Giving Compass' Take:

• In this podcast, Meera Mani, Director of the Children, Families, and Communities (CFC) Program at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, discusses how philanthropy can incorporate a shared narrative to garner support. 

• How do narratives help donors better understand organizational mission and impact? 

• Read about the ethics of nonprofit storytelling. 

When our team first met Meera Mani — Director of the Children, Families, and Communities (CFC) Program at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation — her team had a new vision for helping young children grow up healthy and ready for school. But they’d never invested in strategic communications, and didn’t know exactly how they should use their institutional voice to support the great work of their grantees.

Mani and her team realized they needed a common narrative that grantees, program officers, policymakers, and others could get behind. “Everything we thought about in terms of the grantmaking approach had to point to how to achieve the outcomes we hoped to see at scale,” Mani said. “The way that you achieve the outcomes — a huge piece of that — is having everyone march to the same beat. And that beat is the narrative.”

Fast forward five years: Meera’s program and grantees are successfully driving a shared narrative about what children need to start out life smart and strong. Realizing the key role funders can play in that effort, Packard released a report with insights for foundations looking to communicate in ways that benefit their grantees.

In this episode of Achieve Great Things, learn how articulating a shared narrative can motivate all of your stakeholders to support your cause — and make a lofty aspiration more achievable in the process.

Read the full article about philanthropy and its narrative from Hattaway Communications at Medium.