Podcast: Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins: Graeme Watt on Strategic Storytelling for Fundraising Success
Season 5, Episode 1
In this episode, Andrea Kihlstedt sits down with Graeme Watt, co-owner of Anthem Creative, to explore how nonprofit leaders can sharpen their storytelling to strengthen donor engagement and drive campaign results.
Whether you’re deep into a campaign or just starting to explore how storytelling fits into your fundraising strategy, this episode offers thoughtful insight, practical steps, and inspiring encouragement to help you turn your stories into tools for impact.
Listen Now:
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Want to hear a good story? Of course you do. All of us are drawn to good stories, and that’s what today’s podcast is all about.
I am Andrea Kihlstedt, Co-Founder of Capital Campaign Pro. My wonderful partner and sidekick, Amy Eisenstein, isn’t with me today, I’m sad. But instead, I’m talking to Graeme Watt, a person who understands the essence of capturing and telling nonprofit stories better than most of us. Don’t worry, Amy will be back next week.
Meet Graeme Watt, a Master Storyteller
And now with a fanfare, welcome to Graeme. Graeme is the co-owner of Anthem Creative, a creative studio full of art. Graeme, tell us about yourself.
Graeme Watt:
Thank you so much, Andrea, just thrilled to be here. I know I’ve got big shoes to fill, but I will do my best to keep things entertaining and free-flowing quickly. Yeah, I’m like you said, one of the co-owners of Anthem Creative, and my background started really with nonprofit when I was 26. So I’ll give you the quick history and background, but I was working with a group of teenagers here in Edmonton, Alberta, where I live up in Canada, and had created an eight-week long experiment with a group of 12 to 15-year-olds that turned into something way beyond what I had ever envisioned that it could become.
And so at 26 years old, I found myself quitting my job and starting a nonprofit from my living room with a laptop. And so, that was my first entry point. I knew nothing. I remember Googling the words, “How to start a nonprofit in Canada.” And so, going through that whole process of building a board and learning how to fundraise and developing a team.
So I spent the next seven years failing forward and building a grassroots national organization that was focused on youth empowerment. And so by the end there, we had about 15,000 students raising hundreds of thousands of dollars that we were then partnering with organizations all over the world through that organization. And that was so much fun, it was trial by fire, it was me learning a lot of ways to not do things the proper way and then also discovering my superpowers and skillset. That’s really for me, where I learned the power of digital storytelling.
So this was in early days of Facebook, and that’s where all of the kids were hanging out. And so as we were reaching young people all over North America, that became our primary method. So I learned the impact, the power of good branding and storytelling and using social media and digital platforms to do that.
The work that we were doing with this little organization caught the attention of World Vision, and so we ended up kind of merging and transplanting what we were doing. So one of my fundraising mentors, he calls it going from the Zodiac to the aircraft carrier. And so I went from a small, nimble team of seven staff working with students in a grassroots kind of way, to one of the largest organizations on the planet. And so I got to see both ends of the spectrum.
Lessons in Storytelling
And then because of my creative storytelling gift and skillset, after a couple of years at World Vision, I kind of got dragged kicking and screaming into the branding and marketing side of the organization, and I had identified a real challenge. When I got to the field with World Vision and saw the work that they were doing on the ground in the communities where they were serving families. And then I saw how those stories were translating through the marketing engine and machine to the public, there was a real disconnect.
And I also saw an organization that was incredibly well-resourced, has all the internal teams and budgets to hire consultants and agencies and all of that, really struggling to figure out how to tell its story in a digital world.
And so my brother, who started Anthem Creative, he also had his own 10-year journey of being a director of a nonprofit organization. And he and I just put our heads together and decided, what would it look like for us to create an agency that served the nonprofit sector? And that ultimately at its core, helps nonprofit organizations navigate the digital revolution and figure out how to tell their story in a digital first world.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Well, you sound like just the guy we need to be talking to, because in my experience, and we at Capital Campaign Pro work with and talk to hundreds of organizations. I mean, literally hundreds of organizations, small and large. I’ll bet I could count on one hand the organization that really has done a great job in being able to coalesce and tell their stories, to pick the right stories, to communicate them in a way that is crisp and compelling.
I mean, it turns out to be an important and particularly difficult skill to tell stories well. I admire people who can do it, and I think all of our clients and the people listening to this podcast who are heading into capital campaign, is interested in capital campaigns, they for sure need to know about how to capture and tell the stories of their organization.
The Role of Storytelling in Fundraising
Now, what do you think the role of storytelling is more generally in fundraising? How should organizations think about that?
Graeme Watt:
Yeah, I’ve had a mantra for many years that sometimes can rub people the wrong way, but I’ve fundamentally believed this from the very beginning. When I was 26 years old and knew nothing about nonprofits and how to fundraise and how to really do anything in that space, one thing I knew that I knew that I knew is that whoever tells the best story wins.
And the challenge that people have with that statement is the wins part, because it’s like, oh, we’re not competing. But at the end of the day, you’re competing for the attention of donors, you’re competing for the limited resources as well. And I think the way I think about storytelling when it comes to fundraising, is I think of storytelling as the life blood of your organization. For a fundraising organization, the stories that you tell serve as the reason why people engage and lean in.
My fundraising mentor and coach to this day, a beautiful gentleman named Tom, he always has drilled this into me. He said:
“Graeme, people don’t give to organizations, but they give through organizations to outcomes that they care about. And the way that you get them to care and align your values with theirs is through the stories that you tell.”
And so in a lot of ways, I think of stories as the containers that your mission are packed into. And stories do more than anything else and better than anything else, they capture and crystallize an organization’s mission, vision, and purpose into something that is tangible and has flesh and blood on it. And so, I see storytelling as being absolutely vital.
And time and time again, we see that the organizations that are most successful in their fundraising are the ones that do the best job of communicating their story in a way that connects with people. Not everybody, and that’s the other piece, right? You don’t want your stories to be necessarily for everyone. You want them to be for the right people. You want to be able to use your stories as a signal that say to someone, “Do you care about this? Because if so, we’re doing something, we are creating impacted this area, and if that matters to you, then let’s partner together to do that.”
The Right Story Your Organization Should be Telling
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. It’s so interesting, Graeme, you mentioned mission, vision. I am sure you have too, you’ve read a lot of those statements, a mission statement, a vision statement, a goal statement of right there on people’s websites.
And just about always when you read those statements, mission, vision, values, those are the statements that you read. And almost always, by the time you get to the end of them, much as they’re well-meaning, your eyes glaze over, right? They’re not very exciting. And the ability to translate those ideas into a story that makes your eyes light up, is I think the magic that you are talking about.
So, if you were advising an organization as you do all the time, how would you advise them in capturing stories and knowing what the right stories are that they should be telling?
Graeme Watt:
That’s a great question.
What’s an Anthem Story?
So, we call those anthem stories, and what an anthem story is at its core essence, is a story that captures all the dynamics and breadth and beauty of your organization’s core, mandate, purpose, and mission. And so you talk about the mission statement on the website or printed big on the wall that everybody walks past, but nobody can recite or remember.
When I was running my organization, when people would say, “Oh, what is it about? What do you do?” I would not give them our mission or our purpose statement or our vision statement. I would tell them about Caleb, and I knew that that one story did a better job of capturing the essence and the heartbeat of what we do for somebody to make them go:
“Oh, I understand it. Oh, that’s interesting. Oh, I care about it. I would like to learn more.”
And so I think those anthem stories are absolutely essential, and the value of those stories to an organization are hard to overstate. And so I think that’s one of the things that we always encourage our clients to do, is to figure out for your particular organization, in your context, in the work that you do, what are your anthem stories? And even if you’re listening right now, I bet you if we pause and give you just 90 seconds to close your eyes and ask yourself that question, what are our anthem stories?
- What are the stories that we tell when you’ve got two minutes with an individual in an elevator to tell them about your organization?
- What’s the best story that you could tell?
Those are the anthem stories.
Find the Common Threads
I think then what I would encourage you to do is to take those few anthem stories and to figure out, what are the common threads? What are the characteristics of those stories that make them so impactful, that make them so useful to the organization and communicating the work that you do? And then build a checklist, identify, what are the characteristics of an anthem story for your particular organization? So, that’s really the first part is, what are the anthem stories? What are the characteristics of those stories?
The second piece then is, how do we find more of them? Because that’s the thing with storytelling. You kind of have to continue to feed the machine. You have to continue to tell stories of impact year over year, especially when it comes to nurturing existing donors and continuing to invite them into the mission and continuing to ask them to give more. Because if you’re just recycling the same stories, they start to ask, “Are we making any progress? Are we continuing to deepen our impact?”
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Before you go into the second piece, is an anthem story always about an individual?
Graeme Watt:
It depends entirely on the context of the organization. However, and this has been really well documented, the Soto principle, the story of the one, that a story about a single individual tends to connect much better on a personal level.
And so that tends to be what we see as an anthem story, is kind of, tell me the story of the one person that has been deeply impacted by your organization’s work. What has been their journey and their transformation and their triumph? And that is representative of the whole. That tends to be a much more engaging entry point than, oh 660 million people around the world lack access to clean water.
When you start to tell those stories with those types of numbers, they can be helpful in supporting that narrative, but it’s more difficult for people to wrap their heads around them and ultimately to care, because if the problem seems like it’s insurmountable, then it’s like, well, I’m not going to really be able to make a dent in that with my giving, with my generosity.
But when you start telling the story of the individual… And so, I’ve got lots of examples of stories like this that really create an emotional connection. And it’s usually the story of a community or a small group of people or a family or one individual.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Thank you. Okay, now, now go on. Okay, yeah.
Build a Story Identification Strategy
Graeme Watt:
The second piece. So once you know this is what an anthem story looks like for our organization, and these are all of the characteristics, and you’re building a bit of a caricature of what that story looks like, then how do you go find more of them?
And so now, depending on the size of the organization and the nature of the organization, this will differ, but we are constantly encouraging our clients to build a story identification strategy. And so what that means is identifying, what are the hallmarks of a great story, and then going to the front lines where the stories happen.
And so for an organization like World Vision, for example, their stories happen in 98 countries around the world in small rural communities for the most part. And so then the challenge becomes, how do you identify those stories? How do you capture those stories? And how do you surface them and float them to the marketing team or the individuals that are going to then tell those stories, package them for a fundraising context and distribute them to your existing donors and the general public in order to do donor acquisition with them?
So, that story identification piece is often something that we find is misunderstood or just overlooked entirely. And so when we ask that question, what’s your story identification strategy? We often kind of get blank stares.
And so, that’s really the piece where it really comes down to those front-line staff, because a lot of times you’ll have people that maybe they’re in a clinical environment and so they’re now doing trauma counseling with victims of domestic violence. Their specialty, their expertise, their focus, and what they’re doing is on serving the person in front of them. They’re not necessarily thinking about fundraising or marketing and communications. And so this becomes a training opportunity as well. So it means going to the front lines, the people that are working directly hands-on with beneficiaries, and training them on what makes a great story.
Generating Excitement Through an Anthem Story
The other piece is convincing them of the importance and the value of stories to the thriving of the organization, helping them to feel as though they’re playing a part in the fundraising ecosystem of the organization as well, and then getting them excited about that.
And then training them on how to identify a great story, how to then treat that story, what to do with it once they have it. And so, this is about creating formal, even sometimes having software tools where people can log stories and where they can identify them so that then the marketing team can follow up with those as well.
But you can put more structure around this, depending on the size and complexity of the organization, but if you’re a mid-sized organization that doesn’t have a lot of front-line staff, it can be a little bit more direct connectivity where maybe there’s a meeting on a monthly basis between the marketing team and some of the front-line staff to say, “Okay, what stories have you heard this month? Who’s got a great anthem story?” And then those can get surfaced to the marketing team, they can follow up and do that work.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
It’s interesting to think about stories. With Capital Campaign Pro, Amy and I work with, I don’t know, well over 100 organizations in any given year, right? A lot of organizations, and there’s a wide range in terms of where they are in the campaign process. Some are always finishing campaigns and are celebrating campaigns, some are beginning campaigns. And we in principle are always happy to be finding stories of the successful campaigns to be celebrating, right? There’s nothing like hearing about the little engine that could, and that happens of course, in organizations.
And even with for us, and we know the power of telling stories, we know that we should be doing that, I find that it’s hard for us to be disciplined enough to actually focus in on, okay, who do we communicate with? How do we capture the story? How do we tell the story? How do we get people to be willing to have pictures taken of them? Turns out, even in our business, it’s not so easy to get people to do that.
We do it, we have to be pushed to do it. Once we’ve done it, we’re happy we’ve done it, but it’s peculiarly hard to draw out stories even when the stories are of great successes. Why do you think that is?
Graeme Watt:
I think there’s a lot of organizations that, and we struggle with this too, as an agency. The irony is that we don’t do a lot of this ourselves. We’re terrible at celebrating the impact and the results of our clients. And I think some of that comes from a sense of whether it’s humility or not, wanting to sort of toot your own horn and feeling a little bit strange and icky about that.
We have a much easier time coming into an organization, helping them identify the right stories, building a whole narrative around it, and launching a campaign that has great impact and raises millions. We love doing that. We struggle to tell our own story. I think some of that just comes from insecurity. It comes from a sense of, are we doing it right? Are we going to look silly? Is this the right story? What if it flops? What if we put it out there and it doesn’t resonate? And what if it doesn’t perform? What if we don’t see the results?
And there can often be a bit of a hangup too, and we’ll get to this later in the conversation when we start talking about AI, but the investment required of time and energy and resources to tell a story. And what if we don’t get the return on that? And we’ve just put a lot of energy into it. And so there can be some hangups and challenges with that.
But I think this comes down to a bit of a culture and a values thing. And so we spend time with leadership teams, helping them to really embrace storytelling, understand the vital role that it plays, and building a storytelling strategy into the organization to recognize that if you really want to be successful… And look, let’s face it, inboxes are crowded and social media is noisier than ever.
And with AI generated content coming, there’s just going to be this flood of volume of content that’s hitting us in every way in every channel. And so I think it’s more important than ever that organizations figure out how to really stand out in this kind of crowded, noisy environment. And the best way to do that is by getting really, really good at storytelling.
Ways to Tell Your Anthem Stories
Andrea Kihlstedt:
So okay, let’s jump forward and say, all right, a particular organization has actually captured one or two or three anthem stories that really work, that make people wake up, that people want to hear, want to listen to. And there are many ways they can use those stories.
And in the capital campaign context, which is of course our context, one of the ways to do that is for every major gifts officer, every board member, every executive director to be well versed in actually telling those stories face-to-face, person to person, right? Not creating a slick video about it, but actually having everybody be, here’s the story about, you gave the name of a person, of a boy or somebody that you’ve told —
Graeme Watt:
Caleb, yeah.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Caleb, right. Here’s our Caleb story. We should all be ready to tell this when we go talk to donors or when we… So that for me is the epitome of how best to use a story in the context of capital campaign fundraising. Right? But that’s only one of a great many ways to use a story.
What do you work with your clients to do, in terms of ways of telling stories?
Graeme Watt:
So that’s a loaded question, but I think one of the easy responses is, we recognize that a great story is worth its weight in gold, but also the opportunity to capture one story and tell it in a multitude of ways across a number of different channels, just from an efficiency and stewardship perspective is really important.
So when we land on one great story, it’s, how do we maximize this? How do we create evergreen content with that story so that the story doesn’t have a six month shelf life or it’s not just going to be, and this is one of the things that I see is Giving Tuesday, for example, is a one day moment in time. And so, if you put a lot of energy into telling a story that is just for Giving Tuesday without the ability to repurpose that as an evergreen asset that’s going to serve the organization for three, four, five years, then that’s not very efficient from a resource perspective.
But I think, so in the context of capital campaigns, and this is why for our team, I think capital campaigns are one of our favorite things to engage with from a storytelling perspective, because I see a capital campaign as being a story in and of itself. I think when we first connected, Andrea, I told the story of an executive director of a camp that came to me and he said:
“Hey, I’ve got to raise 600,000 for a septic field at the camp, and I don’t know how to do that. It’s not something that my donors are going to get excited about. And yeah, there’s a couple people who I could knock on their door and say, ‘Hey, need you to do me a favor. We need to fix the septic system.'”
But he’s like, “What’s the right approach here to doing that? There’s obviously urgency and we have to get this sorted out in a short amount of time.”
And so we then just said, “Great, we’ll wrap the whole thing in story. What’s the story that we’re telling?” And a lot of times what we’re encouraging our clients to do is to ask the question, what’s the deeper story? What’s the bigger story? And I think when it comes to capital campaigns, we think in terms of macro stories, and then within that, the micro stories.
Capital Campaign Storytelling
So the macro story, there’s a very clear formula that we use for capital campaign storytelling, and typically it’s a past present, future narrative format, where we go, what is the history of the organization?
- What has the organization accomplished over the number of years that it’s been in existence? And what is the current moment that the organization finds itself in?
- What is that moment of crisis or opportunity that is necessitating this capital campaign?
- And then what is the future reality and the future impact and the future outcomes that that campaign will make possible that don’t exist yet today?
And so, the easy example of that is this camp where he said, “We need to raise a bunch of money for a septic field.” What we came back with and said, “Okay. Well, what else is going on within the organization? What are you dreaming about? What are you thinking about? What could it look like to take that capital campaign idea and not just use it for a septic field, but something broader to tell a bigger, bolder story? And he said:
“Well, our 100th anniversary is coming up in three years, and I’ve been really pounding the drum of sustainability with our board and with our donors, and I want to make the camp 100% sustainable without needing donor dollars so that those donor dollars can be used for expansion and growth.”
And so we said, “Okay, great, but what’s that going to look like?” So we actually built a whole campaign of the $2.8 million campaign, so relatively small, but the septic field was one line item in the campaign.
And then we told this 100-year story, and so the campaign was called The Road to 100, and it was about reflecting on the last 100 years, communicating the opportunity in the current moment. And how this campaign is going to set up the organization for the next 100. And so that’s a huge piece of what I see with capital campaigns is telling this macro story, but then within it, there are all these micro stories of the individuals, the campers that have been impacted, the families whose lives were transformed by that place.
And then there’s also just finding your villains in the story too. And so, one of the threads that we drew on for that campaign in particular is this idea that as the world is getting noisier and more digital and kids are more distracted and connected to the devices, these places, these camps, they are going to need to be more important in the future. And we called it an oasis in a digital jungle. And so, it’s pulling on that big kind of macro thread and this enemy of technology that we’re all fighting against. And seeing kids having a safe place where they can come for the next 100 years is going to be more important than ever, and that campaign was wildly successful.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Graeme, I’m glad you brought up that particular story, that the anniversary campaign is a funny issue for us because with some frequency, organizations come to us and say:
“We are going to be 50 years old and we want to raise $50 million for 50 years.”
Now that’s problematic for us, right?
I mean, what’s problematic is that $50 million does not correlate to 50 years. Right? Nobody really cares how many, I mean, it’s backwards thinking. But what you’ve done with your story is exactly what one should do with a big anniversary, which is to look back and to look forward. And the fundraising happens when you look forward. It doesn’t happen because of the 100-year or the 50th year anniversary. It happens because of the vision that you at this moment in the life of the organization are having an opportunity to reimagine for the next 50 years or the next 100 years. Right?
So it’s a hard to get people off the anniversary itself, and it’s just we hear it again and again and again, right? We’re 25 years, $25 million, right? It’s like, oh no.
Graeme Watt:
And that’s what I mean, I think, Andrea, when I say what’s the deeper story. Okay, you’ve been around for 50 years, so what? Does that just mean that you’ve been ineffective in accomplishing your mission over 50 years?
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Exactly.
Graeme Watt:
So you actually bring up question marks, and this is where I think this idea of, we started this organization 50 years ago. You tell the founding story because we had this burning desire. There was this need that we were going to fill. That needs still exists today. In fact, it’s greater than ever and it’s more important than ever that we address it with greater energy and emphasis, and we’ve got new ways of tackling this. This is where we’re going over the next 50 years. We need you to come with us.
So that’s why I love capital campaigns too, it’s like, okay, what is the story that we’re wrapping the whole campaign in?
And I mean, you’re right. Often, boards and executive directors, they’re coming at a capital campaign going, well, our dining hall is falling apart and we need to replace it. It’s going to cost us $7 million to do. We got to run a capital campaign. So it’s often out of necessity and need, and they’re not thinking in terms of like, what’s the big, bold, beautiful story that we’re wrapping around it?
But that’s one of the things that we come into the mix and do is to say, okay, so when we work up front with the leadership team and potentially a board, we’re always starting with that story. What story are we telling? Because otherwise, if people don’t get excited about a septic field or a dining hall, if they don’t understand the why and how that connects to the broader purpose of the organization, then it’s going to be a really tough slog.
But if you can do something a little bit different, a little bit maybe provocative or outside of the ordinary for the organization. We’ve seen really great success in the last five years in particular with capital campaigns, where we’re pushing the boundaries of what the organization’s comfortable with. And like I mentioned earlier, when you’re competing against an endless feed of social media content and inboxes that are crowded, I think there’s an opportunity for your capital campaign to stand out. And by doing something a little bit maybe different, a little bit, even from what the organization is typically communicating, that also signals to your donors, oh, something different is happening, something new is going on.
So we’ve seen some of our clients take risks with their capital campaigns, particularly in the area of storytelling, and seen that pay off in really, really exciting ways. So that’s another one of my big soapbox moments of do something interesting. Give people a reason to stop and care and pay attention. And I don’t think there’s anything better than the capital campaign to do that.
Capital Campaign Fundraising is All About Energy
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah, sometimes I’ve spent my whole career, my whole very long career in capital campaign fundraising, and I think the reason I have among others is that it’s all about energy. That when a campaign works well, it is infused with energy and that lights everyone up and it gets people to give more generously and it gets people to tell stories more effectively.
And there’s a sense of sort of excitement that comes with this particular kind of fundraising role, kind of fundraising that is lacking in my experience anyway, with year in, year out fundraising. I don’t know how people do that year in, year out, my hat’s off to them. It’s not my cup of tea, so.
Graeme Watt:
Yeah, our team gets way more energized and excited even from our end as creative agency and partner for a capital campaign than a 12-month retainer on an annual giving kind of cycle because… And with that, it’s about, okay, what are the micro campaigns and moments within the 12 months? But you’re right, the opportunity to come on and say:
“Hey, we’re going to tell this one big bold story over the next three years that’s going to help raise significant amounts of money that will move the organization into a new chapter.”
There are a few things more exciting in our world.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Graeme, this has been terrific. I’m so happy to have a chance to talk to you about this important topic, we don’t talk about it enough.
AI’s Impact on Storytelling for Nonprofits
Before we finish. I think we need to talk just for a minute about AI, about what’s going to happen with AI, what it’s going to do, whether we are going to be able to tell stories more easily. I don’t know, what do you see coming down the road?
Graeme Watt:
Well, that’s again, a loaded question.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah, I’m sorry.
Graeme Watt:
I wish I had a crystal ball and I wish I could fast-forward. I am thinking really deeply about this and these are topics that I want to be engaging with and talking about more and more. I mean, we’re having internally as an agency, a bit of an existential crisis moment and saying, what is our role in an AI future? What do agencies like ours look like? And so we’re wrestling with that internally as a team.
I think when it comes to nonprofits in the sector, there’s a lot of things that I’m looking at and when it comes to a storytelling perspective and looking at it through that lens, I think there’s actually some really exciting days ahead.
Just in general, I think AI, the impact of it is going to be probably far greater than we recognize and maybe realize. I think it’s coming much faster than maybe a lot of people want to admit. And so, we started having internal conversations at an agency about a year ago, and we were talking about a three to five year timeline in terms of really needing to adapt and shift and embrace this. We’re now looking at it at more of a 12 to 18 month timeline. And so, that’s just one of the accelerated realities that we’re dealing with.
I think in general, it’s going to have a large impact on society, which means that there will be an increased need for nonprofit organizations to serve certain segments of the population. So depending on the nature and the type of organization, I think that there’s going to be an increased need and demand for organizations that are serving people who are losing their jobs because of AI, who are falling through the cracks. So, there’s that dynamic at work.
When it comes to storytelling though, we’ve been talking about this intensely because we have a film studio that does documentary filmmaking as well. And there is one thing that I’m very confident in, is that donors and audiences in general will have zero appetite for AI-generated content when it comes to a nonprofit organization’s storytelling, because the nature of a nonprofit organization’s work for the most part is so deeply human.
And so we keep talking about this, that I think the organizations that are going to win and the companies in a corporate environment that are going to win are going to be the ones who figure out how to use AI effectively to make themselves more efficient, but who actually are using the increased time, horsepower, and bandwidth and resources to become the most human that they can be.
So for us as an agency, we are doubling down on client experience. We’ve just promoted someone internally to become our director of client experience, which is really creating that human experience with our clients and making it delightful. I think for nonprofits, that human touch, people in an AI future are going to crave things that are real, that are authentic and that are human more than ever. And so I think when it comes to storytelling, yes, there will be the opportunity to tell more stories for cheaper because editing will be easier. There’s a lot of efficiencies that will be created. Visual advertising is going to get easier as well, you’ll basically just speak a prompt into your Meta ad platform and it will create dozens of variations for you and do all the A-B testing.
So there will be a lot of efficiencies, but I think organizations should be really thinking hard and doubling down on that human storytelling component. That’s why we’re going fully into the documentary space. We’re seeing great success even from a fundraising perspective, from our clients with long form documentary style content.
And so we’re talking, just to get really practical, that 18 to kind of 22, 23-minute long documentary style content and then hosting screening events using that content, doing virtual screenings. We’re seeing organizations have really good success with that. And I think there’s going to be an increased appetite for that. People are going to want that human story. When you scroll your feed on social media and 80% of it is AI generated and you can’t tell what’s real anymore, people are going to just go, oh, give me something that I can connect with that makes me feel something that’s genuine and authentic and real, and that’s where I think nonprofit storytelling as a real opportunity and the ones that are already doing it well, will get better using AI.
Being More Human in Storytelling
And this is what we’re wrestling with too is, how do we help our clients do a better job of telling their story, do it more effectively, more frequently, and more efficiently, and to be more human at the end of the day?
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah, I think that’s a terrific thing for us all to remember, that being more human, there is nothing like individual human contact and content and connection. And no matter how good we get at AI generation, that doing things another way, that will always be and increasingly be important. So thank you, thank you for that.
Graeme Watt:
Maybe one last note on that, because I think this is important. One of the things that AI, I don’t think will ever be able to replicate is real, genuine human emotion. And we often in the storytelling vein, are talking to our clients about, just make people feel something. I think that’s so often what the best stories, and video content is probably the best way to do that, but in a campaign video or a brand video, if you can make people feel joy and sadness and anger, all in a three-minute kind of window, that’s an incredibly powerful thing.
And I think at the end of the day, people want to be moved, they want to feel something. And so, I don’t know that AI is going to do a really good job of doing that. When you’ve got a human being on the screen with tears in their eyes telling their story, I just don’t know that AI is going to be able to take that away.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Future is going to be interesting, isn’t it? Graeme, thank you so much for being with us today, with me today to talk about this important topic.
Final Thoughts
Do you have one thing, if you wanted to leave our audience with one very practical thing they might do to begin to capture their anthem stories, what would it be?
Graeme Watt:
If you want the practical answer, I would say, spend the time, do the work, and invest in developing a story identification strategy. If that isn’t something that you have done, if you have not taken the time to ask the question, what are our anthem stories? What are the characteristics of them? And document those and then train all of your front line staff on how to identify them and what to do once they identify those. That is a really practical thing, it doesn’t take months and it doesn’t take a lot of resources to do that effectively. And so I would really encourage that to be the starting point.
And maybe a less practical and maybe more philosophical piece. I would really encourage the listeners to take risks with their storytelling, to be willing to do something that stands out. And that’s one of my biggest beefs and challenges with the nonprofit sector, is that there’s a tendency to play it safe, and that translates into storytelling that is boring, that is mundane, that nobody’s really going to get excited for.
And so we’ve seen this time and time again, be willing to take calculated risks with your content and with your storytelling. And if you do it right and you do it well, the payoff is often really significant.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Thank you so much. I so appreciate your being with us today. For those of you who are listening, if you want more information about Graeme’s company, you would go to Anthemcreative.ca, that’s for Canada, I believe, and he’s got a wonderful new website coming this week. This week is June, the end of June 2025. So, go take a look at it.
And for more information about capital campaigns, we at Capital Campaign Pro have a host of amazing free resources. If you go to capitalcampaignpro.com and look under the resources tab, there’s a whole collection of free resources, which people have told us that they don’t actually need our services because we offer so many free resources, which may or may not be a good idea for us, but it certainly is a good idea for you. So, help yourself to our free resources.
We of course would love to talk to you if you’re going to do a capital campaign, so feel free to give us a call too. So, thank you so much. It’s been a real treat to be with you, Graeme.
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