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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15 Nov, 2017

Are You Focusing on The Process or The Impact?

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:00:56-04:00November 15th, 2017|Categories: Strategic Planning & Sustainability|Tags: program evaluation, Strategic Planning|0 Comments

Over the past year, I’ve become intentional in transitioning away from focusing solely on designing and implementing evaluations to working with my clients on building their capacity to do it all themselves.

And sometimes, I like to offer aspect of my services for free as a way of establishing a connection with a potential client. From a skills perspective, this helps me keep everything sharp. From a networking perspective, this puts me on the radar for future paid consulting work and referrals.

Recently, I offered to revised an evaluation tool for an organization providing small grants to community groups seeking to reduce abortion stigma. They want to develop an easy-to-understand evaluation tool that measures stigma pre and post grantee project interventions and measures overall project success.They are finding their current tool–a survey requiring grantees to provide open-ended answers–to be challenging for most of their grantees to understand, and want something that makes the process of giving feedback easier to obtain and to analyze.

In my work with past and current evaluation clients, some themes I’ve observed related to evaluation are A) a level of anxiety around evaluation as a whole given that evaluation tends to get a bad reputation, B) an interest in developing engaging ways to gather feedback that builds confidence in evaluation, and allows them to do the necessary follow-up with staff and the stakeholders, C) a question in how to implement feedback, or D) a mixture of A, B and C.

I see this more so with clients who are more grassroots or have a community organizing background as they ultimately go by direct community engagement for feedback, rather than on evaluations. Also, there is a sense of feeling protective of their programs, services, and campaigns, and no one wants to see that what they’re doing isn’t resonating with the communities they serve. So, finding a way to gather meaningful feedback and be objective of feedback that may be interpreted as negative is a balancing act.

For some background information, grantees receive small grants to develop a project/intervention that speaks to a level of abortion stigma: individual, community, institutional, media, and policy. Grantees have free reign to create what they want, with support from the organization, I made some preliminary edits to the organization’s evaluation tool, and provided some additional feedback:

First, before starting any process, understand what you want to evaluate. In this organization’s case, the current tool focuses more on the process the grantees went through in developing their project/intervention from conception to implementation. This is called a process evaluation.

An impact evaluation, on the other hand, would focus on the impact the grantees’ interventions had on their target audience(s). If a grantee expects A to occur as a result of their target audience(s)being exposed to their projects, did it really happen? If not, what factors may have contributed to this and how can they be addressed.

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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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15 Mar, 2017

Reproductive Justice: Your Struggles, Your Recommendations [INFOGRAPHIC]

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T19:28:44-04:00March 15th, 2017|Categories: Equity & Justice|Tags: program evaluation, reproductive justice, Research|0 Comments

One of my projects for 2017 is the creation of a training series that aligns my business’ primary offerings: program design, program evaluation, and Reproductive Justice.

My original idea was to create a product or service that helps nonprofits evaluate their programming based on the RJ framework, based on my training as an evaluator with knowledge on different types of evaluative theories that I feel best align with Reproductive Justice.

My focus shifted largely based on my experiences with current and past clients. They shared that while they embrace Reproductive Justice, some weren’t sure how they could implement the framework in their workplace, on campus, or in their community settings. Some of their concerns included a lack of overall knowledge around RJ, an inability to explain what the framework is to various audiences, not being in positions of influence where they have the authority to include the framework in their programming and activities, or they see how RJ could fit within the context of their current work (even though the desire is there).

Plus, for a long time I’ve been hired to work with clients in a very siloed way, where they originally work with me in one way, and would rehire me because they see that they can benefit from one of my other offerings. I wanted to create a way to marry program design, program evaluation, and Reproductive Justice, and for it to be useful for clients, community members, students, human service providers, educators, activists, government agencies, and whoever else wants to see Reproductive Justice within the context of design thinking and evaluation theory. In essence, this training and toolkit is my way of intentionally shifting toward teaching and educating the value of design thinking and evaluation (along with Reproductive Justice) so that it becomes more engaging.

In order for make sure this training and toolkit will be useful, I conducted a survey to see what are current struggles folks are facing with Reproductive Justice, how they create programs, services and campaigns (and what are the driving factors behind why these programs, services and campaigns exist), and how they gather feedback that shows the impact of their work on the communities they care about. Using Piktochart, I created an infographic below that shares some of the highlights.

For now, this project is called the “Reproductive Justice Training & Toolkit”. When it launches (which is expected to be in early Summer 2017), it’ll have a catchier title. While the survey is closed, you can still share how this training and toolkit can help you. Email me at contact[at]nicoleclarkconsulting[dot]com and we’ll set up a time to chat.

And now, let’s take a look at the infographic:

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How to Weave Storytelling with Statistics

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

Try This: Appreciative Inquiry

What’s appreciative inquiry?

Here’s what you need:

Are You Focusing on The Process or The Impact?

Asset Mapping as a Community Organizing Tool

Reproductive Justice: Your Struggles, Your Recommendations [INFOGRAPHIC]

And now, let’s take a look at the infographic:

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