Nonprofits Telling Awesome Stories: charity: water (Part 1)

Woman drinking pumped water.

A woman drinking water from a charity: water well in the Tigray region of Northern Ethiopia. (Photo credit: Sacca)

I scroll through nonprofit websites and Facebook pages quite a bit hunting for stories that immediately grab and keep my attention. (Again, when I use the word story, I’m talk­ing about a true tale, nonfiction). I don’t usually find too many. Some are ok. But many are full of links to donation pages or press releases poorly written. Others don’t tell enough of a story and link nowhere. But a few are amazing.

Despite this, I strongly believe organizations have countless stories about the people they serve. They just have to dig them out (more on how to do that in previous posts). As I’ve said before, it can be difficult, and it’s time consuming.

The next series of posts focuses on nonprofits that are telling some amazing stories online. A few of the stories are older but good stories are timeless. This list is not exhaustive; please let me know if there are some great nonprofits stories I have missed.

Short Fundraising Posts on Facebook

So many people have written about charity: water as a model nonprofit in terms of online outreach that I hesitated to write about it again. But many of these posts are about its fundraising, which it does well. I’ll point out a couple of storytelling, fundraising posts that I liked, then I’ll move into some longer pieces.

Simple, yet impactful, here are a couple of posts from its Facebook page last year.

“Students of Balkumari School in Nepal used to get their water from a tiny stream 20 minutes away. When it dried up, the school was forced to close. But now that they have a tap station with clean water, there are no interruptions, and these kids get to spend a lot more time in the classroom. When you give clean water, one of the things you really give is education. http://www.charitywater.org/

It’s a very short story, but you know from the first sentence that this nonprofit gets to know the people they are serving. Somebody on staff found out the stream is 20 minutes away. There isn’t room to expand, but for a fundraising story it doesn’t need to. It links to its website, and includes a fabulous photo.

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