How to make your audiences feel emotionally connected without showing your beneficiaries on social media
Emotion drives action. If you can build an emotional connection between your audience and your beneficiaries, you're well on your way to enlisting the support you need - from donations, to volunteers, to spreading the word about your great work.
One of the best ways of creating that emotional connection is by helping your audience put themselves in the shoes of your beneficiaries so they start to understand and empathise with them. How? By telling the stories of those beneficiaries. By showing the trajectory from the 'before' to the 'after' via your support - how you changed their lives and what that meant to them, or how the potential outcomes of your research gives them hope.
But sometimes it's just not appropriate to show your beneficiaries on your socials. And if it makes you uncomfortable or it's just not possible then you need to find alternative ways of connecting with your audience. Here are a few ways you can still build that connection without showing faces and naming names:
Interview your service teams - these are the people on the ground and they see a LOT. Ask them about their most memorable moments working for your non profit, and what they love the most about their jobs. Video content is great for this, but quotes can also work - both help your audience to see what the reality of the illness/issue you work with is, and give them someone to root for. The British Heart Foundation did this recently with the team of scientists working on their Heart Healing Patch - take a look here to see how effective it can be to talk about the people doing the work day-in, day-out.
Break your stats down into relatable chunks, tailored to your target demographic. For instance, if you're talking to people in their 30s, rather than saying X% of people in the UK will suffer from Y at some point in their life (which feels big and vague) break it down into X% of women in their 30s will suffer from Y. Those stats feel much more relatable, and it's much easier to understand how a diagnosis or impairment would affect the balls that demographic are already juggling.
Focus on aspects of your beneficiaries' experience that help to tell their story without showing them as people. This post from Simon on the Streets is a great example - it breaks the big issue of homelessness down into the experience of one individual and the living conditions they faced.
In all cases, your focus on storytelling can remain but you can tweak the way you tell the story to avoid having to show faces, if that's not right for you.