Stories That Move People: The Conviction Engine, Turning Compelling Narratives Into Action

This webinar is offered in partnership with Utah Nonprofits Association.

You've written a story everyone loves, with a genuine, heart-felt appeal. But feeling is not motion. In this session you'll learn why someone can genuinely feel your story and still not do anything about it.

The Conviction Engine is a six-stage model for how a story moves a person from information to action, built from thirty years of ghostwriting and instructional design, and grounded in the research on how the brain decides something matters. You'll spend the hour on the two stages nonprofits stall on most. Meaning, where a program description becomes a story a donor's brain will run, and Drive, where what they feels gets converted into what they do. You'll leave with two diagnostics you can run on a real appeal this week, with a pen, in about ten minutes each.

Attendees will leave with:

• A four-part formula for meaning, and the reason a single missing part zeroes out the other three no matter how well they're written
• The Engine Diagnostic: four questions that find the dead cylinder in any appeal, impact story, or campaign page, and the rule for which one to fix first
• The three questions every donor asks before giving, and the specific story they're already telling themselves
• The Drive Diagnostic: a last gate to run before an appeal ships, including a three-donor field test that reviews and compliments can't fool
• A way to read a piece that underperformed by the sound it made, so a flat campaign becomes a repair ticket instead of a mystery

Who Should Attend

Fundraising, development, and communications staff, along with anyone who writes appeals, impact stories, grant narratives, or campaign pages, or who decides which story the organization tells and how.