Ask the chief executive of a charity that runs several services what it does, and you'll get a list.

Three nouns, sometimes four. Every one is true. Every one is a good reason to fund that service, and none of them is a reason to fund the charity.

One chief executive told me earlier this year that his charity isn't single-purpose, and that's why he finds it so hard to get one message across. He'd been working on it for years.

It matters more than it sounds. A list is hard to remember, so nobody repeats it. When a funder can only picture one service, that's the one they fund. And your team ends up telling four separate stories that never add up to a charity anyone can picture.

One sentence above the list fixes that. It says what the whole charity is working towards. Every service, and every story you tell about it, then points the same way.

This edition is how to find that sentence.

Take a charity that runs a food bank, a debt advice service and a youth club. (An invented example, so nobody needs to work out who it is.)

Ask the team what ties those together and you'll hear one of two things. "We support people in our community." Or a way of working: friendly, person-led, never judging anyone.

The first is true of every charity in the country. The second is true and useful, but a funder can't fund a way of working, because it doesn't say what the work is for.

Both answers look across the services for something they share. Look up instead.

Here's the question I ask charity teams. Imagine the work is finished. There's nothing left to do, and the charity closes. What's different about someone's life?

Not what you stopped doing. What's true for a person now that wasn't before.

For the food bank, the debt advice and the youth club, the answer might be "no one in this town has to face a hard time alone." Yours will be in your own words, and it'll take a few goes.

Now try it on each service. The food bank's story could end with that sentence. So could the debt advice story, and the youth club's. You might not have said out loud before that all three were the same work.

That's the real test. If one service's story can't end with your sentence, either the sentence is too narrow, or that service is telling a different story. Either way, you've learned something useful.

Every story should still be about one real person, with a name, a moment and a scene. A story that opens with "we work towards a world where..." moves nobody, because there's no person in it.

The sentence doesn't replace your stories. It sits above them and tells the reader what they all add up to. So when someone is moved by one story, they know what they're backing, and it's bigger than one service.

Keep the sentence about the person, not about how good you are. And never change what happened to someone to make their story fit. If a story doesn't fit, change the sentence.

Charities without this sentence tend to do one of two things. They pick the service that raises the most and quietly tell that story for everything, which leaves the other services unseen. Or they tell every story in turn and let the reader work out what connects them, which they won't.

Both happen by default. The sentence makes it a choice you've actually made.

This prompt helps you find the sentence above your services. You give it your list of services and a story from each. It gives you three possible sentences and tells you how well each one fits each service.

It's built for charities with two or more services. If you run one, your answer to the last question is usually already the sentence, and it'll say so.

It has four limits built in. It won't write the sentence for you and call it finished, because the sentence has to be one your team can say out loud. It won't invent anything about your charity. It checks once that the people in your stories agreed to be used this way. And if your material can't support a single sentence, it says so rather than giving you a vague one.

Paste it in cold. You don't need to prepare anything.

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You don't need a new strategy. You need an hour, two colleagues from different services, and a sentence on a whiteboard that you can cross out as often as you like.

Start with the last question. If the work were finished and you closed the doors, what would be different about someone's life?

Say it badly first. It gets better.