4 Tips for Capturing the Human Stories Behind Nonprofit Data

In the world of nonprofit work, numerical data is often seen as the gold standard for measuring success and demonstrating impact. This is because quantitative data communicates a more objective picture of how well your organization is delivering its mission and is easier to communicate and track over time.

However, numbers alone cannot fully convey the depth and breadth of your nonprofit’s work. To truly capture your impact and effectiveness, you must also highlight the human stories that bring your mission to life, whether your organization is faith-based or focused on environmental conservation. As you do this, you add context and color to your impact insights, making them more engaging and understandable on a human-to-human level.

But how can you gather the human stories behind your data? In this guide, we’ll walk through some actionable tips to help you get started. Let’s begin!

First, determine who you want to interview among your mission’s many stakeholders. Board members, donors, volunteers, beneficiaries, and community partners or sponsors may all come to mind. Begin whittling down your list of options by considering who:

• Can offer a diverse perspective: You’ll want to capture a range of stories that reflect the many different experiences your stakeholders have with your organization. Examine each stakeholder’s level of involvement, background, and demographics.

• Has had a transformative experience: Look for stakeholders whose lives have been significantly impacted by your work. For example, you might choose a beneficiary whose quality of life significantly increased because of your programs or a volunteer who found their life’s calling by working with your organization.

• Has a story that aligns with your current messaging and audience: At different times, your organization will have slightly different messaging and audience priorities. Look for individuals whose stories match up with those current goals and needs so that their input can support your marketing and communications efforts.

• Has a long history or relationship with your organization: Focus on those who have been giving to or working with your organization for long periods. These individuals’ stories will help to demonstrate the sustained impact of your work over time.

Note that as the context for your impact measurement efforts shifts and your organizational priorities change, you can tinker with your list. For example, a volunteer who has a great story about one of your programs might not be right for this round of story collection but may be a great asset down the road.

Interviews give you the chance to dig into your stakeholders’ stories and hear their experiences in their own words. To prepare for insightful conversations, choose a few open-ended questions that will help you give your interviewee a chance to reflect and provide detailed responses.

Here are a few examples of questions you could ask:

• What got you interested in being involved with our organization in the first place?
• What challenges were you facing before finding our nonprofit’s programs and services, and how were you able to overcome those challenges?
• Can you share a specific moment or experience that stands out to you as particularly meaningful during your time volunteering with us?
• What kinds of changes have you seen in yourself or the community as a result of our services?
• What have you learned from being involved in our organization that you would like to share with others?
• How do you see our organization making a difference in the future, and what role do you see yourself playing in that?
• What do you want other people to know about our work?

At the end of every interview, make sure you ask one final open-ended question: “Is there anything else you would like to share?” This gives your interviewee the opportunity to share anything that your questions haven’t yet covered, and may just help you uncover the best and most unexpected insights you can use to share your impact.

Capturing impact stories from your donors, volunteers, beneficiaries, board members, and other stakeholders can start to feel purely like a fact-finding mission. However, it’s important to look beyond the impact report you’re trying to put together or the marketing materials you’re trying to improve and think about the relationship between you and those you are interviewing.

When you start to view your interviews as a chance to touch base with people who are important to your organization, your conversations will change. Your interviewees will give more detailed insights and you’ll have an easier time genuinely conveying how much their story means to your nonprofit.

To help set the stage for authentic connections and conversations, employ active listening techniques. Here are a few proven strategies recommended by Verywell Mind:

• Be present in the conversation. Ensure you’re giving your full attention to the interviewee. This means avoiding distractions and quieting your internal dialogue in order to focus on the conversation at hand.

• Pay attention to non-verbal communication. Be observant of your interviewee’s body language to better understand what they’re thinking and feeling. Also, be mindful of your body language. Are you smiling as someone shares an exciting experience? Nodding thoughtfully as they express tough emotions?

• Reflect what you hear. Everyone needs reassurance that they’ve truly been heard and understood. At natural stopping points in your conversations, pause to paraphrase what you’ve heard so far and ask for clarification as needed.

While traditional nonprofit data collection focuses on monitoring performance metrics or calculating the return on investment (ROI) for specific initiatives, these opportunities to capture your stakeholders’ stories are a little different. Take the time to make it a special experience that will strengthen their relationship with your organization and cause.

Once you’ve interviewed multiple stakeholders, you’ll likely start to notice patterns and themes emerging from your various conversations. You may see that one particular program gets frequently mentioned as having had a positive effect, or you might even notice a common piece of feedback about your fundraising strategy that you want to look into.

Continue to look for the common denominators in your stakeholders’ stories. Start by transcribing your interviews so that you can refer to written records. Then, look for recurring themes, responses, emotions, and experiences that keep coming back up.

You can go deeper by conducting thematic analysis. This involves codifying your interview information and extracting themes from it. This process can be complicated, especially for new nonprofits that don’t have sophisticated data analysis processes. Consider handing the task over to a data scientist or using an impact measurement and management platform to get the insights you’re looking for.

As you look for the connections between your interviewees’ stories, don’t lose sight of the uniqueness of everyone’s experience with your nonprofit. Though you will see common patterns and themes, each individual has their own story to tell. Ensure you have a plan in place for sharing those unique stories in your impact report or marketing materials.

There’s more to your nonprofit’s impact than just cold hard numbers and metrics. Go deeper into how your nonprofit makes a difference in the world by capturing the human stories behind nonprofit data.

Use the tips above to get started. You’ll be more successful in engaging your community in your impact insights when you can share stories that help people connect to your cause on a human level.