GlobalGiving - Story Tools for Community Based Organizations

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Social challenges are complex. Intertwined root causes affect infant mortality, unemployment, malnutrition, etc. How can organizations pinpoint and provide solutions to communities' most pressing needs?

Community members' stories provide snapshots about communities' realities. Our system maps stories' similarities and differences to tease out trends, which make sense of complex social challenges.

Organizations are better able to hear communities, and better understand how to make their projects align with community needs - improving quality of life.

Five GG partner NGOs recruited and trained 120 scribes who collected 2,637 usable stories about 242 different organizations over two months in Kenya.

Summary

This is a brief overview of the story-based method GlobalGiving piloted for monitoring a large network of community-based organizations. If you plan to implement this method yourself, contact us so we can help you.

Contact: Marc Maxson mmaxson@globalgiving.org

We gathered a large body of community stories that revealed what people in various communities believed they needed, what services they were getting, and what they would like to see happen in the future.
We analyzed these narratives for patterns using SenseMaker®. The contextual questions associated with each story provide a perspective with both depth and breadth:
- Broad enough to inform a local organization’s strategic thinking about the root causes of complex problems
- Detailed enough to trigger specific action by local organizations
We shared stories back with local organizations, thanked scribes and storytellers via SMS, and worked 1-on-1 to support learning from feedback. This part is still a work in progress.
We are sharing what we've learned from this pilot. We are enthusiastic about the potential of this method to inform learning and decision-making among implementing organizations, funding organizations, and communities. Here is an overview of the presentation we made at the American Evaluation Association conference.

Using SenseMaker® Analytics

We use Cognitive Edge's SenseMaker® Software to look for patterns in hundreds of stories. Two examples are shown below. In both cases, blue dots represent stories about more recent events and red dots, older events from 2007. Each storyteller was presented with a blank triangle and asked to place one dot in the space to represent how much of each element was in the story they told (social relations, physical well-being, or economic opportunity).

Stories about efforts tied to an organization	Stories not tied to any organization

Using story clusters to tell a story

When story "triads" are filtered using different variables, a common thread among stories can emerge. In the next example: Men (green dots) and women (red dots) talk about education differently.

Girls talk about education at an earlier age, and they couch it in terms of (S)ocial challenges and aspirations, not future (E)conomic opportunities or (P)hysical well-being. By age 16-20, girls and boys talk about education in terms of social empowerment and economic opportunity, respectively. By adulthood, women have stopped talking about education. Note that this is only starting hypothesis, and that a decision maker would then read the stories in each interesting cluster to see whether they jibe with his impression.

Story themes differ from project themes.

GlobalGiving requires organizations to update each of their projects quarterly. We asked a panel of experts to "signify" self-reports in Kenya according to the SeneMaker® framework. Experts viewed the reports as having to do with education and self-esteem. Storytellers, in contrast, emphasized social relations and safety as recurring concerns. Blue lines show the relative story count tied to each category.

"Social Relations" is the central thread among stories

Numbers in the overlapping regions represent the percent of stories that are about both categories.

Visualizing the stories

We are still exploring ways to provide everyone - especially the people in the community where these stories were collected - with access to the stories. The Ushahidi platform provides a map, and our project walls turn these stories into the beginning of a conversation. In the future, other people will be able to receive some of this information by phone text messages.

Ushahidi - Tool to Map Stories in Kenya		The Project Story Wall

More Detailed Information

The "Real Book" for Story Evaluation Methods - a 45 page manual explaining how GlobalGiving managed this project. It also includes details on how to detect and correct misinformation by storytellers, as well as suggestions for others who wish to adapt this approach. It is called a "Real Book" because we want it to be expanded and refined by everyone, like the musicians' Real Book.

Triad maps of all stories' elements - images extracted from SenseMaker®

Map of the story collection and feedback process

Steal these Ideas - A great retrospective on ten years of using stories to understand projects in development from Cynthia Kurtz (http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/)