Welcome {{first_name}}, so glad you’re here. You're joining 3,246 charity leaders, comms leads, fundraisers, CSR and social change professionals learning how to tell better impact stories.

This edition is Part 1 of a two-part series.

Here is what you said:

What this tells us: Half of you said writing for funders, grant-makers, boards and finance is where your storytelling breaks down. That signal connects directly to this week's edition.

The most important communications decision in your sector this week was not made by you. It was not made by your board, your CEO, or your comms team. It was made by an algorithm you have never met, in a building you will never visit, by an organisation you cannot petition.

That decision was: whose story gets seen. Yours, or someone else's.

Yours, with the careful headline you spent two hours on, or a thirty-second clip from someone who has cracked the format. Yours, about the work you did last week to keep a vulnerable person safe, or yet another opinion piece nobody asked for.

You may have noticed that you can no longer predict which of your posts will reach people. A post you laboured over gets twelve views. A throwaway sentence you typed on the bus on the way to work gets eight hundred. The work you are proudest of disappears. The work you almost didn't bother sharing is what people see.

You are not imagining this. The rules have changed, and nobody told you.

For most of the twentieth century, the question of what story comes next was answered by committees. Public service broadcasters were governed by editorial boards, regulators, and a shared idea (imperfect, but stated) about what counted as good for audiences. There were quotas for educational programming. There were limits on how much advertising could run. There were stated obligations to inform, educate and entertain.

None of this was perfect. The committees had biases. The framework was paternalistic. The doors were often closed to the voices that most needed to be heard. But there was a who. There was an address you could write to. There was a regulator that could be lobbied. There was a public process, slow and frustrating but legible, that decided which stories rose and which fell.

That model is now substantially gone. Terrestrial television no longer holds the centre. The committee has been replaced by a different kind of decision-maker: a system optimised, at scale, for engagement. Not accuracy. Not balance. Not significance. Engagement.

This is not a moan about technology. It is a description of a structural shift. The infrastructure that used to mediate between social change leaders and the public has been replaced by an infrastructure designed, and owned, by a small number of organisations and billionaires whose commercial interests are very different from yours. Regulators have been outpaced and, in some places, captured.

The committee that used to ask "is this story good for the public?" has gone.

A new committee took its place. It does not meet. It does not declare its interests. It cannot be appealed to. And it is sitting on the chair where the editorial board used to sit.

For all its faults, terrestrial broadcasting had one accidental virtue: the output was the same for everyone. Whatever bias shaped the news at six o'clock, the bias was shared. Two neighbours who watched the same bulletin had a common reference point. They could argue about it the next morning. They had been shown the same world.

That is no longer true. Algorithmic feeds personalise everything. Your feed and your neighbour's feed are different feeds. The most consequential effect of this is not that you see "more of what you like." It is that there is no longer a shared front page. There is no collective "we saw the news last night."

For social change work, this matters enormously.

Social change has always relied on a shared sense of we should not let this happen. That sense was built, in part, by the fact that a population could watch the same story at the same time and feel implicated together. Algorithmic distribution dissolves that mechanism. The injustice that should outrage the country is shown to those already outraged, and shielded from those who would be, and might act if they were.

This is the structural problem. It is bigger than any single platform, and it will not be fixed by a tweak to a feed. The platforms are doing exactly what they were designed to do. The question for us is not how to make them stop. It is how to do this work anyway.

The most useful framework I know for this moment comes from organiser and Harvard lecturer Marshall Ganz, who has shaped public narrative training for movements from the Obama campaign to the Sierra Club to countless community organising programmes around the world.

Ganz's framework, Story of Self, Story of Us, Story of Now, is the spine of public narrative for social change. If you haven't met it before, you are about to use it for the rest of your career.

In Ganz's terms:

All three matter. All three belong in your communications. But Story of Now is the one that algorithmic distribution flattens hardest, and the one that 2026 most demands.

Algorithms reward urgency in a very specific, narrow way: novelty, controversy, emotional spike.

The kind of urgency Ganz means is different. It is moral urgency. It is the felt sense that this issue cannot wait, and that we are the ones who must act. Without Story of Now, social change communications drift into the timeless, the perpetual, the chronic: the register the algorithms quietly demote and the public quietly tunes out.

Most leaders in our sector write Story of Self by instinct, write Story of Us reluctantly, and rarely write Story of Now at all. We were trained to sound professional. Sounding professional, in this distribution environment, looks suspiciously like staying invisible.

Last week, edition 21 introduced the three jobs every story has to do: fund, spread, act. Ganz's three modes sit alongside those three jobs. Every story carries traces of all three modes, and every job benefits from all three. But each mode tends to take the lead in one of the jobs:

The two frameworks are complementary. One describes the mode of the story (Self, Us, Now). The other describes the job the story has to do (fund, spread, act).

Together they give you two ways to think about every post, every appeal, every speech you write: from the mode side, and from the job side.

Part 2 next week walks through the full integration, with a visual that maps how each mode contributes to each job, not just the lead role.

Open the last three things you published. Look at each one and ask, in order: Was this a Story of Self, a Story of Us, or a Story of Now? Write your answer next to each post.

If your three posts come back as Self, Self, Self, your reach problem is structural, not stylistic. You are writing about you, not about us, and certainly not about now.

If your three come back as Now, Now, Now, you may be shouting. Urgency without identity reads as alarmism, and the algorithm will eventually starve it.

If you cannot tell which mode you were in, that is the most useful diagnosis of all, and Part 2 next week is for you.

You are not trying to fix anything yet. You are diagnosing. The remedy starts next week.

Part 2 lands at 7:45am next Thursday. The full re-engineered framework, the three-question audit template, an AI prompt that runs any draft post or impact story against all three modes, and three practical moves you can use the same week you read it.

If you find this series useful, the kindest thing you can do is forward this edition to one colleague who is also struggling to be seen. The algorithm rewards exactly the kind of person-to-person sharing that bypasses it :)

Thank you to everyone who replied last week expressing interest in the Social Impact Storyteller Academy. I’ve been quietly building a peer space for social impact leaders who are serious about implementation, and it launches later this year.

The curriculum centres on storytelling that will help you win more funding and influence positive change. Before public launch, I’m selecting 8 founding members to help shape the Academy - founders get the first year free, lifetime pricing afterward.

If you’re interested in being considered, hit reply and let me know.

Closing

The committee that used to decide what was important for us has been dismantled. Whether your work surfaces or sinks is being decided in a way you cannot petition.

The remedy is not to wait for regulation to catch up.

It is to learn how the new system works, and to write for it on purpose, without losing the truth of what you are doing.

That is what next week's edition is for. This week, just notice. You are not failing. The system you are publishing into was built to hide you.

Until next Thursday, please stay safe and take care,

Matt Mahmood-Ogston
Award-winning impact storyteller, photographer and charity CEO.
Portfolio: ogston.com | Follow me on LinkedIn