Hello {{first_name}}, you're in great company. You're joining 3,230 charity leaders and social impact professionals reading this each week, all of us working towards making the world a better place.

Thank you to everyone who responded to last week's poll. Half of you who voted are social impact leaders outside the charity sector, asking to be included more. From this week, the umbrella is social impact, and charity is one important part of it, not the default frame. A third of you also voted for a mix of long and short editions, which I will honour. This one is on the longer side because the topic earns it.

For the first five years of running our charity, Naz and Matt Foundation, I told one story.

It was a real-life love story between two humans who happened to both be male. How Naz and I met, what our relationship was, what happened to him after his family discovered our relationship, and the foundation I built in his memory. The same story. Same shape. Date order. High emotion. Told the same way whether I had three minutes or thirty.

I told it to frontline police forces. To the Home Office and the Department for Education. To schools, colleges, and universities. On podcasts. On BBC News, ITV News, Sky News, LBC. In newspapers. In public spaces. To councils. To anyone who would listen.

I did not have a strategy beyond getting the word out. I was not trying to fundraise. I was not trying to recruit service users into a formal programme (we did not have one yet, though we always supported anyone who reached out).

The Foundation was, in those years, a campaigning organisation, mostly me, telling our love story so that other families might not have to lose someone they loved to cultural or religious rejection. The story was activism. It was also, honestly, how I processed what had happened. Telling it helped me heal. I needed to tell it.

And it worked. The story moved people. Police practice shifted in places. Schools and universities started conversations they had not been having. National media gave the work space. Awareness was built, person by person, audience by audience.

What it did not do was sustain the work financially.

I was working a four-day-a-week contract, then running the charity on evenings and weekends. The PTSD was getting worse. Then I had my first panic attack, and my body told me very plainly that this could not continue. Something had to change.

The realisation came gradually after that. To keep the work alive, we needed funding. To get funding, we needed a service to fund. To have a service, we needed service users. To get service users, we needed stories that brought people to our organisation. To tell those stories well, we needed the service defined first.

Just before COVID lockdown, this clicked properly. We had been getting small grants here and there, small donations, but nothing sustainable. The truth I had to face was that the storytelling I had been doing for five years had been working as activism, as awareness, as amplification, and it had done its job. What it had not done, because I had never asked it to, was move anyone to fund the work the storytelling was about.

The story was not wrong. One story, in one shape, simply cannot do every job a charity needs done.

I had been telling a “spread” story. Beautifully. Honestly. With everything I had. It had achieved exactly what spread stories are designed to achieve.

What I had not yet learned was how to tell a “fund” story alongside it. A different protagonist. A different shape. A different ending. A different ask. The discipline of fund storytelling was a craft I would have to learn from scratch.

That diagnosis is the most common one I now see across the sector. A social impact story written by a brilliant team, on a topic that matters, beautifully crafted, that does not land. The reason is almost never that the writing is bad. The reason is that the story has been asked to do too many jobs at the same time, or to do one job when a different job is needed in the room. The funder is not convinced. The supporter does not share. The community does not act. The board nods politely.

Most storytelling training in this sector teaches people how to write a case study, as if there is one universal form a good impact story takes. There is not.

There are three jobs a social impact story can do. They share a craft. But they do completely different work, and the craft moves needed to make each one land are not the same.

Job 1. Move people to fund. The audience is donors, grant-makers, board members, finance directors, CSR budget-holders, foundation programme officers. The job is to establish credibility, surface alignment with the funder's own values, frame the urgent choice, and ask without begging. The craft moves that matter are a credible protagonist (often you or your organisation, not the beneficiary), a specific moment of choice that is still live, a clear named ask, and an implicit invitation into shared work rather than into a transactional exchange.

Job 2. Move people to spread. The audience is supporters, advocates, employees, alumni, your wider network. People who like you already. The job is to make the story shareable, identity-affirming for the person sharing it, and simple enough to retell at a dinner table or on social media without losing its shape. The craft moves that matter are a clear emotional centre, a vivid image or moment that is easy to recall, language a person could speak aloud without it sounding like a press release, and a position the sharer feels good standing next to.

Job 3. Move people to act. The audience is volunteers, voters, community members, policymakers, professionals whose practice you need to influence. The job is to create real choice and agency, name the specific action, and lower the friction between feeling and doing. The craft moves that matter are a protagonist the audience can identify with as a peer (not as a beneficiary to be saved), a specific action named at the right size, an honest acknowledgement of the friction the audience faces, and a close that hands the choice over.

The "credible protagonist" point in the fund job is the most contrarian move in the framework, and worth slowing down on, because most fundraising training in the sector teaches the opposite. Make the beneficiary the hero. Centre the lived experience. Let the funder feel the human cost directly. The advice is well-meaning, and it works for awareness building, which is a spread craft. For fund, craft it actually undersells the organisation.

A funder reading a beneficiary-led story is moved by the transformation, but unclear what specifically about your organisation makes you the right vehicle for their next ten thousand pounds. The beneficiary's story is evidence the world can change. The funder still has to do the work of inferring whether your programme is the cause. Most funders will not do that inference work. They will feel moved and award the money to the organisation whose case was more clearly made.

When the organisation is the protagonist, the story shape changes. We saw a problem. We made a specific choice about how to address it. Here is the moment our judgement was tested. The person we worked with is the evidence the judgement was right. Here is the choice now in front of you.

The beneficiary is still in the story. They are just not the lead. The protagonist whose actions you are following, whose judgement is being weighed, is the organisation. The funder can finally see you, weigh you, and decide about you. The implicit ethical dimension matters too: organisation-as-protagonist fund stories sidestep the trauma extraction, saviourism, and consent ambiguity that beneficiary-led fundraising stories slip into so easily.

The same inversion does not hold for spread or act. A spread story is built around a vivid moment or image that a supporter can carry forward in their own words, and the beneficiary often is at the centre of that moment. An act story puts the reader, or a peer the reader can identify with, at the centre, so they recognise the action that is available to them. Same underlying material, three different protagonists, three different jobs.

What I wish I had known then is what the framework above is built from. Every story has one job. Each job needs its own craft.

The story I had been telling for five years had done its work. What I needed alongside it, by year five, was a different story. A fund story. A different protagonist (the Foundation as an organisation, rather than the love story between two men). A different shape (the credible track record, the live decision in front of the funder, the named ask). A different ending (an invitation into shared work, not a moving close).

If I had learned that craft earlier, the Foundation would have had its financial floor years before COVID forced the issue. I would have spent fewer years contracting four days a week to fund my charity work on the weekends. I would have arrived at sustainability before my body and mind made it the only option left.

In a sector where 151 major charities closed in 2025, where four million fewer people gave to charity compared with 2019, and where the competition for funding has become brutal, the cost of a story doing the wrong job for the room is no longer just an inefficiency. It is the difference between a programme that survives and one that does not.

This framework is the simplest tool I have found for making the diagnosis stick.

Try it on the next piece you write. Then reply and tell me what changed.

Before you write your next social impact story, whether it is an appeal letter, a board paper, a LinkedIn post, a conference talk, an internal memo, or a campaign launch, ask three questions in this order:

1. Who is this story actually for?
Be specific. Not "supporters". Which supporters. Not "funders". Which funder, in which room, on which day. If you cannot name them, you cannot write to them.

2. Of the three jobs, fund, spread, act, which one is this story doing?
Pick one. If your instinct is "all three", that is the diagnosis: the story is currently trying to do too many jobs, and that is why it is not landing.

3. What is the one thing I want this audience to do as a result of this story?
Not three things. One. If you cannot reduce it to a single sentence, you have not picked the job yet.

The one-page decision tree below operationalises the test. Print it. Pin it to whichever wall you write at.

Complete this before writing or rewriting any social impact story.

A handful of you asked last week about a peer space for social impact leaders to discuss implementation. I have been quietly building exactly that.

The Social Impact Storyteller Academy launches later this year. The three jobs you have just read about, fund, spread, and act, are the spine of the curriculum, alongside the year-long arc of Story of Self, Story of Us, and Story of Now.

Before public launch, I am hand-picking 8 founding members to shape what the Academy becomes. Founders get the first year free, lifetime founders' pricing thereafter, and a monthly call with me to shape the community as it builds.

If you would like to be considered for the founding cohort, just reply to this email with "Academy" in the subject line. I will be in touch directly.

If "your story has one job too many" landed for you this week, hit reply and tell me which of the three jobs you have been overloading. I read every reply.

And if there is a colleague in your organisation, a fundraiser, a comms lead, a CSR manager, a social enterprise founder, who would benefit from this framework, forward this edition to them.

Until next Thursday, sending you safe and peaceful energy.

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