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What you’ll get: A practical, perspective-shifting guide to nonprofit storytelling, donor relationships, and what it really means to invite someone into your mission rather than pitch them on it, drawn from a conversation with fundraising strategist Clay Buck.

There’s a story that nonprofit fundraisers tell themselves.

It goes something like this: our mission isn’t emotional enough. We don’t work with kids. We don’t have pets. We don’t have cancer. So our story is just harder to tell than everyone else’s, and donors are going to be harder to move.

Clay Buck has heard this story a thousand times. And he’s spent 30 years gently, persistently, sometimes loudly dismantling it.

Clay is a fundraising strategist, speaker, and principal at Next River Fundraising. He started his career in 1990, has held roles from database admin to chief development officer, and has worked across performing arts, social services, and homeless services organizations. He’s one of those rare people who has sat in almost every seat, and because of that, he sees things that others miss.

On a recent episode of Tellwell: The Podcast, Clay joined Max Kringen for a wide-ranging conversation about nonprofit storytelling, donor psychology, and the quiet reframes that change everything. This post pulls the best of it together so you can put it to work.

The Tearjerker Formula Is Not the Whole Story

Somewhere along the way, nonprofit fundraising absorbed a rule: sad face raises more money than happy face. The tearjerker story. The most broken beneficiary. The most desperate circumstance.

And Clay isn’t here to tell you that rule is wrong. The research behind it is real. Human beings respond to pain and urgency. But he is here to tell you that the rule got misread.

“It’s not about the saddest story,” Clay says. “It’s about a human connecting to human about a real feeling.”

That’s a different thing entirely. And it opens the door to a much wider range of stories than most organizations think they’re allowed to tell.

Clay spent years working in performing arts nonprofits, organizations that often feel like they’re at the back of the line when it comes to emotional fundraising narratives. You can tell the story of the kids in the education program. You can show the happy faces. But it can feel thin compared to a food bank or a cancer organization.

So Clay told a different story. He wrote a campaign from the perspective of the marble in the lobby floor. That specific, specialized marble chosen to resemble the floor of another great performance hall. The marble that had been crossed by Broadway stars, by first-time theatergoers, by donors who had stood in that very spot and waited for the curtain to rise.

It went gangbusters.

Not because it was sad. Because it was specific. Because it connected something familiar to something a donor had never thought about. Because it made someone pause and think: I have stood in the same place as Kristin Chenoweth.

That is a human connecting to human about a real feeling. Sadness has nothing to do with it.

Quiet Stories Are Still Powerful Stories

The lesson Clay draws from that lobby campaign is one that nonprofit communicators need to hear until it sticks: your story does not have to be loud to land.

“Stories can be quieter and simpler and more beautiful than we think,” he says. “They don’t have to be tearjerker, rip your heart out. It can be just quiet and perfect and beautiful.”

This is not permission to be boring. It’s permission to be honest.

It’s permission to tell the story of the outreach worker who goes out every day to connect with people living on the streets, people who have said no to help, people who are not ready. To tell the story of how that worker doesn’t force, doesn’t cajole, just builds trust slowly. To tell the story of who those workers are and why they do it.

Clay ran that campaign for a homeless services organization. Donors responded with some version of the same thing: I had no idea that’s what it’s like.

That’s the goal. Not to manufacture emotion. To create understanding. To bring a donor close enough to the work that they can feel what it costs and what it means.

When you stop chasing the most dramatic story and start looking for the most honest one, you find that your organization is full of them.

The Three-Legged Stool

Here’s the reframe that sits underneath everything else Clay teaches.

Most nonprofits, consciously or not, operate with a mental model that looks something like this: we are experts doing great things, funded by wealthy people who want to do good, serving beneficiaries who are victims of a problem.

That model produces a particular kind of storytelling. It produces appeals that emphasize brokenness. It produces stewardship that feels like reporting to a boss. It produces a subtle but persistent sense that the organization is the hero, the donor is the funder, and the beneficiary is the problem to be solved.

Clay proposes something different. He calls it the three-legged stool.

The nonprofit, the donor, and the beneficiary each have a role. None is more important than the others, though the beneficiary and the community they are part of is of course the heart of it. But all three are necessary. Remove any one leg and the stool falls.

“We are all in this together,” Clay says. “The donor has their role to play, we the nonprofit have the work to do, the beneficiary’s job is to receive the mission. We are all doing our jobs.”

Frame your stories from that perspective and the whole tone shifts. You’re not asking donors to fund your work. You’re inviting them to fulfill their role in a shared mission. You’re not reporting outcomes to a stakeholder. You’re showing a partner what their contribution made possible.

That’s a fundamentally different relationship. And it starts with how you think, not just how you write.

Donors Aren’t Customers

This is the one that tends to generate the most pushback, and Clay knows it.

There are thoughtful people in the fundraising world who argue that treating donors like customers is actually a step forward: be responsive, deliver value, earn loyalty. Clay respects those people. He will also argue with them every time.

“When we frame a donor as a customer, we’re putting a transaction to it,” he says. “They are buying something.”

And maybe there’s something to that. Maybe they’re buying a feeling. Maybe they’re buying a better outcome for someone else. But the customer framing keeps us thinking in terms of exchange. You give us money, we give you impact, transaction complete.

That is not what giving actually is.

When Clay digs into the psychological literature on generosity, what he finds is that giving is an act of identity. An act of belonging. An act of agency, of saying: I believe in this, and I am someone who acts on what I believe.

“I believe I’m a good, kind, thoughtful, generous person that believes in this stuff,” he says. “So I’m going to give. That’s what I do. That’s who I am.”

Giving is also, Clay says, an act of mattering. We all want to know that we count. That our presence in the world makes a difference to someone. When a donor gives, they are saying, in some quiet part of themselves: I hope this matters. I hope I matter.

And the question for every nonprofit is: do you acknowledge that? Do you close the loop? Do you tell your donors, clearly and specifically and often, that yes, you matter, you were part of this, this happened because of you?

Or do you drop the ball?

Tell Stories to the People Who Want to Matter With You

One of the most quotable moments in the conversation came almost by accident. Clay was talking about donor cultivation, about the reality that not every donor is going to be that into you, and that’s fine.

“Stop wasting our time on the folks that just aren’t that into you,” he said, “and let’s tell stories to the people that want to matter with us.”

He caught himself mid-sentence. Said he’d never put it quite that way before.

That line reframes the entire challenge of donor communications. You are not trying to convince everyone. You are not trying to manufacture belonging in people who feel nothing. You are trying to find the people who already sense that they belong, who already feel a pull toward your mission, and give them the story that confirms it.

That means being honest about who your community is and who it isn’t. It means not chasing people who show no signal of connection. It means investing deeply in the relationships where the signal is strong.

Your story doesn’t have to be for everyone. It just has to be true for the people it’s for.

Donors Are Data, and Data Is Human

Clay started his fundraising career as a grant writer and events manager, then moved into database administration. He has two degrees in theater. He is, by his own description, not a data person.

And yet he thinks about donor data constantly, because he learned early on that data and story are not opposites. They are the same thing, seen from different angles.

“Every piece of information that a donor provides you is a story they’re telling,” he says.

A $50 gift is a story. It tells you something about this person’s capacity, their level of trust, where they are in their relationship with you. A donor who fills in every field on your giving form, who provides their spouse’s name and their phone number and checks the box to receive your newsletter, that is a donor who is saying, loudly: hey, I’m here. Pay attention to me.

The question Clay asks organizations is simple: are you listening?

He uses his own name as the example. His legal name is Thomas. His preferred name is Clay. When he fills out a giving form, he uses Thomas because that’s what his credit card requires. But when he fills out a communications preference form, he uses Clay.

He has given to many organizations over the years. Exactly one of them has called him Clay.

He is still giving to that one.

This is not a data problem. It’s a listening problem. The information was there. The organization just didn’t pay attention to what it was being told.

“These aren’t records,” Clay says. “These are people.”

Reframe how you open your CRM. You’re not opening a record. You’re opening a person. A real, caring, breathing human who has told you something about who they are and what they want from you. Your job is to listen and respond.

Story as the First Gift

Toward the end of the conversation, Clay went somewhere unexpected.

He talked about cave drawings, about how the earliest recorded stories weren’t found at cave entrances but deep inside, down and back, in the places where tribes would gather during winter to survive. Story, he argued, is not decoration. It’s not strategy. It is primeval. It is how we connected as a species before we had any other tools for doing so.

“Story was the first gift,” he said.

And who told those stories? The shamans. The people who could take mud and dirt and spit and draw something on a wall that would last ten thousand years and tell a vivid, specific, emotional truth about the life of the tribe.

That is what nonprofit communicators are. You take the raw material of real lives and real work and render it into something that connects people to each other and to a shared purpose.

The Chicken Mul and What Fundraising Is Really About

Clay closed with a story he’d stumbled across on TikTok, from a creator doing a series on forgotten Black recipes for Black History Month. She was making something called Chicken Mul, a dish from Black churches and communities in the late 19th and early 20th century.

A Chicken Mul was a community gathering. People came and brought what they had, added it to a pot, let it slow cook and braise all day, and then sold bowls of it to raise money for the church. These churches were not just Sunday worship spaces. They were community centers, providing food, shelter, and connection to the people around them.

The creator’s line for it: mutual aid in a bowl.

“Isn’t that what we’re doing in fundraising?” Clay asked. “Fundraising and storytelling and nonprofits is about community coming together for the good of the community.”

Not appeals. Not funnels. Not pipelines. Community coming together, bringing what they have, making something that sustains everyone.

“Perhaps we need to mole generosity a little.”

Three Things to Try This Week

1. Look at your last appeal. Whose story did you tell, and how did you frame the beneficiary? Were they a victim of a problem, or a person with a role in your shared mission? Rewrite one paragraph using the three-legged stool framing and see how the tone changes.
2. Open your CRM like you’re meeting someone. Pick ten donor records. Before you look at their giving history, read every field they filled in. What are they telling you? Are you responding to what they said, or just what they gave?
3. Find the quiet story. What’s something in your organization that donors never see? A volunteer who shows up every week. A staff member who does something small and essential. The room where something important happens. Write 200 words about it, from that perspective.

You don’t need all three. Pick one and actually do it.

Hear the Full Conversation

Clay Buck is the keynote speaker at Well Told, the nonprofit storytelling conference happening April 30th, 2026 in Fargo, North Dakota and streaming live online. If you want more of this, that’s the room to be in.

Grab your spot at WellToldConference.com.

And listen to the full episode of Tellwell: The Podcast wherever you get your podcasts, or connect with Clay directly at nextriverfundraising.com.

Tellwell: The Podcast is produced by Tellwell, a strategic storytelling agency helping nonprofits raise more money and build stronger communities. New episodes drop regularly at wetellwell.com.