By Paula Alvarado
Category: Communications and Storytelling
Estimated read time: 5–6 minutes
In the world of purpose-driven fundraising, there is a persistent gap between the communications organisations produce and the communications that actually build lasting funder relationships. The gap is not usually about quality. It is about truth.
After 25 years working in strategic communications — including supporting the Tenure Facility through the process that secured significant investment from the Audacious Project in 2023, during what was one of the most complex fundraising periods I have worked through — I have come to believe that the organisations that raise the most effectively are not the ones with the most sophisticated donor strategies. They are the ones that have learned to tell the truth about their work in a way that the people funding it can actually feel.
That is harder than it sounds. And it matters more than most communications advice acknowledges.
What funders are really looking for
Experienced funders have read thousands of proposals. They have been shown a great deal of impressive data and a great many photographs of communities they do not know. They have developed, over years, a finely calibrated sense for the difference between an organisation that understands its own work and one that is presenting a version of it designed to appeal.
What moves them is not polish. It is the particular texture of lived experience — the kind of detail that could only come from someone who was actually there, making difficult decisions in the field. The story of a community that fought for a decade to secure their land title, and what the organisation learned about its own limitations in the process. The programme that was redesigned three times before it worked. The partnership that nearly broke down and was repaired through a conversation that nobody wanted to have.
These stories are specific, accountable, and true. They signal something more important than impact: they signal that an organisation knows what it is doing and is honest about the complexity of the work.
The Audacious Project and what it taught me
In 2021, the Tenure Facility was among a group of organisations to receive significant support through the TED Audacious Project. I was the Tenure Facility’s Chief Strategic Communications and Outreach Officer at the time, and the fundraising process around that moment was not easy — we were just emerging from the pandemic, and gathering stories from communities and partners across multiple countries felt almost logistically impossible.
But the effort paid off. Not because we produced glossier materials than other applicants, but because the stories we gathered — of communities advancing collective tenure security across millions of hectares of land in more than a dozen countries — were grounded in real relationships and specific, verifiable experience. The Tenure Facility had been inside the work for years. The stories showed that, in ways that no amount of impact data alone could have communicated.
What the Audacious Project responded to was not just scale. It was credibility. And credibility, in fundraising as in everything else, is built through the quality of the stories you tell and the honesty with which you tell them.
Story and data are not opposites
There is a tendency in the sector to treat story and evidence as two different kinds of communications, deployed for different audiences. Stories for donors who need to feel something. Data for institutional funders who need to see proof. This is a false distinction, and acting on it produces weaker communications for both audiences.
The most powerful fundraising communications hold story and evidence together. They show the person behind the statistic and the statistic that puts the person’s experience in context. A community protecting 50,000 hectares of forest is a number. The governance system that community built to do it, and what it cost them to defend it, is a story. Together, they create something neither can produce alone: a complete picture of why this work matters and why this organisation is the one that should be trusted to do it.
The ethics underneath the strategy
There is something that fundraising communications guides often leave out: the ethics of the stories being told. Whose stories are they? Who gave consent, and what did that consent actually cover? Who will see the final product, and have the people in it had the chance to?
These questions are not separate from strategy. They are part of it. Funders who operate in the Indigenous rights and climate space — who are themselves under pressure to demonstrate accountability to communities — are paying attention to how the organisations they fund represent the people they work with. Stories that tokenise or oversimplify, that present communities as recipients rather than leaders, or that were gathered without genuine consent, carry risks that will eventually materialise.
The organisations that have built the most durable funder relationships in my experience are the ones that treat storytelling as an extension of their values — not a separate communications function. They invest the same care in how they gather and share stories as they invest in the work itself. That investment shows, in every communication, to every funder who reads it.
Where to put your energy
If you are working on fundraising communications and you are not sure where to focus, here are the questions worth sitting with.
Are the stories you are using in proposals and reports drawn from genuine field experience and real relationships, or are they illustrative composites assembled to fit a narrative frame? Do the communities in your communications recognise themselves in how they are portrayed? Have you been honest with your funders about what has not worked, and what you have changed as a result? If a major funder read everything you have produced in the last year, would they come away with an accurate understanding of what your organisation is actually doing and learning?
These questions are uncomfortable. They are also the foundation of fundraising communications that build something beyond a transaction: the kind of trust that carries organisations through difficulty and sustains them over the long term.
Paula Alvarado is the founder of Seeds for Change, a strategy and communications consultancy working at the intersection of Indigenous rights, climate, land governance, and global health.
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