Story Gardening Step Five: MAINTAIN

(This is the final post in a series of six posts on how to create a garden of stories your organization can harvest for appeals, newsletters, gratitude reports, social media posts and more. You can read refer to my main blog page for the other posts!)

It might go without saying, but you need a system to maintain your StoryGarden.
 
If you've spent the time and effort to grow it...

If you've carefully cultivated the story soil in your organization, you've sowed, nurtured and harvested some of those story seeds... then you're going to want some kind of system to maintain it.

It could be as simple as a Word document or a Google Sheet. It could be something created within your donor database, a website page, a Trello board, or a custom built solution.

Whatever you use, it has to be a system that works for you—and for your organization's unique needs.

Here are a few things every system should have:

- name and contact info of your storyteller
- basic story details
- where and when the story has already been used
- where and when the story could be used in the future
- photos or video collateral that links to the story (or a link to that collateral)
- consent forms or confirmation that permission has been given to use the story and in what form

Ideally your system also has a custom form that helps you continue to capture new stories—as well as a procedure in place to move those story seeds through the StoryGardening process.

This is pretty basic, but I believe this is an absolutely essential component of any thriving StoryGarden. Anything you see that I'm missing here—let me know!

I'd love to hear from you if you already have a great system (or really any system) in place that works well for you!

That concludes my series on StoryGardening for now!

I hope you've enjoyed reading a bit more about this idea and please do let me know any thoughts or feedback you have as I work through creating an offering around these ideas.

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Maintain will be the fifth module in the five step StoryGardening process I’m creating. If you’d like to learn more – you can let me know here!