22 Feb, 2018

How to Weave Storytelling with Statistics

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2023-09-12T16:44:09-04:00February 22nd, 2018|Categories: Research & Evaluation|Tags: program evaluation, Research, storytelling|0 Comments

Dr. Jennifer Aaker, marketing expert and professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, once shared a story of a marketing researcher who asked students to each give a persuasive one-minute pitch to their classmates. While most students included statistics in their pitches (an average of 2.5 stats), only one student included a story in their pitch. Afterwards, the researcher asked the students to write down every idea they remembered from each pitch.

While five percent of the students remembered a statistic, 63 percent remembered the story.

The reason? Aaker offers three:

Stories are powerful tools that force people to slow down and listen.
Stories influence how people see you.
Stories move people from complacency to action.

Statistics may bring attention to a cause, but stories elevate their impact. In short, stories can give numbers more credibility.

Some people are hard numbers folks, and I get it. Especially if you’re someone that’s responsible for illustrating impact, such as a grant writer, funder, nonprofit manager. Social workers and others in the helping professional rely on hard numbers because it can lead to increases in funder for their programs and services.

It’s easier to pull numbers. Just create a survey and send it out.

But if the marketing researcher’s discovery is any indication, stories draw people in and have greater impact.

Take the “identifiable victim effect”, for instance. This refers to the human tendency to offer greater sympathy and aid when a specific person is observed under hardship, compared to a vaguely defined group with the same need. The identifiable victim effects puts a “face” to a problem, causing greater impact.

For example, last night, CNN aired a town hall featuring survivors of the mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in which 17 people (including 14 students) were killed. Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control show that, on average, 96 people die by gun violence every day in the United States. An average of 96 people doesn’t sound like a lot, but hearing the voices of the survivors and family members during the town hall (and seeing the faces of the victims from the shooting) literally puts a face on the problem of gun violence in America more now than it ever has.

As a follow-up to my “Who Are The People Behind the Numbers?” blog post from 2014, I wrote a Try This exercise on using storytelling as a tool for Reproductive Justice. Sharing personal stories resonate with us and helps to build powerful connections with others while also helping to build compassion, especially when we’ve never had a particular experience.

Sometimes seeing a high percentage raises awareness; but numbers alone may not fully capture the entire picture. And there are even people who say that storytelling should replace numbers. Don’t throw out your spreadsheets and statistical software just yet, but don’t stress yourself out with figuring out how to tell the most compelling story without numbers to back it up. Instead, use storytelling to make your numbers stand out (and vice versa). Here are 5 ways to weave storytelling with statistics.

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14 Feb, 2018

Try This: Appreciative Inquiry

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:11:01-04:00February 14th, 2018|Categories: Research & Evaluation|Tags: program evaluation, Try This|0 Comments

Have you ever noticed that when you go looking for problems, more problems tend to appear?

It’s like peeling back the layers of an onion and chopping it. It’s never-ending and your eyes water in the process.

The same goes for conducting community needs assessments. When designed to identify the pressing needs of a community, they often focus on deficits, which doesn’t do much for community morale. Continuous focus on the problem increases the likelihood of seeing the problem everywhere. This isn’t to say that communities should turn a blind eye to what’s happening, but there’s something to be said about raising awareness of this practice, as it can immobilize communities to create change.

A while back, I wrote a blog post on asset mapping as a tool for community organizing and engagement. One reason why asset mapping and similar strengths-based tools are growing in popularity is due to an increasingly mindset shift away from solely deficits-based to identifying community strengths. Whereas deficits-based practices are problem-focused, needs driven, and questions what’s missing, strengths-based practices are opportunity-focused, strengths driven, and identifies what is currently available that can be built upon.

Today, let’s look at another strengths- based practice, appreciative inquiry.

What’s appreciative inquiry?

Appreciative inquiry (AI) is strengths-based approach, developed by Dr. David Cooperrider in the 1980s. First used in organizational development and change, AI has helped institutions worldwide integrate the power of the strength-based approaches to multi-stakeholder innovation and collaborative design. It quickly gained ground in program evaluation following the 2006 release of Reframing Evaluation Through Appreciative Inquiry by Hallie Preskill and Tessie Catsambas.

AI focuses on identifying what is working well, analyzing why it is working well and then doing more of it. In other words, AI teaches us that an organization will grow in whichever direction that people in the organization focus their attention.

If this can be done in organizations, why not apply it to community change?

Here’s what you need:

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24 May, 2017

Asset Mapping as a Community Organizing Tool

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T19:34:14-04:00May 24th, 2017|Categories: Research & Evaluation|Tags: program evaluation, Research|0 Comments

Let’s say you are part of an advocacy group that promotes the health benefits of vegetarianism.

You attend a community town hall where residents speak their concerns over what’s occurring in the community and request resources that can benefit the community.

You stand up to the microphone, introduce yourself and your advocacy group, and make a suggestion to host a gathering for residents on vegetarianism. You share all the good statistics: Eating a plant-based diet high in fiber, folic acid, and a whole bunch of vitamins can reduce high cholesterol, lead to better weight management, lower blood pressure, and reduce the risk of heart disease. You make a suggestion of having your group facilitate a number of workshops in the community.

A resident raises her hand and stands up. Eating lots of fruits and vegetables sounds good and all, she says, but she and other residents have tried unsuccessfully to bring a farmers market to the community. There’s community support for a farmers market as it will aid in increasing food security in the community, but there are concerns that getting food at a farmers market will be more expensive compared to the community grocery store. Also, the community cannot decide which area would be best to have the farmers market. The community grocery store is located near the community’s most used subway station. And speaking of the grocery store–it’s not a very pleasant shopping experience. Not only does the meat smell rancid, the fruits and vegetables look questionable. Many of the items are past the expiration date, and the store’s electronic benefits transfer (EBT) system doesn’t work most of the time. Having a farmers market in the neighborhood will not only give the community another option to buy food, but they can also use their EBT cards to buy items at the farmers market.

Another resident stands up. He’s interested in creating a community garden because he likes the idea of growing his own food so he doesn’t have to deal with the community grocery store. There are plenty of vacant lots in the community, and he knows of a large lot of land near the community’s recreation center. There’s a”For Sale” sign but he doesn’t know the first thing in purchasing land and wants to know if other member are interested in buying the lot with him. In fact, he has no idea how to grow fruits and vegetables.

One of the most social-worky phrase you will ever hear is “meet the client where they’re at”. When you’re working with an individual (or a community, for this example), you may have your own agenda. Despite best intentions, if you can’t understand what matters to the community, their concerns and their successes, you will never find a way “in”. In order to build a connection between yourself and the community, you have to establish trust. Your advocacy group’s ultimate goal is helping communities eat healthier, and this community is interested doing that, but maybe not in the way you envision. So, what’s one way to marry your goal to the goals of this community?

Conduct a community asset map.

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8 Mar, 2017

Try This: Ask Better Questions

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T19:28:59-04:00March 8th, 2017|Categories: Research & Evaluation|Tags: program evaluation, Research, Try This|0 Comments

Starting today, we’re going to ask better questions. Questions that allow you to dig deeper to unearth richer experiences. This is crucial in gaining a better understanding of why someone keeps (or stops) coming back to your programs, products or services.

When I say “dig deeper”, what I’m getting at is being strategic in how we ask questions. There’s a difference between asking questions that allow you to truly hear what someone is saying, and asking questions because you’re searching for certain types of responses.

Digging deeper, goes beyond “I love it!” or “I wouldn’t change a thing”. People are coming back to you for a reason, and these reasons can help you enhance what you’re offering, and can also inspire you to come up with creative and engaging solutions to address other needs that you’re currently not addressing.

Tips and examples

Good questions are:

Unbiased
Empowering
Provide a safe space for the person to feel comfortable responding to
Stretch the person who is responding

I’ve highlighted the last point for a reason. Here’s an example:

Back in 2015, I facilitated a few focus groups for a client, a nonprofit that provides social justice oriented feminist leadership for young women of color. The focus groups were for the organization’s 6-week summer leadership program for young women of color in the New York City area. The organization wanted to know, among other things, how effective the program had been that summer.

Okay, sounds easy. I did a few site visits during the 5th week of the program to facilitate the focus groups. I had my questions ready based on the evaluation questions the organization sought out to explore. During the first focus group, I asked “Looking back on everything you’ve learned during the past 5 weeks, can you share something that you would change?” Some of the responses I got looked similar to “I loved everything!” or “I wouldn’t change a thing” or “Everything was good”.

Initially, I chalked it up to the participants being teenagers. Then I realized they were responding this way because of HOW I asked the question.

So, I tried a different approach for the second and third focus groups:

Looking back on everything you’ve learned during this program, if you could rebuild this program from the ground up, based on your own needs and interests, what would it look like?

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8 Feb, 2017

Try This: Roll The Dice

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T19:05:03-04:00February 8th, 2017|Categories: Research & Evaluation|Tags: program evaluation, Try This|0 Comments

Last month I shared The World Cafe as an activity you can use to engage participants outside of traditional means of collecting data. Today, let’s look at one activity you can use to guide participants in making sense of it all and drawing their own conclusions.

“Rolling the dice” usually means “let’s see what happens”. For this activity, it takes on a whole new meaning.

(Though technically, “making sense of it all and drawing your own conclusions” could also mean “seeing what happens”, but humor me for a bit.)

Here’s what you need

Two boxes that are roughly the same size
12 sheets of paper
A marker
Tape
Tape recorder

Ways to use this activity

I’ve used this activity in two ways: facilitating focus groups and data interpretation meetings.

Focus groups are generally used to gather feedback, and I’ve been asked to facilitate them as part of a program’s evaluation. In this context, each side of the die represents an evaluation question posed to the focus group.

In the context of a data interpretation meeting (also known as a “data party”), each side of the die either illustrates a piece of quantitive data (such as percentages from a survey or a report connected to the evaluation) or a piece of qualitative data (such as themes identified and coded from transcribing responses from a focus group). In simplest terms, coding identifies themes occurring across focus groups, informant interviews, observation notes, etc. With coding you can identify overarching themes as well as themes specific to the group or people in question, and this can be illustrated as a quote, percentage, etc.

Let’s create our dice

Take one sheet of paper
For a focus group: Write out an evaluation question you want to pose to the group
For a data party: Write out a theme you coded
tape the sheet of paper to one side of a die
Repeat for each side until all sides are covered

And that’s it.

Now, let’s see this in action

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While five percent of the students remembered a statistic, 63 percent remembered the story.

What’s appreciative inquiry?

Here’s what you need:

Tips and examples

Looking back on everything you’ve learned during this program, if you could rebuild this program from the ground up, based on your own needs and interests, what would it look like?

Here’s what you need

Ways to use this activity

Let’s create our dice

Now, let’s see this in action

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