Stories That Move People: The Conviction Engine, Turning Compelling Narratives Into Action
Wednesday, October 21, 2026 (2:00 PM - 3:00 PM) (MDT)
Description
You've written a story everyone loves, with a genuine, heart-felt appeal. But feeling is not motion. In this session you'll learn why someone can genuinely feel your story and still not do anything about it.
The Conviction Engine is a six-stage model for how a story moves a person from information to action, built from thirty years of ghostwriting and instructional design, and grounded in the research on how the brain decides something matters. You'll spend the hour on the two stages nonprofits stall on most. Meaning, where a program description becomes a story a donor's brain will run, and Drive, where what they feels gets converted into what they do. You'll leave with two diagnostics you can run on a real appeal this week, with a pen, in about ten minutes each.
- A four-part formula for meaning, and the reason a single missing part zeroes out the other three no matter how well they're written
- The Engine Diagnostic: four questions that find the dead cylinder in any appeal, impact story, or campaign page, and the rule for which one to fix first
- The three questions every donor asks before giving, and the specific story they're already telling themselves
- The Drive Diagnostic: a last gate to run before an appeal ships, including a three-donor field test that reviews and compliments can't fool
- A way to read a piece that underperformed by the sound it made, so a flat campaign becomes a repair ticket instead of a mystery
Who Should Attend
Fundraising, development, and communications staff, along with anyone who writes appeals, impact stories, grant narratives, or campaign pages, or who decides which story the organization tells and how.
When
Wednesday, October 21, 2026 | 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM MT
Location
Online via Zoom | Will be recorded and shared to registrants following the event. Even if you can't make the live training, be sure to register so you can receive the recording!
Cost
$45 for UNA Members
$90 for Not-Yet-Members
About the Speaker:
Platte F. Clark is the author of The Conviction Engine and the ghostwriter behind nearly thirty trade nonfiction titles, bestsellers among them. He spent twenty-five years in instructional design, building programs for FranklinCovey, Tony Robbins, and VitalSmarts that were graded on one thing: whether anyone did something different afterward. He is a WGA screenwriter with a produced Lionsgate credit, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (2024), and the author of the Bad Unicorn trilogy for Simon & Schuster. He runs Straw Dogs, a ghostwriting and narrative consulting practice, from American Fork, Utah, and co-hosts the Author Unknown podcast.
$45 for UNA Members
$90 for Not-Yet-Members