: Through a blog post, you have room to tell the full story of how you work, including how you collaborate with others to implement your projects. A blog post that talks about your existing partnerships is a great way to showcase the contributions of your partners and support that relationship. It can also be a way to attract and build connections with new partners. If you simply want to share the names of your partners, that's a Tweet. If you want to share the details of how you collaborate and what those collaborations have achieved, that is perfect material for a blog post.
Generating content: If you’re active on social media, you know it can take a lot of work to generate content. A blog can help you address the content issue by giving you things to share on Twitter, Facebook, and other social outlets. For example, when you first publish a blog post, you can advertise it through a Facebook post; you can repost this Facebook post again later (perhaps much later); and then finally, later still, you can create a Facebook post about an aspect of the story and directs readers to the blog for the full story. In this way, a blog becomes a central part of your communications pipeline. You can generate the content initially through your blog, but then repurpose it for other mediums.
What Should You Blog About?
Topics for your blog could range from posts about project events and milestones to commentary about local, national, or global issues and their effects on your community and the people you serve.
Other potential blog post topics could include:
Because your blog lives on your website, you have complete control over it. You can post a one-paragraph blog post one day and a long post equivalent to a three-page document the next. You can even create a series where you explore a single topic through posts published over several days or weeks, allowing you to explore a complex issue in manageable chunks.