If you’re like me, you’ve learned a lot from the Paris Olympics: It turns out the world’s elite athletes don’t like sleeping on cardboard beds; $1.5 billion can clean a river, as long as it doesn’t rain two days before you want to swim in it; and it is possible to recover from the twisties.
But for all the lessons we can learn from the successes and failures of the host country, the International Olympic Committee and the athletes themselves, I believe the greatest lessons we nonprofit professionals can learn are from NBC’s extraordinary work in covering the games — a broadcast 64 years in the making.
From NBC's Olympics homepage. Screenshot/nbc.com
In 1960, ABC won the rights to broadcast college football, a sport with exceptionally low ratings. Producer Roone Arledge had a vision that would revitalize the college football market and ultimately forever change how sports are broadcast. He believed that in addition to adding new on-screen graphics and better camera angles, the way to make the audience truly care about the sport was to provide them with context — to humanize the players and form a connection between the viewers and the schools themselves. In other words, he wanted to tell stories.
This week, those who watched NBC’s prime-time coverage of the Olympic games not only saw the world’s greatest athletes compete, but 64 years after ABC pioneered the practice, we also learned their stories. I had never heard of Rebeca Andrade, a gymnast for Brazil, but after listening to NBC tell her story — that as a little girl she had to walk two hours each day to attend practices while her mother cleaned houses to barely support her seven siblings — I was genuinely excited to see her win the silver in the individual All-Around.
The use of stories is nothing new to marketing or fundraising, whether it be in sports or nonprofit work. We’ve all seen late-night commercials telling the story of a starving child that we can help with just a few cents per day. Jewish federations across the country use the stories of their community members to encourage participation and contributions. Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger created an entire virtual museum to tell the story of hunger throughout history.
The challenge that many of us face, especially those of us without full marketing teams, is in using storytelling properly. Let’s take a look at some of the things that NBC is doing right, and how we can apply those principles to our nonprofit work.
Stories humanize our purpose
When trying to make our case for supporting the work we do, we have a tendency to express the need and our impact in large numbers: There are millions in need of housing. We raised $2 million toward our mission. Our network supports more than 1,500 teachers. The problem is that abstractions can be difficult to digest and often go in one ear and out the other.
In contrast, NBC rarely uses large figures or generalities. The only time I’ve heard them mention the total number of American athletes was during the opening ceremonies when all of the participants stood together. NBC’s approach on their website mimics that of their broadcast — with just a few stats and scores, the homepage is filled with photos of individual athletes and their stories, as well as Hollywood celebrities and retired athletes attending the games.
In every newsletter at Hebrew at the Center, where I am the director of marketing and communications, we opt to tell the stories of the teachers, students and schools that we support rather than share facts and figures. By learning about the solitary Hebrew teacher at a small suburban school who benefits from access to our community of practice because she has no other Hebrew teachers to turn to where she works, our supporters quickly understand the need for our work and the importance of their support.
Take action: In your next annual report or fundraising email, remove a few of the graphs and figures and focus on humanizing the need with pictures and stories.
Stories direct attention to where it belongs
If I had to characterize the Olympics in two words, they would be “information overload.” Each day, my DVR fills with more hours of live sports than I would be able to watch in a month (as I write this sentence, there are 15 concurrent live events). At the end of the first week, just as I was beginning to get a handle on gymnastics and swimming, they awarded the final medals in those sports — and track and field, rhythmic gymnastics and trampoline began. Not only do the stories that NBC spotlights help me connect with the sports and athletes, but they help me focus on one thing at a time.
Having worked at synagogues, schools and advocacy organizations, I know what it’s like to have to promote a dozen different programs at once. Everything is equally deserving of the attention of our community, but if we try to focus on everything at once then we focus on nothing. By telling a single story at a time, however, we have the ability to direct attention to the greatest and most urgent need.
Take Action: On your website, be sure that you have one picture and story “above the fold” (just like the main headline of a printed newspaper, this is the first thing your visitors see before scrolling) and move less critical information below it. By helping your supporters focus more deeply on a single topic, they will become better engaged.
Stories make us feel like anything is possible
I’m a slightly overweight 44-year-old, but I’m pretty sure that if Suni Lee can be sidelined by kidney disease and six months later go on to win two gymnastics medals, I have no reason not to consider myself an Olympic hopeful for the 2028 games. That’s the power of the humanizing story: it allows us all to suffer through challenges and revel in victories. Most importantly, it gives us the aspiration to someday accomplish a feat equal to that of our heroes.
While I was creative director at Temple Aliyah (now HaMakom), we rebuilt our annual campaign from the ground up. Whereas the previous campaign focused on the synagogue’s financial need, the new campaign, which we named “MY Aliyah,” encouraged our members to take ownership of our community and connect it to their individual stories. Using aspirational language, we invited them to “be the philanthropist you’ve always wanted to be,” and offered naming opportunities to donors at levels as low as $180 in an effort for them to feel what was previously reserved for those who gave much more. The following year, we doubled down on the power of story by designing our High Holy Day tickets with a spot for attendees to write their favorite Temple Aliyah memory. When they took out their ticket during the Yom Kippur appeal, they were reminded of the spot that our synagogue held in their hearts, the power they had to make a difference, and why it was so important to be the reason it continues to exist in the future.
Take Action: As you prepare for this year’s annual campaign, utilize stories to serve two purposes: help supporters understand what you do, and help them see how their support can impact your shared story.
Be sure you’re telling the right stories
The Washington Post recently reported that 34 million people watched the first week of NBC’s prime-time Olympic coverage this year. NBC uses a combination of viewership data, audience demographics, social media trends and historical popularity, in addition to assorted other metrics, to determine what to focus on. (If it was up to me, I’d make trampoline the centerpiece of every prime-time broadcast, but it’s unlikely they would have 34 million people watching if that was the case so it’s a good thing it’s not up to me.)
I’m currently building “The Sulam for Imagineers,” a six-month program for United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism that is based on the lessons in my book, The Nonprofit Imagineers. We’re putting creativity at the forefront as we explore the challenges our synagogues are currently facing and come up with truly creative solutions. In order to know which ideas to focus on, one of the first things each synagogue team will do is spend time understanding the stories of their individual community members.
Since the “if you build it they will come” approach isn’t working for many synagogues, we need to better understand how synagogue fits into the stories of our members’ lives, rather than how members fit into our synagogue’s story. Ultimately, once we know the right stories to focus on, we will better understand how the changes we decide to make will impact each of those individual stories.
Take Action: Ask questions. Don’t just talk to your board and diehards: Talk to the $18 supporters, the volunteers that you see once a year and former members. Find out what stories they want to be a part of and how you can better fit their stories.
Go for the gold
If there’s one thing I learned from Simone Biles, Team USA’s “greatest of all-time” gymnast, it’s that you don’t win gold by being flawless on every apparatus or nailing every landing. It’s by aiming so high that even without perfection you still come out ahead.
There are countless lessons to be learned from the Olympics and more ideas for improvement than any one of us has time to implement, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. We should be aiming for more than we can achieve, so that even if we come up short, we can still look back in astonishment at all that we have accomplished. And when we somehow meet that goal, we have the courage to move the target even farther.
Ultimately, whether we’re trying to increase donations, build our membership or tell better stories, our ability to accomplish our goals and those of our organizations isn’t about perfection — it’s about progress. “Winning doesn’t always mean being first,” Bonnie Blair, American speed skater and five-time gold medalist, once said. “Winning means you’re doing better than you’ve ever done before.”
The Olympics are about stories, and so are our organizations. Our stories connect us, empower us and remind us that together, we can achieve greatness.
Ben Vorspan is the author of The Nonprofit Imagineers and director of marketing and communications at Hebrew at the Center. He also has a great story about the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Olympics for anyone who emails him and asks.
