My name is Slavica Stevanovic, and I am the Managing Partner of Qatalyst Research Group. This blog is about the importance of storytelling that captures our imagination for the field of social finance.
Thomas King once said, “The truth about stories is, that’s all we are.” They tell our individual, social and cultural truths. One version of the Aboriginal story of creation is that the animals created a home for a woman who accidentally fell from the sky, thus emphasizing the connection between the elements of skies, humans and the animal world – this interconnectedness is at the core of Indigenous cultures. Other origin stories, whether religious, scientific or economic, shape our identity and our relationship with the world around us.
Evaluators are storytellers. We use a wide range of tools such as statistics, the written word, art, music, photography, and scientific formulas to understand and communicate the impacts of interventions and the experiences of those affected. We have learned how challenging it can be to tell impact stories fairly, ethically, and truthfully. We have been trained to handle those stories with care, to weigh them against other stories, and to think deeply and carefully about whose stories we uplift.
The new field of impact investing is facing similar challenges. Today, impact reporting relies primarily on financial performance and portfolio-level outputs. That data is important and often easier to measure and summarize at the portfolio level. However, it does not tell us much about the personal experiences, trials and tribulations, successes and impacts on those delivering or receiving services or using products. It surely can’t tell us much about unintended impacts. We need to hear the stories of impact. But not all stories can be told; sometimes hard decisions have to be made about what impacts are material. Whose stories are important and how do we choose which ones to tell? Only the successful ones? How do we balance a big story (portfolio-level impacts) with smaller and individual (enterprise/community level) ones?
These are not easy questions. My team and I have recently grappled with these issues. We were asked to review the impact of a fund which invested in organizations delivering a wide range of initiatives. There was limited data available and many unique, community-level and individual-level stories. Our approach was two-fold: (1) we relied on traditional performance data (i.e., outputs) where it was possible to tell the larger story of the opportunities created and level of engagement; and (2) we integrated materials that the funded organizations had collected (photos, voice recordings, videos, social media posts, interviews, storytelling sessions and journey stories) to document engaging, visual and accessible impact stories for each initiative and organization. These impact reports were then used to share the successes of initiatives with the communities, raise funding, and demonstrate the outcomes achieved (see here for some examples of individual stories.
Lessons Learned
Impact materiality (or, more simply, ‘which and whose story’) is often defined as information required for decision-making and value-maximizing. This is one way to decide what impact to measure, but we must not forget that information is given by communities and should be serving the communities. In telling the impact story, we must ask who it is for, what it is for, what lies beneath the obvious, and what story elements are best suited to truthfully represent the impacts and capture the imagination of diverse audiences.
The American Evaluation Association is hosting Social Impact Measurement TIG Week with our colleagues in the Social Impact Measurement Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our SIM TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.
Thank you for the article in sharing your perspective on storytelling as another measure of impact. Appreciated it! BTW check the link to see examples; it does not work.