Peter Korchnak wrote about a presentation given by Roger Burks, senior writer with the 30-year-old charity Mercy Corps. The gist of it was that good storytelling can motivate action on the part of readers—for Mercy Corps, that usually means getting them to write a check.
The Editorial Advantage has published several posts on the role that the Internet can play in fund-raising. Most charities leave money on the table, according to Website usability expert Jakob Nielsen, because they fail to tell prospective donors what the organization is about and how it uses its money.
So we looked at Mercy Corps’ site to see if Roger Burks and his colleagues do a better job answering those questions. We were impressed by what we saw.
Several times a week, the Mercy Corps blog publishes detailed stories about individuals and communities around the world whose lives have been improved by its staff, volunteers, and donations. For instance:
- A young woman of Asian descent left her home in Orange County, CA, to work in China and soon took over a project to counsel children who survived the disastrous earthquake in Sichuan. Like most of the blog posts, the story of Christine Fu is illustrated with excellent photographs, including one from her wedding in a displacement camp.
- Refugees in war-torn eastern Congo no longer must resort to drinking rainwater from muddy puddles, thanks to the drinking water they now receive from Mercy Corps. Mercy Corps also provides hygiene supplies and is digging latrines to help stop the spread of diseases like cholera.
- At a Mercy Corps trade fair, a Mongolian woodworker met a Dutch entrepreneur with whom he began collaborating. The two now do a thriving business supplying furniture that has become especially popular in children’s rooms throughout Holland and Belgium.
The stories illustrate the charity’s mission (to “find social innovations that address the world’s toughest problems”) and its strategy (to “work in countries in transition, where communities are recovering from disaster, conflict or economic collapse”).
Do the stories bring in donations? Probably not by themselves, but they engage your interest and motivate you to learn other things about the organization, including the high proportion of revenues (86.2 percent) that go to program expenses, compared with administration and fund-raising (13.7 percent). Mercy Corps uses a host of other proven communications techniques, such as down-to-earth examples (e.g., a $45 gift funds three hand-washing stations in the Congo).
For these and other reasons, Mercy Corps ranks among the healthiest charities studied by the financial analysts at Charity Navigator. Good stories take money to write and illustrate, but in a competitive fund-raising world, charities have few better ways to answer the question, “Why us?”
