This article was first published on 7 December, 2018 We’ve been teaching fundraisers for 30 or so years to tell stories in their fundraising, but is this always the best approach? If it is, what kinds of stories should we be telling? The first rule is to focus the storytelling on someone who the donor can feel connected with and a degree of empathy towards. Empathy is important in fundraising because it is the channel through which we experience emotion. If we want people to give or take another action on our behalf, we have to make them feel something. This is particularly true in the context of new donor…