130 – The Storytelling Trick Your Non-Profit is Missing with Max Kringen

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Tired of posting content that goes nowhere, Max Kringen reveals how mission-driven storytelling can turn random posts into genuine relationships. Tune in and learn how to craft content that builds trust, drives action, and keeps your audience coming back.

Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success podcast. I’m your host, David. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about storytelling going human first, and probably a little bit of digital strategy. I’ve got Max Kringen here with me. Max is the founder and chief storyteller of Tellwell, which is a Fargo-based creative studio helping mission-driven organizations tell stories that spark connection, build trust, and ultimately drive some kind of action.

Max, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. How are you doing?

Max Kringen: Thanks so much for having me, David. I am so excited to be here. I’ve become a fan of the pod and a fan of Wow Digital over the last couple of months, and so I’m really excited to be here and chatting with you.

David Pisarek: Awesome. So let’s jump right in, right? Non-profit leaders tend to struggle to turn any data and impact information into content that actually connects, is compelling, and connects emotionally with their ICP, their ideal customer profile. Sounds a little bit businessy, but we need to have personas and avatars so that we know who we’re talking to and what drives them and what motivates them.

What is human-first storytelling and how can non-profits move towards that?

Max Kringen: That’s a great question. I think the thing that gets me really excited about it is a really significant shift from how people think today about what they think impresses a donor or that customer. As you think about that ICP, there are different things that impress different people.

But a universal truth, I believe, is that people connect with stories before they connect with stats.

You have to earn the opportunity to share those nerdy stats because people don’t remember stats. Our brains just aren’t built to remember them. One of the things that I always encourage folks to do is think about a story that actually connects. Through that, we use a tool called Narrative Transportation to really say, ‘Here’s the story of Maria. Maria was down on her luck, and she was really struggling to feed her kids.’ Because what we’re doing when we do that is we say, ‘Hey, there’s a person that sounds like, smells like, feels like you, or potentially like you. And so you can put yourself in their place.’ So in this case, anybody who’s a mom, anybody who has a kid, anybody who has empathy for somebody like that can suddenly see themselves in the place of Maria.

So what we encourage folks to do is start with a story, define your empathy before you jump into your authority and really back off the facts. Because the facts, how many pounds of food you’re donating, how many nights a year you’re providing shelter, those are great stats, but nobody cares yet.

Nobody knows, nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care, that old adage. I think it’s wildly true, especially when we’re talking to our non-profit brothers and sisters, because, frankly, donors don’t care yet. But if they can picture themselves in your story, if they can see themselves in that character, in that ICP, magical things can happen.

David Pisarek: I love the idea that you’re talking about connecting and engaging emotionally.

Nobody is going to care, for everybody listening, nobody’s going to care about your cause unless you give them a compelling reason to.

And it’s the storytelling that engages them because when you have conversations with people, when you’re sitting in a presentation, if there’s something that’s a visual or an idea or a topic or a thought that comes at you and you hear it and you’re like, ‘Okay, this resonates,’ you start to pay more attention.

It starts to gauge things that have happened in your life in your past or present, and maybe it’s related to a goal or vision that you have, and you can start to connect with it. It’s that connection that’s going to drive the empowerment to get people to actually do something, whether it’s volunteer, come and support with money or time, whether it’s join a board of directors, whether it’s participate. Actually, even maybe signing up for a program or coming to an event, or even just hitting a care button or a like.

Max Kringen: Oh, man. David, what you’re talking about is really allowing your donor, volunteer, or whoever it is to see themselves in your story.

We talk about this as sparking curiosity. And so if we can spark curiosity, we are then starting to earn the trust to go into that education phase about how to get involved with clear calls to action and things like that.

But what you’re talking about is sparking curiosity, and it is the most powerful way to invite somebody into your story. Spot on.

David Pisarek: So storytelling, I think I’ve heard you talk about it in seasons, like introduce, educate, engage your mind. In terms of a framework, how can organizations create content with purpose instead of just scrambling week to week? We were talking just before we hit record here about how we have a cache of episodes that we’re not scrambling the week of to get something done. I saw this big smile show up on your face when I was saying that. How can non-profits go in that direction?

Max Kringen: If you’re a non-profit listening, you’re probably nodding along right now because you’ve been there where you’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh, what am I going to post today? What am I going to post this week? I just need to get something out.’ And so, the way that we’ve shifted that is to really take how people interact. If you think about any good relationship that you’ve been in, likely there were four parts that you went through.

First is the introduction, right? You have to understand, could this thing be for me? Then you go into education where you start to figure out, where do we align on some different things? Where do our interests align? Where do our values align? And some of those types of things.

Eventually, there has to come a call to action, that invitation into the story. And then finally, any good relationship, any long, sustaining relationship, has this idea of remind.

Remind people that you love them so that way they remember that they love you, too. And so I would love to tell you that this came to me in just a stroke of brilliance or it came to me in a dream.

But the reality is, I was BSing with a client, and they’re like, ‘So how do you build your content calendars?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, well…’ And then, I really started to think about our trust framework: introduce, educate, engage, and remind. And what was starting to come out, and I’m a verbal processor anyway, was this really natural alignment with seasons. And then I was like, wait a second.

Spring is about sparking curiosity. It’s all about opportunity for new beginnings. Summer is it’s all about building trust. We’re in the Midwest and the United States, and so, summer is all about the growing season. Like tending to your crops and making sure that they understand they are loved and they are cared for. We are cultivating them. We’re making sure that the weeds are pulled, and our gardens are beautiful.

And we have to do those two things before we get into fall, which also happens to align with major giving seasons, right? In the US, anyway, and I think this is true for Canada, too. A wildly large percentage of giving happens in the fourth quarter of the year.

Fall is our time for engagement. It’s our time for calling people to action. It’s our time for inviting them into the story. What I’ve seen happen way too many times is, after that big fall giving season, after that big push, after you’ve raised all of this money and you’re so excited, then we just go dormant, right?

January, February, March, we’re just like, ‘Well, thank god that’s over.’ And then you’re like, ‘What do I do next?’ But I think that there’s a huge opportunity in that winter season for that reminder phase of a relationship. Remind people you love them so they remember you love them, too. That is really our time to say, ‘Hey, we did this together. I don’t have another ask for you right now. I just want to tell you, you matter to this story. You’re a part of this story. I’m grateful for you being a part of this story. And your donation has this specific outcome.’

I think, as we think about those, in the seasons, our bodies are also started to get a little bit nerdy about this. And then I had some friends that I was like, ‘Does this feel right?’

I have an extremely nerdy friend who’s like, ‘Actually, our bodies are physiologically more inclined to be ready for those things at those different seasons. Because in the spring, we’re so excited about the sun coming out again for long periods of time that we’re like, Hey, there’s an opportunity for new things. Summer, we feel very safe, and so it’s our time to welcome others into it. Fall, when we’re getting those good smells and the cookies, we’re feeling very generous. And winter is just when we want to hunker down with a good book.’ And so it’s a great time to remind somebody that you’re in the story.

And so we call that our Seasons of Story.

David Pisarek: I love that idea. It’s really, really awesome. For anybody who’s looking at this, the podcast is on video. Also, everybody can go to YouTube, you can get on Spotify video, etc., etc. But on the wall behind me, I have our content calendar. I’m going to be thinking about how to rework this to build in some of that framework for sure in the coming year when we do the content planning and stuff.

I think it’s really important for the non-profits out there to be talking about the impact. People want to donate to a cause that’s doing good things. Being able to tell the story helps dramatically with getting people to understand the work and the value of what you’re doing and to get them to want to be a part of that.

To that point, though, when you’re going out, and you’re communicating, you’re sending your emails, you’re doing posts, not everything should be an ask for money. There’s education that needs to go out. We need to provide insight. We need to stay in touch and let people know. Yes, absolutely. End of December is biggest giving season. You’ve got this year anyways in 2025, you’ve got Giving Tuesday, which is beginning of December, and then you’ve got End of Year giving for people to get their tax receipts, that type of thing.

January, February is the perfect time to talk about how that is going to have a positive impact and tell the stories of who those are going to impact.

Max Kringen: Spot on. I think one of the things that we know about so many non-profits is how understaffed and under-resourced they are. And so, even thinking about that, as a framework, could feel really intimidating to say, ‘Does that mean that I have to have 12 stories or I have to have 52 stories that I have to be figuring out how they fit into each other?’

I think about this less as we have to have different stories, but it’s more about the lens through which we look at that story. And so that could mean maybe we’re talking about one story per quarter, but we go a little bit deeper with it each month. And we talk about it, we look at it through that slightly different lens, through whichever part of that relationship or trust framework that we’re in.

But the other thing that we can do is to feel like we want to keep our content fresh.

We could literally take four stories and share them through that different lens, through the lens of curiosity, through the lens of trust, through the lens of engagement and call to action, and through that lens of reminder or gratitude. We could do that and really have four stories that keep our content fresh every single week. And it keeps us interested, too.

I think one thing that we run into as marketers, and I would be curious, David, if you run into this, I’m convinced everybody knows who we are, what we do, how we do it, and why we do it, right? I’m convinced of it. But the reality is, and I heard this on another podcast, we are a period in the book of somebody else’s day. We’re not even a period in a sentence of somebody’s day in the book. They have so many other things going on.

So I think, as non-profit marketers and leaders and fundraisers, what we sometimes get into is this idea of ‘They already know our story. I don’t need to tell it again, or I don’t want to inundate them.’ What I can tell you with such confidence is that they probably haven’t heard the story. If they’re tuning in again, they want to hear the story because they bought into you. And nobody is going to get annoyed with hearing more about the impact that your organization is having and the people that it’s affecting, especially when I know that I’m a part of that story as a donor or a volunteer or an advocate.

David Pisarek: I think you’re spot on with that. Absolutely, Max. Organizations need to know. Their business owners, organizations, you, me, we, our business, our organization, that is the center of our world. We live it, we breathe it, we do it all day, every day. That is not how the outside world perceives us. We need to remind them. Maybe not every email is like, ‘Hey, we do this.’ No, but sprinkle it in.

Max Kringen: Absolutely. There are some really easy ways to do that. If you’re familiar with, like, Simon Sinek’s ‘Start with why.’

There are probably four to six different ways that you can take a why statement and craft it in a way that feels very natural and engaging.

If you’re a fan of Donald Miller and the ‘Story Brand framework,’ he gives you sound bites and is so excited to be showing some of those different ways to share those little bits and bobs in sound bites. We have our own framework, which is also based on the hero’s journey, and it gives you different sound bites for different seasons in different ways and for different reasons. So you’re spot on.

People want to connect with you. What they don’t want is they don’t want to be yelled at. They don’t want to be talked to. They want to be talked to. They want to be invited into the story.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. Come along with us on the journey. I loved your idea of telling the story, different seasons, making it a multi-part, like following somebody. If you are helping bring clean water to a third-world country, awesome. What’s a day in the life like through the course of a year? You can tell that story through all of that, through the farming, the agriculture, the children, the friends, the cleaning, the nutrients. There’s so much there.

I think a lot of non-profits are just stuck, to your point. They’ve told the story; why tell it again? I think there are ways that they can do that by splitting it up, chunking it up, taking a long-form video and cutting it up into 10 different segments, one a week. You’ve got 10 weeks of content or social posts, that stuff. I don’t think a lot of non-profits are thinking that way.

In your opinion, how can they step off the treadmill of how do we do this and start building a rhythm that actually drives some action for them?

Max Kringen: Yeah. First of all, it’s really sage advice that you just shared. Second, we talk about it as a content hamster wheel. It feels like it’s impossible to get off.

I think one of the biggest opportunities for folks is to take a piece of content and figure out what are the 10 to 15 different ways that I can be using it. And that can feel daunting, but we have some magical tools, some really incredible tools at our disposal for free or wildly inexpensive. Using tools like ChatGPT or Claude, Gemini, or any Copilot, if that’s for some of our non-profit friends, you can take any of these pieces that you’re doing and ask it to create different versions of it for you.

And so what I always encourage people to think about is: how do you take that one piece of content and have it be… Have enough substance to get 5 to 10 to 15 uses out of it? There are some really cool tools, like Descript or OpusClip, that allow you to take a video, for example, because a video is a huge investment.

For our non-profit clients, we’re asking them to spend starting at $10,000, and sometimes it goes all the way up to $25,000 or $50,000. And one of the most painful things, both as a creative director who creates videos, but also I would imagine for the fiscal responsibility of a non-profit, is to see that expensive video that we put so much time, effort, energy, and love into, to watch it go over to YouTube to die. That is the most painful thing, and you will never see your return on it.

So, to your point, take that one video, make 10 to 15 different clips out of it, and then, you can even start to look at that clip through the lens of trust, through curiosity, through engagement, and through remind. You can look at it through that lens and say, ‘Hey, do you remember this person? Because of your gift, we were able to do X, Y, and Z.’ So you can even use some of those same clips over and over again. It’s just about getting into that rhythm, not necessarily of content creation, but content curation as much as anything.

David Pisarek: One of the things that we do with our clients is we shoot, after we launch projects, testimonial videos, and we have our script. We’ve got, ‘Here are the 11 questions we’re going to ask.’ And what we’ve been doing is taking question number six, about the feedback module or whatever, we take the clips of our different clients talking about this thing, and we made another video talking about that function.

If you think of your non-profit, you’re helping people. Somewhere, there is a human who is being impacted positively by the work that you’re doing, whatever it is that you’re doing and how you’re serving it. Get some testimonials from them, and put together some questions that you ask the same way. Then you can grab snippets of them, and it doesn’t have to be a 15-minute collaboration video on question five from everybody; you can turn that into six or seven 40-second videos.

Max Kringen: Now, please, for all that’s holy, do not make a 15-minute video of your client saying great things about you because we remember threes. If you think about it, people have the ability to remember about three things. And so you’re like, ‘What do you mean three things?’ Okay, David, if you’re on fire, what are you going to do?

David Pisarek: I’ll drop and roll.

Max Kringen: Bingo. This one doesn’t always land. I’m from a rural town where we had a lot of trains. When you approach a train track, do you know what to do?

David Pisarek: No.

Max Kringen: When we did farm safety, it was stop, look, and listen. It’s three. We simplified to apply those really complex things down to three things because it’s what we can remember.

David Pisarek: For anybody out there, if you’re remembering phone numbers, my 416 708 832. You learn the stuff in threes. There’s pricing sales handling where you’re dealing with tiered pricing. You’ve got low, mid, and high. Groups of three are what work.

Max Kringen: Yeah. And so you even take the example of testimonials.

It could be the exact same topic, but don’t give more than three perspectives in it, because the moment that you do, then it starts to feel like a list, and people tune out. Because people have to almost protecting themselves from information overload.

I don’t know what the stat is today because it changes daily on how many marketing messages we see. And so when we can create clarity, when we can say, ‘Hey, these are three examples of X, Y, and Z,’ people are like, ‘Oh, okay, I have time for three.’ The moment you’re like, ‘Hey, we have 10 examples of how great we are,’ people are going to be like, ‘Oh, hell no, I don’t have time for that.’ So threes are your friend.

David Pisarek: Okay, so we’re talking about content. We’re talking about producing engaging content. We’re talking about taking stuff that you’ve already got, repurposing it, changing the intent of it, putting in messaging that will resonate. We also need to be thinking about design, right? Because visuals, a picture is worth a thousand words, we were just talking about video. I like to say video is worth a million if a picture is worth a thousand.

But design is really important. How can getting something engaging, eye-catching that stops somebody in their doomscrolling in whatever social platform they’re in, it would be intimidating, especially if you have a small budget. Do you have any small design principles or tweaks that can instantly level up a non-profit’s brand to make it feel or look more credible?

Max Kringen: I love this question. What you’re talking about, too, is a theory called the halo effect.

The halo effect really says people are going to perceive the value to be different from what it actually is if it looks better or is presented better.

And so, as you think about the incredible work that an organization does, you can actually make it appear to be even more valuable. This is a double-edged sword, but what I can tell you from experience is that there are so many organizations that are like, ‘I don’t want to look too polished because then my donors will think that I’m wasting money on X, Y, or Z.’

But here’s what actually happens: the bigger donors that are interested in your mission are going to say ‘They have their stuff together. They know what they’re doing. They are treating this like a business, and that is something that I can invest in. That is something that I want to put money into.’

So here are, I would say, probably two and a half super quick, I’m a designer by trade. That’s how I started. I actually started in the promotional products industry, so I made a lot of pens, a lot of T-shirts, a lot of random things. And there are a few key things that non-profits can, and I don’t love the ‘should’ language because ‘should’ is shame language and all that jazz, but here are three things that I would say you should do:

One, pick a font and use it. Use it on everything. That feels really elementary, but here’s what happens, especially as we have younger marketing and communications and fundraising folks. They go willy-nilly on whatever font is speaking to them today. Make that font big, make it legible, and make it so simple. Get rid of anything cursive, get rid of anything cutesy. Just go simple. Simple sells every day.

David Pisarek: For the love of God, for the love of everything holy in the universe, the multiverse, the multiplex, whatever you want, do not use Comic Sans, please.

Max Kringen: Here’s the thing. Yes, we love to hate on Comic Sans. We love to hate on Papyrus. We love to hate on those things. But really, those fonts are screaming that we don’t take ourselves very seriously. If you’re a non-profit that works with kids, guess what? You’re going to get so much more traction out of a Monserrat or a Poppins or something along those lines, that is bold and clear and probably better aligned than look at this cutesy font.

Because what you’re probably doing as a non-profit that works with kids or young adults is you’re probably trying to give them a great foundation on which to jump off, or figure out how they can better engage in relationships or just give them the tools that they need. And so, to take yourself more seriously, one, use a great font in a very simple font and use it all the time.

The second big thing that I would say is choose a small colour palette. You should not have 15 fonts in your colour palette. I would argue to say, unless you have a designer on staff, you shouldn’t have four. You should have 2-3 really great colours in your colour palette. The other thing to be thinking about with that, ADA accessibility. Beyond ADA accessibility, just accessibility in general.

One of my mentors, who was a designer on the very first Google Maps, accessibility isn’t for a specific demographic. Accessibility makes things more accessible for everybody.

A ramp on a sidewalk does not just make it more accessible for people who have limited mobility, like those in wheelchairs. It also makes it easier for older folks. It makes it easier for people who just had a knee replacement. It makes it easier for folks who are just learning to walk, little toddlers, as they’re coming up. That ramp isn’t just for people in a wheelchair, it’s for everybody, and it makes it easier.

So, as you think about accessibility, as you think about how to welcome more people in, keep accessibility top of mind. And that goes along with the colours, because what we love to do is we love to have colours that are like, ‘What are two shades off from each other?’ The reality is that makes it really hard to read.

And so my third tip is to make an investment and work with an experienced designer who knows the non-profit space, right? That could be somebody like, Wow Digital. It could be somebody like Tellwell that understands this space in a slightly different way to say, ‘Hey, we know what you’re trying to do, and we want to use design to create clarity and welcome more people in,’ create more accessibility to welcome those folks in, whether that’s our digital storefront or our digital front door in our website, or it’s our physical spaces.

Accessibility matters to everybody, and it is a great, great, great use of a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand dollars. What I can also tell you, from experience, is that ADA accessibility and the various accessibility laws in Canada and the United States pay dividends when you take care of them ahead of time. Because, as somebody who has worked with a lot of non-profits, the number of non-profits that have gotten in-compliance notices from folks because their website wasn’t accessible for one reason or another is incredible, and they end up paying a lot of money to try to defend it. And all of those things are super easily be taken care of on the front-end. That was more of an answer than what you were actually looking for. And I get a little soapboxy, but I love accessibility, I love good colors, and I love a good font.

David Pisarek: Absolutely.

One of the other perks of being accessible and meeting those guidelines is that it actually increases your Search Optimization. If you want to rank higher, if you want to provide a better experience for your users, being accessible is one of those key things that you need to absolutely be taking into consideration.

Look, we’re partners with a couple of the big accessibility add-on platforms, and my approach to them is that those are enhancements, not fixes. You need to make sure your coding, your design, is all up to par. If you want to spend the money on one of these tools to enhance accessibility, awesome.

Max Kringen: Or, and I would even say it’s a great use for AI. Use AI as a thought partner in this and say, ‘Hey, go through my website. I want to make sure it’s as accessible to everybody as possible. Help me see my limitations.’ You’re a WordPress shop, right?

David Pisarek: Yep.

Max Kringen: Awesome. We’re a WordPress shop, too. I love WordPress. There are some big players out there, like Theme Nectar and Elementor, and some that are building accessibility tools right into them, and they’re good. But to your point, you’re spot on in saying, those are great check marks, but you need to make sure that you have the foundation really solid, too.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. Okay. So we’re talking about design. We’re talking about content. Web is definitely part of this conversation. So a lot of organizations, some of the smaller ones that we’ve worked with, they tend to think of their websites as a brochure.

And I’m trying to reframe their mind going, it’s not a brochure. It’s a marketing communications team that’s working for you 24/7, and you need to be leveraging that in your favour.

When I have a workshop and a webinar that I run, in the webinar, I talk about design practices for making your website more engaging and storytelling, but I don’t want to talk about myself. Let’s talk about you. In terms of the design and storytelling choices, I’m going to rate my presentation that I do based on what you’re going to say here. Let’s see how inspired and accurate we are here. What could people do to make their website feel like it’s telling more story, feel like it’s more trustworthy and inspiring?

Max Kringen: I think that there are two big things to do.

The first is on your ‘About page,’ on your homepage, it likely has a lot of ‘we’ language, ‘us’ language. The first thing to do, make it ‘you’ language. Talk about who you’re talking to and get really crystal clear on who it is you’re talking to. If your website is a resource for the people that you serve, that is one persona that you can go down.

But more than likely, those folks are being connected to you through a variety of different agencies and connection points anyway. So your website is not actually the tool that they’re finding resources on; your website is a donation tool. It is a platform to welcome in donors to amplify your mission.

And so the first big one is really, get clear on who you’re talking to and what you’re trying say to them. Make them the hero of your website. So many non-profits, we love to talk about ourselves, but get over yourself. In order to invite other people into the story, you really have to start talking about them. One of the ways that we suggest doing this, and I would love to riff on this if you do something similar, is that sometimes we create persona-based websites versus service-based websites.

So a persona-based website is like when they get to your website, we navigate them off to their individual part. And so it could be like, ‘Hey, I’m in the case of a women’s shelter in town.’ It’s like, ‘Hey, I’m a mom, and I need help right now.’ That is the big button on the right-hand side. We put it on the right-hand side because that’s where people naturally read from, oddly enough, even though we read left to right. And on the left-hand side, it’s, ‘I’m a supporter and advocate, and I want to learn more about the impact that you’re having.’ And so right off the bat, we’re saying, ‘Hey, we’re ready to meet you where you are.’ And then it takes to their own individual experiences. Do you guys do something like that or ever play with that?

David Pisarek: We definitely work with our clients to build out personas or avatars, whatever you want to call it. We take a look at demographic, geographic, and psychographics. If nobody knows what psychographics are, go listen to episode 16 of the podcast. I know it’s from a couple of years ago, but I talk specifically about… psychographics.

Max Kringen: Psychosegmentation.

David Pisarek: Yeah, so go take a listen to that, and it’ll give you a lot of clarity around how to develop that and work with it. A lot of our clients, we have conversations around, what does your avatar care about? How can we talk and engage with them? I do mentoring and coaching for other non-profit agencies, consultants, and whatnot. And what I tell all of them, I was at a networking event last night, and we were talking about this, ‘Stop talking about yourself because nobody gives a damn. Nobody cares.’

Max Kringen: Nobody cares about you. They care about them.

David Pisarek: Right. So, the question you need to ask yourself, everybody listening, whatever your mission statement is, whatever it says when somebody lands on your homepage or the top five pages of your site, go look at your analytics, okay? Ask yourself, so what? We provide nutritious meals to children before school.

So what? What’s the point of that? It’s a great idea. It’s a great concept. You’re helping people. You’re doing something very valuable, but it’s not engaging or compelling enough to motivate me to do anything about it. It’s all about you.

So I love that you mentioned that.

Max Kringen: David, one thing I’ll give you props on and challenge that exact example in real-time, you actually made that more human because that’s just what you do. Most people are not talking about, ‘We feed kids before school so that way they go to school with their bellies full and their brains ready to go.’ You said that really beautifully.

Honestly, if people could just get a little bit more human-like, they would change. Because what they’re doing is they say things like, ‘We set children aged 5 to 8 up for success so that they can be better humans in the world of X, Y, and Z.’ And you’re like, ‘What does that mean?’ And what you just did in there and what you did really beautifully is you’re like, ‘We feed them before school.’ And I love, and that’s how my brain works, too, where we just go straight into, ‘Why do we exist? What is that we do? How do we deliver it?’

Let me just throw in one more about websites, because I think the other big thing with websites that is missing all the time is in the Donald Miller world, in the story brand world, they call them cash registers. And this is what you can do? Your single most important thing for most non-profit websites is a donate button. You need to get them to donate their dollars, to invest their dollars with you, so that way you can further your mission.

Have that donate button, have it so many different places on your website. Have it in the upper right-hand corner, but then also have several calls to action throughout. And then, your opportunity and your obligation, because we are in 2025, might be 2026, by the time this bad boy comes out. It is so easy. There’s not a good excuse not to have a good giving platform.

There are so many good giving platforms out there, and there are so many great ways to give. Some of our favourites are like Donor Dock and GiveButter, but you can also integrate directly through a Stripe or a PayPal or something like that. Do not create friction when you’re asking people for money. There’s a reason why when you go to a gas station or a convenience store, they’ll take your money in whichever way. They’ll take your check, they will take your cash, they will take your Venmo, they will take your credit card, they will take your Bitcoin, right?

Make it so easy. And with all of the platforms out there today, there are oftentimes freemium versions of them, and there’s just no reason not to have a great, seamless, easy giving experience. I don’t know if you’re a TikTokker. Do you guys do TikTok?

David Pisarek: Yeah. We’re on TikTok, everybody.

Max Kringen: Nice. Okay, we’ll probably see this on TikTok. Make your checkout experience as easy as it is for me to look at something, get excited about it, and check out on TikTok, because I get to do it within two clicks. In two clicks, I can buy something. Make your giving experience just that easy and seamless, and you will be amazed at what happens.

David Pisarek: A number of episodes ago, I don’t remember which episode it was, I had Josh Bloomfield. He’s the CEO of GiveCloud, which is a donation platform, and we were talking about gamifying donations.

Max Kringen: Yes.

David Pisarek: And not be like, ‘Donate, donate, donate.’ Donate a backpack for back-to-school. Get supplies to those that need to ‘donate five backpacks,’ and try to, ‘How many backpacks could I donate? What’s the impact that I could have?’ The one thing I would add to what you said about having donate everywhere is to make the donate call to action relevant to the content that it’s within. Because at that point, it’s logical. It’s not just donate, donate, donate. It’s, I don’t know, buy school supplies or whatever. I think that is what’s going to make it more compelling for somebody to actually click on it.

Max Kringen: I don’t know what the kids say these days. I would say, retweet or double-tap on exactly what you just said. That’s part of the story, right? And what you’re talking about, too, is this idea of mission-related asks.

We know that people don’t want to give to a general fund, right? Nobody wants to be paying the secretary or the administrative assistant of your non-profit. But really, as non-profit professionals, we know and understand that those are critical points of our mission to fulfill our promise. One of the things that we recommend doing is to use that mission-related ask where we can say, Hey, all you’re trying to do is give people an idea of what the impact is. So it could be like, ‘This dollar amount does five backpacks, and this dollar amount pays for a camp, and this dollar amount does this.’ What you’re not saying is that this very specific thing goes to this very specific area. All you’re doing is giving them an example of what this could look like. And so don’t get too bogged down in this idea that $500 fills five backpacks. That means that all 500 of those dollars have to go to that.

Your mission, if your mission is to fill those backpacks with school supplies, your administrative assistant is a part of that. Your fundraising people are a part of that. Your fundraising platform is all a part of that mission. And so to your point, David, you’re spot on. It’s like, make people see what their impact can do.

David Pisarek: People are not stupid.

Max Kringen: No.

David Pisarek: They know there are administrative costs to doing the work. As a non-profit, as a registered 501(C)(3), or a registered non-profit charity in Canada, you have to disclose your expenses. It’s all public information. If anybody really wanted to know, they can open up your annual report and see what’s going on. People aren’t stupid. They know that there are costs, there are shipping costs. If you’re helping people in Uganda or something, there are costs for taking whatever it is that maybe you’re getting clothes donated, you pack it into a barrel, and you have to ship it. There are costs. It’s not free. Maybe you can get some of that shipping stuff donated. That’ll be really cool.

Max Kringen: That would be nice.

David Pisarek: The whole other side of it.

Max, it’s been an awesome conversation. Maybe we’ll have you back on another episode down the road and dig in a little bit on some of these, but amazing concepts, thoughts, ideas around storytelling with purpose and rhythm and cadence and content creation and web. It’s very clear you know what you’re talking about.

I hope the folks listening to you and I are getting some really great thoughts, some gold nuggets out of the conversation that we had. I want you, I’m going to put you on the spot here. If you were to issue everybody a challenge, something you want to do within 24 hours of listening to this episode, what would that challenge be?

Max Kringen: My challenge is very simple: I want you to go to your website. I want you to go to the ‘About page’, and I want you to copy all of that content, throw it into the AI of your choice, and I want you to say, ‘Pivot this content from talking about me to talking about the people that we serve and our donors,’ and watch it do its magic.

And in moments, you’re going to see and you’re going to feel a really significant difference. So, the one thing is to go change your About page tomorrow. Feed that content back to your web designer, feed it over to your webmaster, whoever that is, and just say, ‘Hey, I got this stuff, and I’m figuring some stuff out, and I need to make them, whoever they are, the hero of this story, and we’re the helpful guide.’

David Pisarek: Love it. If anybody wants to get in touch with you, Max, what do they need to do?

Max Kringen: Oh, we’re very easy to find. One, you can go to our website, wetellwell.com. We have a podcast called Tell Well, the podcast where we’re talking to mission-driven leaders from all over the country. We have a online and in-person non-profit storytelling conference called Well Told. If you just look for the Well Told conference on your favorite Googles, you will find it there. I would love for you to connect with me. I’m on LinkedIn. I’m on all the socials at Max Kringen.

David Pisarek: And you have a free resource for everybody. So if you’ve made it through to this part of the show, you’ve got a resource, the Seasons of Story framework, and a Content calendar for 2026.

Max Kringen: Yeah. So we have that content calendar that we talked about, the Seasons of Story. If you go to wetellwell.com/seasons, and we’ll have a link in the show notes as well, I’m guessing you can get that. There is a combination of video walkthroughs and downloadable Google Sheets calendars for you to create your own.

The other thing that I’m going to throw in, just because we’ve been talking about it, I’m going to give you access to our Tellwell AI brain. And that’s really like, it’s all the things that I nerd out about on a regular basis and all of our favourite frameworks from the hero’s journey to start with why. They’re all baked into this Tellwell AI brain and use it. Have fun with it. Try to figure out some new stories around it. It’s a great resource, and our clients have been loving it.

What I find a little bit scary is that sometimes it can be more me than me, where I actually check my own work against it. And I’m like, ‘Does this sound like me?’ And they’re like, ‘Well, actually, we need to make this more about the person you’re talking to.’ And I’m like, ‘Damn it.’

So we’ll throw that in as well.

David Pisarek: Amazing value, everybody. I hope you have an awesome time playing around with the AI. Make yourself sound like Max. No, I’m just kidding.

Max Kringen: Dangerous.

David Pisarek: Max, thank you so much for joining in today. It’s been great having you here on the Non-profit Digital Success podcast. To everybody listening, if you want any of the links or resources that Max provided, just head over to our podcast page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com.

And until next time, keep on being successful!