Authenticity shines through when one is speaking from the heart about deep passions. We have all experienced connecting to a story that is delivered with honesty. One of the things that has impressed us the most about social entrepreneurs is that most can tell personal and passionate stories about the work that they are doing. This powerful ability to link a story to the mission of your organization is one of the best ways for social entrepreneurs to engage people in your work.

As we have shared, much of the motivation behind Room to Read comes from the children and their families with whom we are fortunate enough to interact with on a regular basis. The direct and honest way in which they communicate their circumstances, hopes, and desires for their futures moves us to share their stories, garner support, and advocate for our cause. They tell the impact of Room to Read’s work better than anyone.

Suma Tharu, from Nepal, provides a great example of the power of sharing personal stories. Suma comes from the Tharu community, which is an indigenous ethnic group that lives in the Terai in the southern foothills of the Himalayas. When she was six years old, she was given by her parents to a wealthy family to serve as an indentured servant in their home. This is a traditional practice called the Kamlari system. Both of Suma’s parents had been indentured servants, too. They had six other children besides Suma and could not take care of all of them, so they felt they had no choice. The Kamlari system is outlawed by the government of Nepal now, but it is still practiced in desperately poor families. Suma served three different families from age six to 12 and described her experience as “being treated like a dog.… You’re basically captive in the house.…To be a Kamlari is to lead the life of slavery.”

Several nonprofits have been working to free children like Suma still serving as Kamlari girls and to prevent the practice from continuing.

Room to Read started our Girls’ Education Program in 2008 in this region of Nepal to partner with organizations rescuing the girls and to help mainstream the girls back to school. The goal was to help families see there are other options and to understand the value of educating their daughters so that in the long term the girls would have more choices in life and have brighter futures.

Room to Read has worked with 1,500 Kamlari girls in this region to date. But Suma’s story is unique. After being selected to participate in Room to Read’s Girls’ Education Program, she was chosen by a partner documentary film group called Girl Rising to be featured in a film of the same name. The film told the stories of nine girls from nine different countries and showed how investing in the education of adolescent girls was game changing for them, their families, and their communities. Suma writes her own folk songs in the Tharu language about the difficult life she has led. Writing and singing songs has helped her cope. “My songs have always centered me,” she says. “They tell me where I have been, where I have come from, and how far I have to go.” As part of the promotion of Girl Rising, Suma was invited to New York City to sing on center stage at Lincoln Center at the Women in the World Conference, which aims to bring to life firsthand stories from around the globe of what it is like to be a woman. An excerpt from Suma’s song she sang that day:

Thoughtless were my mother and father, they gave birth to a daughter…

Did you want to see me suffer, Mother?

Did you want to see me suffer, Father?

Then why did you give birth to a daughter?

My brothers go to school to study

While I, unfortunate, slave at a master’s house…

Abused every day by the landlord’s wife

It’s a hard life, being beaten every day…

Thoughtless were my mother and father…

They gave birth to a daughter…

After she sang at the conference, Suma was interviewed on stage and shared, “I’m singing for me and thousands of other girls still caught in a house, struggling for their life… I want to fight for the rights of women.” She was an incredible representative for the voice of young women around the world who want to be valued and given the opportunity to reach their full potential in life. Once Suma was freed and going to school, she said, “Education is like the light in our eyes. We don’t know anything until we get an education, we don’t ever know where to go.… It’s not just in order to have a job, it’s also something you have to do for yourself, and others can never steal it. It always stays with you.”

Erin had the pleasure of spending a few precious days in New York with Suma and her chaperone and translator, a Nepal Girls’ Education Program senior staff member. Suma, having never even been to her country’s major city of Kathmandu, was having a once-in-a-lifetime adventure in New York City. She stayed calm and measured throughout it all. She was not that impressed with the glitz and glamour of the city, which was somewhat disappointing to New Yorkers who love their city! She instead missed the open landscape, food, and simple pleasures of home. Suma, having spent most of her life walking or riding her bicycle everywhere, would get sick in every form of transportation we tried, from subway, bus, or taxi. We instead walked wherever we could.

On one of these walks, Erin asked Suma what was different and what was similar between New York and her home. Suma said that in her country, people would not show affection in public, noting that New Yorkers were always kissing, hugging, and holding hands. Suma then went on to poignantly point out what was similar to Nepal: Darker-skinned people seemed to do most of the hard work. Suma, who is dark-skinned herself, had hoped this would have been different in America. But when she looked around, the darker-skinned people were driving the taxis, opening the doors at the hotels, and clearing the dishes at restaurants. Everything Suma said was honest, straight to the point, and made you think deeply. These were phenomenal observations for a young woman who was just 16 years old at the time of her visit.

Stories like this help us build awareness of the need to improve the quality of education for all children. The hard part is that so many stories exist about so many important issues. As a social entrepreneur, you must excel at telling your organization’s story to cut through the noise and win people over.

Planning Your Communications

From the start of our work, Room to Read has always tried to be thoughtful about how we communicate our story, even if the process was ad hoc and opportunistic in our early days. As we have grown, we have learned a lot and now annually update comprehensive marketing and communications plans for key areas. We have a communications department that oversees our global efforts in marketing, investor communication, media relations, crisis management, and internal communications. Given our limited financial and human resources, the key is to be well organized, strategic, and efficient in communications. Our annual communications calendar maps out all external communications, target audiences, frequency and timelines, channels (online or offline), persons responsible, budgets, and methods to track and evaluate results.

This plan also helps us to segment our communications to be relevant to different audiences and not bombard people with too many points of contact. For each communication piece, we have a primary goal of what we are hoping to achieve (for example, inspire donations or engage and update our supporters), and we craft our message to underscore the unique value proposition that highlights what differentiates Room to Read’s work from other entrepreneurial ventures. Whether it’s our website, blog, Annual Report, Global Results and Impact Report, or social feeds, we regularly hear from our wide network of supporters that our communications are informative and uplifting, and encourage people to join the cause and act. Mission accomplished!

We, of course, didn’t start out with this level of planning. As we discussed in Chapter 2, the methods and tools we have used to create momentum around telling our story have evolved with our organization. We use the framework of start-up, transitional, and mature stages of organizational development to explain how you can best promote, advocate, and build public awareness and action for your mission.

Start-Up Stage: Building the Personality of Your Brand

Right from the beginning, Room to Read’s founders agreed quickly on what the “personality” or brand of Room to Read would be. We wanted to stand for hope, optimism, the belief that large-scale, positive change in the world can be achieved, and that education is a cornerstone solution to helping solve every other problem today. Since we were solely focused on serving children, we wanted our brand to be playful, youthful, and fun. As a social enterprise headquartered in San Francisco, near Silicon Valley, we also wanted to be known for being results oriented, disruptive, innovative, and entrepreneurial. We wanted people to think of us as managed as well as any highly profitable business but with the heart of a leading social-mission-driven organization. It was a tall order.

We landed on the name Room to Read, with our logo representing a schoolhouse filled with colorful books, the tagline of “World Change Starts with Educated Children,” and all our reports and external communication being upbeat, results and data driven, transparent, and ambitious. To illustrate our attention to detail, our tagline was “World Change Starts with Educated Youth” for 48 hours until we decided that “children” was a warmer, more approachable word that better represented our brand.

Every organization has a brand personality. It is crucial to figure out early on what you want yours to be so you can shape it and communicate it consistently. In building our brand, we focused on our organizational name, logo, tagline, visual identity, and the experience we wanted people to have when interacting with us. Although it is important to focus on internal issues like program delivery and operations, the founding team also needs to focus on communicating externally and building a movement around the mission and organization.

As social entrepreneurs, we all ultimately seek to launch a movement of change. We realize we cannot do it alone and must create a cadre of champions around us to be partners, volunteers, and investors. Some of the greatest movements in history, such as the civil rights movement in the United States or the nationalist movement in India for independence from the British, were successful because of the collective action they inspired. At Room to Read, we realized early on that we were in the movement-building business and identified different categories of key stakeholders to tailor our message to motivate, engage, and inspire action.

Receptive audiences come in all shapes. The following list exemplifies the various types and venues for initial target audiences:

• Room to Read–organized events, which ranged from small dinner salons in investors’ homes to larger events in public spaces
• Media outlets of all kinds, from newspapers, magazines, and radio to television, as well as online media
• Corporate speaking opportunities, from “lunch and learns” that engaged employees, to executive or client conferences where we were keynote inspirational speakers
• Already assembled audiences, or “Triple As” as we nicknamed them, which could range from a Rotary Club to a professional association to a conference
• Schools and universities, which often lead to making connections to parents and young professionals starting out their careers

We were constantly pitching anyone who would listen and said yes to almost every opportunity in those early days to talk about our work. Many people heard our story. Some chose to donate to us, and the truly converted became part of our volunteer chapter network and have been active partners in building our global movement.

Much of the brand building and external communications at this early stage involves envisioning the change you desire and painting a picture for the audience. It is aspirational in nature as the organization is still in the proof-of-concept stage. The ESE is still building its body of evidence to prove its impact. Often, you have to describe the intended impact you believe you are having rather than providing detailed evidence for the simple reason that as a start-up, you are still collecting the evidence. It takes a leap of faith.

We found the public, key partners, stakeholders, and investors to be understanding about this. At Room to Read, we described what it was like to be a student in a dilapidated school before and after Room to Read support. We painted a vivid picture of a run-down, crumbling, overcrowded school building transformed into a newly constructed, larger school, complete with a child-friendly library filled with local language books and staffed by a trained librarian. We would then share that we had replicated this transformation 50 times in one country, and scores of times across all our countries of operation in that year alone. This story of the change we were creating in hundreds of schools a year felt tangible because we rooted it in the story of the transformation of just one school community.

The challenge at this early stage of development is that sometimes the vision and story you are telling can get ahead of reality. We had to be careful because our stories of the changes we had effected in one community might or might not be replicable or scalable across all the school communities in which we were working. In a quick, inspiring snapshot of one successful school, the complexities and nuances of the hard work we were engaged in could be lost. It could appear that the solutions to real-world, complex problems are too easy or simple. Social entrepreneurs run the risk of their messaging getting ahead of the content and evidence—the aspirational desire to highlight stories of change to engage others in your cause can precede the reality of proving the model.

Being aware of this risk means we must be cautious about oversimplifying our messaging as well. At Room to Read, we realized many of our supporters didn’t fully understand our model. They didn’t realize we were working exclusively in government school systems, not building and running our own private schools. They didn’t realize our literacy work was at primary schools for both boys and girls and that our Girls’ Education Program operated at secondary schools. They thought we were exclusively working with girls. Many of details of the “what” and “how” of our work were lost as we successfully engaged and inspired people to care and invest.

At this early stage of development, some of this disconnect is to be expected as the experiment of trying something new means all the details are not necessarily known at the beginning. Some larger and more traditional nonprofits in the international education space, however, criticized us for getting a lot of media attention and private investor funding without having the depth or scale of programming to warrant it. To some extent, they were right.

We took that misalignment in our messaging to heart, and it motivated us to bridge those gaps. We wanted to build a reputation based on evidence for the depth and quality of our work, not just for the story of the growth and scale of it. Room to Read’s experiences demonstrate that it’s possible to create an aspirational vision of where you want to go. Although success stories can get ahead of your evidence, it is both a risk and an opportunity that ESEs can adroitly manage to their benefit to drive their scale without misleading anyone. Disrupting the status quo has risks to it, but those risks should be managed ethically and transparently.

Transition Phase: Widening the Circle

As Room to Read grew, we focused not just on defining and sharing our message ourselves but also on empowering others to be storytellers for us. In today’s world, people crave involvement in activities that are aligned with their values and that have real meaning. ESEs are in the unique position of being able to engage people in constructive ways to change the world—which is the kind of meaning people are seeking.

We invited people to do this through our volunteer chapter network, where we encouraged people to devote their time and talent to helping Room to Read raise public awareness and much-needed funding. We started our volunteer chapter network in the first few years of Room to Read as a way to encourage people in different cities around the world to be the local face of the organization in their communities. Chapters largely organized fundraising events, thereby reaching out to their networks to support our mission and having a huge multiplier effect on the amount of funds and brand awareness we could build as a small nonprofit. Our chapter network rapidly grew in our first 15 years to more than 40 cities in 16 countries with more than 16,000 volunteers.

The unifying force of our chapter network is that everyone in it believes that education is a powerful tool for changing the world. Often, people join our chapter network because education defined their experiences in their own lives, which opened doors and created opportunities that didn’t exist for previous generations in their families. These individuals have been incredible brand ambassadors for Room to Read. We’ll talk more about how we manage our chapter network in Chapter 8.

We hold chapter leadership conferences (CLCs) regularly in which the leaders from different cities gather for four days in San Francisco to share upcoming plans and best practices, be inspired, and celebrate each other’s successes. CLCs are a highlight of our year at Room to Read, both positive and uplifting, knowing that these inspirational volunteers dedicate extensive time to help us.

We hear many stories at the CLCs. People share narratives of being the first generation in a family of immigrants that gave up everything to raise their children in a country where they could obtain a quality education. Or they share how they were the first women in their families to earn higher degrees, have successful careers, and choose their own spouses because their mothers and fathers broke from tradition. We at Room to Read have been lucky to tap into a powerful group of individuals who are willing to move mountains to make change happen.

Our job at Room to Read is to create the space and provide the tools to unleash the energy of these volunteers to represent us in their local communities. In the transitional stage of rapid growth, it sometimes felt like we couldn’t keep up with the boundless energy of our chapter network. We provided PowerPoint slide decks for them to use when speaking to audiences, event-planning toolkits for organizing fundraising events, and ways to connect across chapters to share and learn from each other. Because of this, our local chapters have played a huge role in the growth of our brand as well as revenues.

Many of our volunteers first learned about Room to Read through John Wood’s first book, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World. Having a charismatic, visible leader like John writing a compelling book helped us recruit motivated people who wanted to get involved. And the book was a natural calling card to many media opportunities, like John being a guest on Oprah and getting stage time at various conferences. As our communication messaging began to evolve beyond our start-up story, we regularly found ways to use media opportunities to attract new champions to our movement.

Events were another key way to widen the circle. We hold a wide variety of events, often driven by our volunteer chapter network, that range from large galas with a key theme like “Destination Literacy” to more intimate salon dinners, to casual gatherings like beers for books or Bollywood girls’ night out parties. Events succeed because key leaders and spokespersons can share their personal narratives as well as build a collective commitment of the group to act in supporting an organization’s mission. A challenge for all spokespersons at Room to Read was how to tell the story in the most powerful and engaging way for each type of audience. We learned some best practices over time:

• Share your personal journey and what drives you to do this work. This will connect with your audience.
• Shock people into understanding the need by using statistics and data.
• Use stories of direct beneficiaries of your work to connect people at a human level as well to the cause.
• Use more images and fewer words when presenting with visual aids.
• Back up your claims of success with impact and output data.
• Share examples not just about your programs but also about your operations to build confidence that you are a solid and transparent organization.
• Always close with an ask—to donate, volunteer, or take some sort of action.
• Take questions, if appropriate, from the audience so you can have a two-way conversation.

Tailoring the messaging to fit the audience involves customizing the style and tone of communicating as much as the actual content—perhaps even more so. After being on the BBC Women’s Hour radio show, Erin received compliments from Room to Read’s London-based supporters that they almost forgot she was an American because she altered her pace and tone so effectively to match the interviewer. This was a different style than what she would use for an audience of bankers at a corporate speaking engagement in New York, or for a group of parents and children at a school in Singapore.

Another challenging aspect of this transition phase was developing the skills of staff members—and of people in our chapter network—so that they could represent Room to Read in compelling ways. That way, we would not always be dependent on Room to Read leadership.

This proved to be a much harder challenge than we at first realized. We struggled for years to find the best way to build the capacity of others to tell the Room to Read story and engage a wider audience. Fortunately, a great opportunity presented itself when Ketchum, a global communications firm, selected us to be their long-term pro bono corporate social responsibility partner. They used their tested and proven model of creating compelling messaging and tools to help us empower anyone to represent Room to Read.

The central part of their process is creating a message map for your organization and then training your key spokespeople how to use it effectively. The goal of the Ketchum communications training process is to ensure all people in your organization can easily tell your story clearly, consistently, and with passion in every opportunity. As Ketchum says, it is a rigorous approach that combines style with substance. The goal is to identify the “radiant core” of your story, distill it down to key points, and highlight proof points to back up and support each element and to overcome any objections that arise.

In Figure 3.1, we share a recent version of Room to Read’s message map. Accompanying the map is a more detailed training document that has the supporting proof points for each box in the message map. In Figure 3.2, we give a few examples of these proof points.

The message map is not static. We overhaul it for each of our five-year global strategic plans. We also update and refine the map and proof points annually with the latest evidence. We then roll out the map and train any new staff members. We also use the map with volunteers, board members, and advisors—anyone representing Room to Read.

The message map is a great tool because it reminds us there is no single way to tell the Room to Read story. You can start at any point in the map and jump to any box as fits the situation. For any interaction to be compelling, though, it must be authentic to the person telling it and fit into the flow of the conversation. Because it simplifies message training, people can easily get comfortable with it, allowing us to widen the circle of those capable of telling the Room to Read story in compelling and consistent ways. The message map and accompanying proof points are not shared externally, but only used internally as training materials to build staff’s capacity to tell the Room to Read story in a meaningful way.

Since one of the best ways to make Room to Read’s work come alive is through the stories of the people whose lives have been transformed, we have hired communications officers in most of our country offices to collect and share these stories of success. We use stories in our blog on our website, investor reports, media stories, and public presentations. Everyone who travels for Room to Read is also always on the lookout for great stories that dramatize our message: the power of education to create a brighter future for the world’s children. We weave these into conversations and presentations, because although audiences appreciate statistics, they frequently connect best to the personal stories of transformation.

Often just weaving in a quick story makes a point come alive. When Erin talks about our Girls’ Education Program, she usually shares a recent interaction from a country she visited that year. She collects jewels such as what one of the girl graduates in Cambodia told her: “Education is like oxygen—it is what gives me hope for a brighter future for myself and my family.” Or she’ll relate experiences such as what happened when she attended a life-skills workshop for the girls in Tanzania. The topic was delaying marriage until after secondary school graduation. When the group asked Erin when she had gotten married, she told them she had waited until she was 34 years old—after she had established her career and met the right man for her. This news was greeted with spontaneous applause and a dance by the girls to congratulate Erin on being “smart” enough to wait. Or Cory brings alive how we work with governments, by discussing a recent visit with Ministry of Education officials in Nepal, the types of issues they raised, and the feedback they provided on our program.

Using stories to highlight the importance of issues is probably done best by Nicholas Kristof, an op-ed columnist for the New York Times and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes. In his columns, Kristof regularly talks about causes he’s passionate about through the personal experiences of people. As Kristof says, “Individual storytelling is incredibly powerful. We as journalists know intuitively what scientists of the brain are discovering through brain scans, which is that emotional stories tend to open the portals, and that once there’s a connection made, people are more open to rational arguments.” Room to Read was fortunate to have Kristof visit our work in Vietnam in 2011 and again in 2014 and write about one of Girls’ Education Program participants, Dao Ngoc Phung. After losing her mother to cancer, 14-year-old Phung had to assume many of her family’s household responsibilities. During the week, Phung’s father had to work extra jobs in the city to pay down the family debt, so Phung had full responsibility for her younger siblings in addition to keeping up with her schoolwork and other chores. Yet despite this heroic multitasking—which would be overwhelming in and of itself—Phung was determined to stay in school so that she could become an accountant one day. Kristof’s inclusion of Room to Read in his column was one of the most powerful media exposures we have received.

Mature Phase: Amplifying the Message

When we reflect on Room to Read’s evolution over the past 18 years, we are quite proud that we have built such a trusted brand in global education. As we discuss in following chapters, we made several key pivots in how we evolved our programs and operations as we have scaled Room to Read. Through these changes, we retained and grew our support base because of the strength of our brand. Corporate brands that thrive often represent lifestyles instead of products and indeed transcend traditional product lines—think Nike or Apple. Successful ESEs must do the same.

As we are all aware, the Internet has significantly changed the ways in which you can share your message and reach a wider audience. It allows you to amplify your message at lower costs than ever before. Technology is a great equalizer. Although most of today’s current technology platforms didn’t exist when we started Room to Read, we now actively manage our online presence to reach audiences through blogging; posting on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram; and through our own custom-built peer-to-peer fundraising platform.

We collaborated with the online and mobile fundraising platform for social impact organizations, Classy, to develop and be first to market with a cross-currency platform that allows our individual and corporate supporters to run a campaign that accepts donations and offers tax receipting in all our major fundraising currencies. These tools help our messages go viral, encourage others to tell our story, and spread news of the work we are doing. We also view our website as one of our most central external communication tools and devote a lot of time and attention to ensuring it is compelling, delivers a positive user experience, and drives visitors to action—either by investing in us or advocating on our behalf.

One the best examples of generating interest in and awareness for our work was our “Do Not Read This” video. The video was a challenge to viewers not to read anything for 24 hours and experience what your life would be like if you were illiterate. As you watch the video you experience what it feels like to go through life unable to read a street sign, medicine bottle, map, book, or website—something that more than 750 million people do every day. It was created by our communications department for less than $400 and went viral, being viewed more than a half million times. It was ranked in the top 10 social impact videos on YouTube in 2014 and won a 2015 SABRE Award, the biggest public relations award in the industry. Campaigns don’t have to be expensive or complex. Instead they can be disruptive, thought provoking, and, most importantly, easy to share to encourage people to spread the word about your cause.

Building brand awareness is more successful when social media campaigns are combined with our supporters’ individual networks and the networks of corporate partners. One of our media partners, Bloomberg, ran the “Do Not Read This” video in Asia as a free public service ad when it had space. This helped raise awareness for Room to Read as well as for eradicating illiteracy. We earned greater name recognition in prominent business circles from outreach like this. And we have received substantial exposure more broadly, as demonstrated by an experience our board chairperson had while traveling on a personal trip to Myanmar (a country in which Room to Read had at the time not yet worked). His tour guide asked him what he did. After mentioning his work with Room to Read, the young man replied, “Oh, Room to Read is very famous. We see it on TV, and we are all waiting for Room to Read to come to Myanmar.”

In recent years, the Internet has raised awareness and much-needed financial support through crowdfunding, where you fund a project by raising monetary contributions from many people, and peer-to-peer fundraising, a method of fundraising that leverages your supporters to fundraise on your behalf. Room to Read has recently invested heavily in building our technology platform to support peer-to-peer fundraising in multiple countries and currencies. This is a natural extension of our successful volunteer chapter network, building off the same principle that most people give to a nonprofit organization if they are asked by a trusted friend or colleague.

Erin remembers sitting in an Internet café in Ho Chi Minh City in Room to Read’s early days, overhearing backpackers searching the Internet for a nonprofit they could support after being moved by the poverty they had seen throughout Vietnam. At the time, Google was giving us free ad space, so a link to Room to Read appeared. The backpackers said, “Room to Read—never heard of them. Let’s keep searching.” At that point, Erin introduced herself to the two women and showed them her business card. They were mildly interested but not convinced. But today, many more people have heard of Room to Read from their trusted networks. Happily, now when we meet people on an airplane, at a friend’s party, or a networking event, they often say, “Oh, of course I have heard of Room to Read. My friend told me about you.” It is extremely gratifying to hear these responses, particularly when faces light up upon hearing our name.

We also have engaged in several “cause marketing” partnerships. Cause marketing is a collaboration between a corporation and a nonprofit designed to promote the former’s sales and the latter’s cause. It has become increasingly popular.

A great example of a successful cause marketing partnership for Room to Read has been with Atlassian, a technology company that builds collaboration software to help teams organize, discuss, and complete shared work. In 2009, Atlassian’s two founders came to Room to Read early in the company’s history offering to donate all revenue from every starter license subscription. The goal was to sell starter license subscriptions for five users, for $5 each, for five days to raise $25,000 for Room to Read.

As Atlassian was a relatively new technology company based in Australia, we had no idea of the value this was likely to generate, but willing to embrace innovative new ideas, we readily agreed. The $25,000 goal was reached in less than 24 hours. At the end of the five-day period, $100,000 had been raised. The starter license program soon became $10 for ten users, all donated to Room to Read, resulting in literally millions of dollars for girls’ education. Eight years later, Atlassian is one of our largest corporate supporters and has provided approximately US$7 million to date through our multiyear partnership agreement. As it has grown, so does its contribution to Room to Read.

Atlassian went on to become one of the founding companies of “Pledge 1%,” which is a corporate philanthropic movement dedicated to making the community a key stakeholder in every business. Pledge 1% encourages and challenges individuals and companies to pledge 1% of equity, profit, product, and employee time to their communities. Atlassian’s co-CEOs often speak publicly to incentivize other companies to join the Pledge 1% movement and highlight the success of their partnership with Room to Read. This kind of exposure from well-regarded, successful business executives could never be bought by money.

Atlassian and Room to Read continue to find ways to support each other’s cultures and growth. Atlassian in recent years has focused on getting its workers involved through an employee giving campaign called Dollars-a-Day, in which employees can donate out of their paycheck to support Room to Read’s Girls’ Education Program. We also host an annual trip for select Atlassian employees to Cambodia to see the work they are supporting firsthand. This is a great way to recognize and motivate top supporters of our cause.

One of our other successful cause marketing partnerships is with Tatcha. Tatcha is a high-quality line of beauty and skin care products. A highly accomplished female executive, Tatcha’s founder and CEO is a source of inspiration and role model for young women. When she started her business, she decided she didn’t want to just build a profitable business. More importantly, she and her cofounder wanted to improve the world for girls everywhere. The company launched the “Beautiful Faces, Beautiful Futures” campaign, in which Tatcha would donate the equivalent to one day of girls’ education to Room to Read for every full-sized skincare item sold. We developed a “trust” logo with Tatcha that states it is a proud partner of Room to Read. This logo appears on all its full-sized skincare product packaging. Tatcha’s initial goal was to support 35,000 days of school. Since 2014, however, Tatcha has grown so rapidly that it has already surpassed a million girl-days of school!

Again, Tatcha’s investment in Room to Read grows along with the success of the business. And we gain exposure to customers who shop for Tatcha products in high-end stores like Barneys and Sephora. Tatcha builds us into every aspect of its corporate culture. It trains its staff to talk about Room to Read to customers and make the connection between buying Tatcha products and doing good for girls around the world. The brand exposure is something we could never achieve on our own.

Taking every opportunity to tell our story has been central from day one in being able to build a global movement around Room to Read and our cause. We encourage all social entrepreneurs to build a strong communication plan into their strategy early on so that it becomes a part of your approach to growth and development through every organizational stage. Whether you are on a stage in front of an audience, giving an interview to the media, creating a social media campaign, or empowering spokespeople to tell your story, the most important point is to maximize every chance you can to build awareness and advocates for your organization and cause—a crucial key first step in scaling up.

Key Takeaways

• Create a complete brand personality or identity early on which to build your external communication, focusing on your organizational name, logo, tagline, visual identity, and the experience you want people to have when interacting with your organization.
• Take every opportunity to tell your story with simple, clear messages and powerful images to a wide variety of audiences, from individuals at events to corporate gatherings, conferences and already-assembled audiences as an invited speaker, and in traditional and social media. Building a wide and varied support base takes a commitment to external communication.
• Be careful that your message highlighting successes in your early stage doesn’t get too far ahead of the reality of your work. In the proof-of-concept stage, you need to rely on representative examples of your work to demonstrate impact, but be careful that the myth of your success doesn’t grow faster than reality. Eventually, you will need to bring in “hard” evidence.
• As ESEs, we are in the movement-building business to drive social change. Use a message map communication tool and training process to empower spokespeople to be able to communicate your organizational story clearly, easily, and with passion.
• A wide circle of storytellers for your organization is essential for creating collective action around your cause. We invested in user-friendly materials and training to ensure our staff, volunteer chapter members, and board and advisors could effectively be our storytellers. We all own spreading our story as widely as possible together.
• One of the most powerful ways to engage people in your cause is to tell stories of the personal experiences of the people impacted by your work. These stories draw people in who then want to learn more about the facts, statistics, and details around your issue.
• Many innovations are emerging that allow you to amplify your message to engage audiences in low-cost, high-impact ways such as social media, peer-to-peer fundraising, crowdfunding, and cause marketing. Lean into these opportunities to widen the circle of advocates working to support your organization.