The Story Has to Be Backed

In her second year, Andrea did what Walt used to do. She stood up on a Sunday and told a story.

It was a good story. It was true, and she told it well. The response was polite. The money came in slowly, and then it stopped.

You may remember Walt and Andrea from the first note in this series. Walt led his congregation for twenty-two years. When the building needed a new roof, he told a story about the roof over his grandmother’s kitchen. The money was raised by Easter.¹

So why did the same move work for Walt and not for Andrea? Was it the story? Was it the teller?

I think it was neither. To see why, it helps to look at a piece of paper most of us have never read closely.

A promise on paper

Take a close look at a British pound note and you’ll see a short line of small print. It’s a promise from the Bank of England to pay the bearer, whoever happens to be holding the note. The Bank has printed a promise like it since it opened in 1694.

For the longest time, that promise meant something you could test. You could walk into the Bank, hand over the note, and trade it for gold.²

The paper was never the value. It was a promise about value. People accepted it because of what stood behind it.

Every story an organization tells works the same way. The appeal letter. The gala video. The vision at the staff meeting. Each one says to the bearer: give, and this will happen. Stay, and this is where we are going.

Stories work

I want to be fair to stories, because they deserve it. They are how we explain ourselves. A donor first pictures a student in a classroom through a story. A staff remembers why the work matters through one.

Research from psychology helps explain why. Melanie Green and Timothy Brock studied readers who got lost in a story. They called it being “transported.” Those readers came away believing more of what the story implied. Telling them the story was true, or made up, mostly made no difference.³

A good story wins people over on its own.

Where the backing lived

So look again at Walt’s roof. The story carried the request. Twenty-two years of kept promises paid it.

But those promises were never written down. They lived in Walt’s memory, his calendar, and his friendships. When he retired, the backing retired with him.

Andrea’s stories were drawn on that same bank. The room could not see a record behind them, because no one had kept one. That was not a flaw in her storytelling. It was the condition of being new in a place that kept no receipts.

A room’s memory of one leader can’t be handed to the next. A written record can. It is the only backing a newcomer can inherit, and the one she can start building in her first month.

When stories outrun the record

When the promises behind our stories get kept, each new story is worth a little more. When the stories run ahead of the record, a kind of inflation sets in.⁴ No one calls the story false. It just buys a little less each year.

Then the board asks, reasonably, for better storytelling. Notice where that request puts the problem: in the teller.

The fix is not a better storyteller. It is a better record. Warmth matters, but warmth alone does not produce trust. The record is what lets the next story be believed.⁵

Read your own notes

Here is a check we can run together. It takes less than an hour.

1. Bring the right people. Sit down with the staff who deliver the program, not only the people who write the copy. They know which promises get paid.
2. Pick one story. Choose the last thing we told outside our walls: an appeal, a case statement, a gala script.
3. Underline every promise in it, stated or implied. “Your gift will.” “We are building.” “Every family we serve.”
4. Write the receipt beside each one. When did we last deliver this? Could we show a donor?
5. Mark each promise: backed, partly backed, or not yet.

“Not yet” is not a failure. It is a promise in progress. But it should change the next story.

What backs the note now

The Bank of England’s promise means something different today. The link to gold ended in 1931. A note can now be traded only for other notes. The Bank says faith in the pound rests on keeping prices steady, year after year.⁶

The backing moved from metal to conduct. Ours was always conduct.

Picture Andrea’s next Sunday. She tells a smaller story this time: here is what we promised you last year, and here is what happened. It is not her best story. It is the first one the room can check.

Tell the story. Then keep the promise it makes, where people can see you keep it.