Why I Built Story Engine: The Stories Your Team Keeps Meaning to Collect
Written by Yoonji Jung, Co-Founder, Story Engine
You know the program is working.
You see it in the student who finally speaks up. The family that found support. The relationship that changed someone's year. You're in the room for those moments — because you're the one doing the work.
And then the moment passes, and the story goes uncaptured.
The stories are there. The capacity isn't.
Hi, I'm Yoonji. I built Story Engine with my business partner, Cory Shoemaker, after a decade of working alongside nonprofits through Good Creatives, watching the same thing happen over and over: the executive directors and program directors doing the most meaningful work often had the least time to capture it.
And research suggests this isn't unique to the organizations I've worked with.
The 2026 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report, based on a survey of 322 nonprofit communicators, found that many of their biggest frustrations weren't about a lack of creativity. They were about capacity, structure, and sustainability. More than a third — 34% — said their organizations didn't have a system for managing communications requests from other departments.
Story collection is an operational challenge.
The people closest to the impact — program staff, executive directors, volunteers, case managers — are often the people with the least time to stop, conduct an interview, document what they heard, get permission, organize the material, and pass it along to whoever needs it.
Even when organizations create a process for collecting stories, getting staff to consistently use it can be difficult. Nonprofit Marketing Guide has documented this exact challenge: organizations can build story intake forms and story banks, but keeping story collection top-of-mind across a busy team still requires ongoing effort.
It's not that you don't have stories. You have plenty. The problem is creating a simple, repeatable way to capture them before they disappear.
Capturing a story means caring for it, too.
And there's another challenge: collecting someone's story isn't the same as collecting a testimonial.
Especially when nonprofits work with children, families, people experiencing hardship, or other vulnerable communities, storytelling has to consider dignity, consent, privacy, and who ultimately has control over the story. Ethical Storytelling recommends explaining how a person's story will be used, getting meaningful permission, respecting whether they want to be identified, representing their experience with nuance, and giving storytellers a voice in how their story is ultimately shared.
That matters to me.
I don't think nonprofit storytelling should be about extracting the most emotional quote possible. It should be about creating a better way to listen.
That's the gap I wanted Story Engine to close.
A simpler way to capture stories as they happen.
Here's how it works: You pick the people whose stories you want to capture and send them a link. They share their experience through chat, voice, or video — on their own time, in their own words. Story Engine helps with the heavy lifting of collecting and shaping those conversations into material your team can actually use.
Instead of relying on someone to remember a great story six months later when the annual report or Giving Tuesday campaign comes around, you're building a library of real experiences as they happen.
My goal is to make that process accessible to organizations that don't have a dedicated communications team — while giving the people they serve the opportunity to be heard and to maintain agency over their own stories.
You don't need more pressure to tell better stories.
Because nonprofits don't need more pressure to "tell better stories."
They need a better system for listening to, capturing, and caring for the stories already happening around them.
If that sounds like your team, I'd love to show you what it looks like!
Warmly,
Yoonji Jung
Co-Founder, Story Engine
