So what's you Story?

(Published in Raisor's Ask - South Asia's Fundraising Magazine in October 2008)

Everybody loves a good story. It is perhaps the oldest of our art forms, the first human expression. Even before we learnt to read or write we were telling stories. In front of our bonfires, on the walls of our caves, through our songs and dances we were narrating stories of wars won, loves lost, new horizons explored – tales of the far and near. And like it was then, it still is now. We sit in front of the screen in a movie hall, or the stage in an auditorium or in front of the pages of a book, wide eyed and hungry, our hearts wrapped up in the sagas being told, journeying thousands of miles in our minds, living the legends ourselves. Our lives become one with those in the story. We laugh and we cry, we get angry and we seek revenge, and we see ourselves and find meanings for our own lives through living the stories that we experience. Such is the power of a good story.

However, when we believe in a cause and work for it and need to raise support for it - be it funds or volunteers - we somehow forget all about the strength of stories. We go ready with our presentations and pitches, with our vision and mission well articulated, our annual report and five year plans, with graphs and figures and various parameters of impact assessment. We aim to floor the potential donor with arguments for the absolute necessity of our cause, with how many schools we have built, or how many more health units need to be put in place – dry facts completely devoid of emotion – and wonder why we have failed to get our point across.

In my many years of work in fundraising, I have realized that people respond to people. They respond to the human condition. They respond to the difference our work has made to people - even a single street child or an abused woman or a poor cancer patient. They respond to stories.

Once I had gone to potential donor ready to overwhelm him with the staggering number of grants IFA has supported and I found him cold. But when I told him how a grant had enabled sufi musicians from Punjab to record and sell their music in the village melas and how that had changed their lives, I found him smiling. A similar incident happened with a corporate in Hyderabad. I had gone to ask them for funds to support a project that would document traditional designs of weavers in Andhra Pradesh. I met the senior leadership team and took them through the presentation I had prepared. They all nodded in agreement that the work we were trying to do was good, but still, there was no excitement in the room. A colleague of mine started talking about the people we were supporting, which communities they came from, what were their challenges etc. Suddenly one of the senior managers said, “Hey, that’s the community our factory workers mostly come from!” And in that instant the people we were supporting had faces, had names, were real and familiar for the team evaluating us. We got the funding.

In my various meeting I have seen people warm up to and listen to stories - stories that capture lives, stories that tell the tales of courage and inspiration, of struggle and strife, of success and failure. I have seen them respond to emotions more than any cognitive articulation of strategic interventions. People, end of the day, want to help others and to see how that has transformed lives. That is the story they want to hear from us.

It is tough to find those stories in the documentation and reports we do in our sector. Tough to find them in our offices where the essence of our work often gets suffocated in the dailyness of our business. We need to find them in the field. We need to look for these stories by engaging with the lives of the communities we support, the people who make our work meaningful. We need to go back to them and find these stories – stories of survival, stories of blossoming, stories of re-imagination. And if we can find even one story that moves us deeply in our hearts and makes us feel that just because of this one story our organization and our work is worth it – this is the story that we must retell to people who we ask for support and funding. This is the story that will make them feel the way we do about our work and some day soon they may even support us.