I could tell you that Mercy Community Hospital saves lives.

Or I could tell you that it happened one Friday night last month, when Bob and Jane Simmons and their young sons, Michael, 9, and John, 7, were asleep in their red brick home in suburban Caldicott, their clothing laid out for the planned fishing trip the next morning. At about 11:20, Jane Simmons, 34, got up to investigate a noise from downstairs, lost her footing at the top of the staircase, and tumbled to the foyer below.

When Mercy Hospital technicians arrived, the young mother could not move. Later, medical specialists found she had suffered a life-threatening brain injury. “Everyone thought I’d die for sure,” says Simmons, who had rapid emergency surgery at Mercy. “Now I’m planning to join my family on that fishing trip.”

Too often, nonprofits simply tell prospective donors what they do: We save lives, we educate tomorrow’s business leaders, we shelter the homeless, and so on. As if doing good, in and of itself, were enough to warrant a hefty donation.

In fact, the best way to motivate supporters is to show them what you do. That way, an abstraction like saving lives takes on concrete meaning. Not only will readers or viewers see your programs in action; they will see themselves and their neighbors in the people you serve.

Showing takes a bit more work. But it can make the difference in communicating with donors. Here are ways to show:

Use anecdotes. My opening about Jane Simmons is a quiet suburban
accident story—just what’s needed. The reader is probably a young suburbanite with a family, and he or she can identify with a young mom whose life is saved at the community hospital. When you fall down stairs, dear reader, we’ll be here for you too, it seems to say.

Moreover, an anecdote allows you to show donors how a program works. Imagine that Mercy’s “rapid emergency surgery” was actually a new initiative in which response time spells the critical difference in saving lives. In that case, our opening anecdote sets the stage for explaining the R.E.S. program and how it is saving lives.

If your subject is an important new art restoration initiative, bring us into it through the story of a single painting. Maybe it was barely discernible in the past and now blazes forth in colorful glory because of your curators’ work. We want to know how that happened using the art institute’s new approach.

If you have professional staff writers, they should be looking for anecdotes all the time. If not, encourage development staffers who write your materials to take the extra step and search for anecdotes. It’s not easy: most of your nonprofit’s program experts won’t offer anything if you ask, “Have you got a good anecdote about that new effort?” But in conversation that expert will sometimes say, “Boy, I’ll never forget that day.” That’s when you ask, “Why?” because therein lies a story.

Anecdotes are a way in. They let the reader crash through the statistics (“More than 400 single mothers are being trained….”) and see a program’s impact through specific people. Major corporations and governments do this all the time: The Subway fast food chain doesn’t simply tell you that it’s possible to lose weight eating its food; they show us weight-loss hero Jared Fogle. The U.S. government doesn’t simply say that combat troops are heroic; it shows us the exploits of an individual soldier like Jessica Lynch.

Use small details. In a recent issue on the history of rock’n’roll music, Rolling
Stone magazine described the Sun Records studio in Memphis where Elvis Presley first recorded his songs as “about the size of a generous living room, with space for a small, rocking combo and not much else.” Yet it’s “the room where rock and roll was born.” There we have it—a living room with an historic role. Small details help build a word picture.

Similarly, you might describe an old campus building, with clanking pipes and a door that rarely stays shut, where super-bright undergraduates use advanced formulas to build racing cars that win every time. The pipes and the door give us a feeling of place, and once you show us how odd the students look, dressed in parkas against the cold and eating Chinese takeout near the chassis of their modernistic car . . . well, we’re ready for more. (P.S. Of course I’m interested. That could be my nerd son or grandson with the chop suey!)

Use details that are vivid and revealing—that somehow sum up the look and feel of the scene and grab the reader. Put us into the soup line, or the ballet class, or the wind tunnel, and we are prepared to go along for the ride.

Use striking photographs. One of the great astonishments of our visual 21st
century culture is how many nonprofits continue to run page after page of “football team” pictures in their publications. Rather than show a fascinating moment at a class reunion, an editor feels obliged to line up all attending members of the Class of 1956 for a group shot. Without doubt, that way everyone is in the photo—and nobody looks at it. Ditto those photos of people passing oversized bank checks to one another.

Short of hiring a professional photographer, every nonprofit should own a good idiot-proof digital camera and put it in the hands of someone with a knack for catching the odd, revealing moment that really shows us something.

Striking photos are another way in: They allow us to see the high-tech equipment and other elements of new programs in action and delivering benefits to the community and society.

If you’re Mercy Hospital, you’ll go out of your way to find the anecdote, the details, and the happy-now-with-her-children photograph of a young mom with a life-threatening injury. Show donors what you do, and they’ll show you what they can do in return.

This article originally appeared in Contributions Magazine.