It’s not the best ideas or the most innovative thinking or the best ground game or operational plan.  It’s story.

The charitable organization world is one  with almost no barrier to entry and massive, diminishing returns.  The number of nonprofits has skyrocketed while the number of people giving has dwindled.

You don’t need a new audience.  You need a better story.

C.R. Hallpike is an anthropologist who said this about the author of a recent book on the topic:

It would be fair to say that whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously … [It is not] a contribution to knowledge.

The book, Sapiens, sold over 27 million copies and it’s author agrees.  He said:

I thought, ‘This is so banal!’ … There is absolutely nothing there that is new. I’m not an archeologist. I’m not a primatologist. I mean, I did zero new research. . . . It was really reading the kind of common knowledge and just presenting it in a new way.

Charles Darwin didn’t discover evolution, he wrote the first and most compelling book about it.

Daniel Pink is no different than our Sapiens author, he has zero subject matter expertise or new thinking, he’s just really good at packaging up other’s ideas and telling great stories.

Tesla, at least in part, is worth 7x more than Ford and GM combined because it’s founder is a great teller of the vision and story.

Your nonprofit likely deals in complex issues.  Story is the simplifier, it’s your leverage.  Albert Einstein’s genius was heavily tied to his imagination.  At 16 he imagined what it would be be like to ride on a beam of light, holding onto the sides like a flying carpet and thinking through how it would travel and bend.

Ken Burns said, “common stories are 1+1=2.  We get it, they make sense.  But the good stories are 1+1=3.”  That’s leverage.  It’s conveying your complexity simply and by showing, not telling.

How many of the great things that your charity does could grow 10x or 100x more if someone just explained them better?

Kevin