When you land on a website, what keeps you from leaving after only a few seconds? Usually it’s clean design or a few compelling numbers. A polished website is a sign of legitimacy. A banner of impactful statistics: a sign of scale. Both matter of course — but neither is what really sticks with you long term.

Think about the last time you saw an impact statistic on a nonprofit's homepage. Can you actually remember the number? Probably not. Now think about the last time you read the story of why an organization exists in the first place — who started it, what problem they saw, who it helped. That's what you remember.

 It’s not just intuition, research shows stories are recalled better over time than statistics (Graeber et al., 2024). Furthermore, research on nonprofit storytelling has found it to be a proven, effective tool for charities to attract more donations (Merchant et al., 2010).

This is the gap a lot of nonprofit websites currently fall into. Storytelling is often missing, and not always by accident. Many sites are designed to get users to a tool or a directory as fast as possible. The logic makes sense: get people to what they need immediately. But in doing so, these platforms often lose the very thing that makes people trust and remember them: human touch.

Storytelling doesn't have to mean a literal, written narrative. Users often find willingly reading a chunk of text as a ‘hard ask’ anyway. It can be a specific success story woven into a page. It can be a photo of a real person rather than a stock image. It can be a testimonial from a volunteer, a user quote, or a community-oriented statistic. Storytelling can be treated less as a content category and more like a lens, a way of presenting information so it feels human instead of transactional.

From our own experience designing with this approach, we've worked on reimagining a ‘How To’ section as an animated story following a real person's experience finding help on the platform and adding a ‘Connections Made’ statistic showing how many people have connected with nonprofits on Giving Connection, with more to come!

This human framing builds trust. Social proof, or tending to follow the actions of others, is one of the most reliable ways people evaluate whether something is credible. In fact, online opinions are among the most trusted forms of advertising there is (Nielsen, 2021). Stories are effective vehicles for delivering this proof. A story doesn’t just explain what happened, it shows who it happened to. That's what convinces people something is real.

As one user put it during our own research on stories highlighting nonprofits:

In other words, real stories about real nonprofits transformed Giving Connection from just a directory to a place people actually believe in.

Put simply: don't just report your impact — tell it. Turn a statistic into a story. Turn a success into something someone can feel, not just read.  After all, 

–Giving Connection Community Member

1. Graeber, T., Roth, C., & Zimmermann, F. (2024). Stories, statistics, and memory. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 139(4), 2181–2225. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjae020

2. Fogg, B. J., Soohoo, C., Danielson, D. R., Marable, L., Stanford, J., & Tauber, E. R. (2003). How do users evaluate the credibility of Web sites? A study with over 2,500 participants. In Proceedings of the 2003 Conference on Designing for User Experiences (pp. 1–15). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/997078.997097

3. Merchant, A., Ford, J. B., & Sargeant, A. (2010). Charitable organizations' storytelling influence on donors' emotions and intentions. Journal of Business Research, 63(7), 754–762. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2009.05.013

4. Medill Spiegel Research Center. (2025, December 4). How online reviews influence sales. https://spiegel.medill.northwestern.edu/how-online-reviews-influence-sales/

5. Nielsen. (2021, November 29). Beyond martech: Building trust with consumers and engaging where sentiment is high. https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2021/beyond-martech-building-trust-with-consumers-and-engaging-where-sentiment-is-high/