Free guide - for purpose-led organisations
5 Stories Every Purpose-Led Organisation
Should Be Telling
Most organisations doing important work are sitting on extraordinary stories they've never thought to tell. This guide gives you five proven story types - with the questions to find each one inside your own work.
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5 Stories Every Purpose-Led Organisation Should Be Telling
Five proven story types with the questions to find each one inside your own work. Sent straight to your inbox.
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Most organisations doing important work
are nearly invisible. That's not a marketing problem.
The work is real. The impact is measurable. The people whose lives you're changing, or the community you're rebuilding, or the planet you're helping to restore - that's all there. But somewhere between what you do and how you talk about it, the story gets lost. You end up with content that describes your services instead of your impact. Videos that look professional but don't move anyone. A website a sympathetic reader can understand, but that a stranger scrolls past in seconds.
The organisations that cut through - the ones that attract the right partners, hold the attention of the people they need to reach, and build trust that takes years to manufacture any other way - are not necessarily doing more important work than you. They have found the one story that makes everything else make sense. And they are telling it clearly, in the right format, to the right people.
This guide gives you five starting points for finding it.
Five story types. Questions to find each one in your own work.
Each story type comes with a short explanation of why it works - and the specific questions you can ask your own team, clients, or the people you serve to surface it.
The one that shows before and after - not in numbers, but in a person's life. The story partners and supporters cite when they explain why they give their time, money, or backing.
The person on your team who embodies what you stand for but has never been on camera. The story that builds internal culture as it builds external trust.
Told by a funder, corporate partner, or collaborator. It does what no self-promotional content ever can - it validates your work from the outside.
The story that makes your cause feel urgent to someone who didn't think it had anything to do with them. Often the most under-used story in the purpose-led toolkit.
Why this organisation exists, told in a way that isn't a history lesson. The story that earns trust before you've asked for anything.
Every story type comes with specific questions you can bring to a team meeting, an interview, or a simple conversation. Finding the story is usually the hardest part - this guide makes it practical.
I've spent 40 years helping organisations find and tell the stories that matter. For 16 of those years I was embedded at Wesley Mission - producing weekly documentary stories for advocacy and campaign work, and annual films designed to move people to act.
The five story types in this guide come directly from that work. They're not frameworks I read about. They're the ones I found myself reaching for again and again, because they consistently moved audiences - whether that audience was a corporate boardroom, a community meeting, or someone watching alone at home.
Once you've downloaded the guide, I'll send a short series of emails over the following two weeks - each one built around a different aspect of purpose-led storytelling. If at any point you'd like to talk through what this looks like for your specific organisation, you're welcome to book a Story Session.
Ready to talk about your organisation's story?
The Story Session is a free 20-minute call where I find the one story you should be telling but aren't - and give you a concrete idea for what to do about it. No preparation. No charge.
Book a free Story Session