I spent more than half of my day yesterday living in someone else’s comment section.

Reading them? Sort of. More like writing them. LinkedIn replies, mostly. Someone is asking how to get donors to engage, and in a flash, I’m crafting a reply, long before I finish my coffee. Then another post puts the story before the data, without the critical missing piece. Active voice. I’m in the thread, building on the post.

It’s consultant work, to be sure, because you have to show up. Show up and do your best to help those reading the comments.

At first, I didn’t see it. But after the fourth or fifth reply, I caught it. Every conversation was essentially the same.

A fundraising coach named Kelvin posted about donor-centered language. His framework was solid. The right instinct. And I added to it. Active voice. Verb choice. Sentence structure. Then I asked a question he hadn’t. Who is the subject of every single line? When it’s the organization, the donors stay in the cheap seats, the bleachers. Or in the case of Kelvin, the terraces at a football game. They stay there, in those cheap seats, watching the story. Not living it. No one gave them a chance to interact with it.

An hour later, I was drafting another reply to another nonprofit communication expert. Exact same idea. Different angle. Then, I wrote a message to a founder in Montreal who liked one of my posts. I wrote it and stopped.

Both come down to the same question: who is the sentence about?

I didn’t think about the words I was typing. I just typed it. Then I sat there and read it back. Who is it about?

It’s not a fundraising principle. It’s the whole thing. If you could boil your organization’s story into one idea, it’s this: who is your story about?

The thing is, I’ve been writing long enough to know that sentences that stick aren’t about the writer. They are always about someone else. Another person and their experiences. The prison post I published, titled Forty-five Minutes? It’s someone else’s story. I had no right to tell it better than he already did. (I hated his choice of words, but that’s a ‘me’ problem.) I wrote Facebook copy for it, reading, I’ll let him tell it. Four words. That’s the whole job. Tell the story and get out.

The Gethsemane piece? Jesus is the subject. And He didn’t leave. The commuter on I-55 in the dark isn’t the point. The one who stayed? That is.

Same lesson. Every time.

Sure, you can write a sentence that is technically active, grammatically clean, and still have it be completely about yourself. We built a clinic. We changed lives. We showed up. The organization is doing everything! The reader gets to watch the action, eating popcorn from the comfort of their Nissan Versa in a parking spot at the drive-in theatre.

Or ask the harder question up front, long before you write the first word.

Where is the story?

Whose story is it?

Did you miss it when you walked right by it?

As for me, I draft copy for nonprofits. I write blog posts. I answer LinkedIn comments at 8 in the morning for people I’ve never met. And the work? It’s always the same. Find the person the sentence should belong to, and get out of the way long enough for them to be in it.

Most days, I have to be reminded.

Today? I got reminded. Three times. All before noon.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​