Reject cynicism.
Defy apathy
Celebrate good.
Here’s something we’ve noticed after 15 years of working alongside nonprofits and philanthropies: many organizations are telling the same story over and over.
A founder’s vision. A participant’s transformation. The impact of a major financial gift.
These stories aren’t inherently wrong, but they don’t show the whole picture. They rely on statistics rather than individual experiences. They fall into “savior” tropes. They oversimplify complex issues. And they don’t build trust.
Trust is the currency of the nonprofit sector, and storytelling is one of the primary ways that trust is built — or eroded.
That’s why we created The Character Triangle, a simple tool to help our clients (and ourselves) tell better, more dimensional stories. (Get the short guide, written by our founder, Kate Schmidgall, for a full breakdown of how to use the Character Triangle in action.)
The Character Triangle is deceptively simple. It offers nonprofit leaders and communications teams a clear framework for evaluating whose voices are amplified, and whose are unintentionally overlooked. Its goal isn’t to complicate your storytelling process, but to add dimension, balance, and respect.
If your stories are good, but you know they could be better, this tool was made for you.
In our work through BitterSweet Creative and BitterSweet Monthly, we’ve logged thousands of listening hours with nonprofit leaders, participants, staff, and community partners. We’ve seen what resonates and what unintentionally distances.
Most nonprofit storytelling struggles for understandable reasons:
Limited time
Limited budget
Shrinking attention spans
Pressure to highlight outcomes quickly
Under these constraints, common storytelling tropes often creep in:
The “Founder Hero”
The “Grateful Beneficiary”
The “Oversimplified Challenge”
The “Vanity Metrics”
These tropes aren’t malicious. They’re familiar, and it feels efficient to rely on them. But they often flatten the richness of the work that is actually being done. And flat stories don’t build trust. Nuanced stories do.
Great stories highlight real people and reflect both struggle and growth.
The program manager who’s been doing the hard work for a decade. The community partner who knows the full context of a problem like no one else. The volunteer who showed up for the first time last week with a fresh perspective.
Often, the voices that add the most dimension to a story are already present within an organization. They just haven’t been asked.
Over the years, we found ourselves looking for these people on every project. And eventually, we realized we needed a tool: something simple enough to use under deadline pressure, but strong enough to challenge our habits.
The Character Triangle forces us and our partners to confront a foundational question about every story we tell:
Whose voices are we consistently elevating, and whose perspectives are missing?
The framework invites teams to examine the balance of perspectives across their storytelling ecosystem — from participants to staff, from community partners to leadership.
In our experience, most organizations unintentionally over-index in one or two categories and miss powerful dimensions that are already present in their work.
When that balance is restored, stories feel fuller, more balanced, more respectful, and more trustworthy.
We won’t walk through the whole Character Triangle framework here. But if you’ve ever felt like something was missing from your storytelling, we think you’ll find it useful.
Thoughtful storytelling can still cut through the noise. Your audience is hungry for authenticity, not another polished report. The Character Triangle is one tool to add to your toolbox that will help you become more intentional at the beginning of the storytelling process, before you pick up your camera or schedule your first interview.
The Character Triangle offers a practical starting point for nonprofit leaders, marketing directors, and development professionals looking to refresh their storytelling strategy, without a massive budget or team.
Download The Character Triangle ebook to begin adding nuance to your narrative.