At Totez, we believe in the power of storytelling to drive change. Our mission is to equip small and medium sized charities with the necessary skills and tools to tell their stories so they inspire people to support the cause they are working on. We aim to level the playing field with larger charities by employing simple practices and utilising AI ethically and responsibly.

Please note that throughout this website, when we say "charities", we mean "charities, social enterprises and other non-profit organisations". That's just too long winded so we settled on "charities".

Totez Charity Storytelling is based on our founder, Lynn Leggat's, 15 years of working with small and medium sized charities and social enterprises. She used to manage a grant programme with 34 small organisations who were able to make a big impact with a few thousand pounds. She has watched organisations begin to grow as they harness the power of the stories they hear and she has written thousands of grant applications, telling powerful stories to convince funders to choose the organisations she works with over hundreds of others.

The one thing that separates smaller charities from larger ones, is the storytelling resources they have access to. Larger charities can employ teams to tell their stories. Smaller charities normally rely on one person, often working part time and wearing lots of different hats. These smaller organisations have a big impact, but they do it with far less money. They struggle to grow and often plateau way before they have reached enough people.

One of the important reasons for this is that they struggle to be consistent in identifying and collecting the powerful stories they come across, and they find it hard to allocate time to sharing those stories effectively. There are myriad reasons for this, but time and confidence play a big part in creating barriers to storytelling that can be removed with the right support.

All organisations need to plan but in small and medium sized charities, storytelling is something they do on an ad hoc basis and they rarely recruit the whole team - staff, volunteers, beneficiaries to help. There are valid reasons for this, including issues of consent, privacy and safeguarding, but with careful planning and a system that everyone knows and follows, it is possible for your whole team to become involved in capturing, editing and sharing stories.

Most charities exist because someone experienced a thing, couldn't get help and decided to make that help happen themselves. People who support charities normally do so voluntarily because they have also experienced the thing, and they believe that the organisation is good at supporting people like them. Organisations grow because they convince people that what they do is important and that the world will be a worse place without them. The bigger charities are fantastic at doing this, but smaller charities find it more difficult to shout about what they do. They know all about the thing they do, but they don't always know how to promote (shout about) it.

That's where Totez comes in. We have a range of practical tools that charities and social enterprises can use to streamline storytelling so it is manageable. We can work with teams to develop a storytelling system that works to help the whole team stay within ethical and legal parameters, and we provide prompts and tools that save time and effort. We give you all the tools you need to make it easier for you to shout about what you do.

Explore our resources, try out the Charity Storytelling Coach or enrol on a mini course. Learn how your team can capture stories on the go and share them instantly using their phones. Become confident and skilled in fulfilling your obligations around consent, privacy and safeguarding, while expanding the number of people involved in telling the stories that will attract supporters. Find out how to get personalised support to get your whole team involved in storytelling.

One powerful story is worth a year's worth of data and statistics. Make sure you're sharing the stories that show people why you exist.