Helping Field Teams Identify and Write Success Stories with Impact
by Shivani Bail — Jul 6, 2023
Comms Ninja Shivani Bail writes about her experience in designing and conducting a unique Storytelling workshop along with Comms Ninja Sneha Ullal Goel, for Educate Girls on writing better case studies for their re-enrollment initiatives
Comms Ninja Shivani Bail conducting the Storytelling workshop for Educate Girls’ Regional Heads for Communications
For organizations working in the social impact space, talking about hard-won successes in an insightful and engaging manner lies at the very heart of the work they do. This is not a big problem when the person making programmatic decisions is the same person writing the stories. As teams grow and organizations expand their reach, this vital task becomes harder to achieve. Such was the challenge before Educate Girls, a non-profit headquartered in Mumbai that identifies children, particularly girls, who are out of school and does everything in its power to get them re-enrolled. They wanted Comms Ninja to conduct a workshop to train their regional communications team to help them arrive at a fresh way to write their case studies.
About Educate Girls: Educate Girls works in three states–Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh. It commands a team of more than 18,000 Team Balika volunteers and has reached more than 18.6 million children to date. Success stories pour in from every corner of each state and it is up to the regional communication team in these states to give these stories some shape and form so they can be used across the organization’s different platforms and publications. On a daily basis, these coordinators and volunteers question gender-based stereotypes and superstitious beliefs and practices. It’s one of the hardest jobs in the world. It requires team members to directly question the core beliefs and values of people who have not witnessed a significant shift in the pace of their existence for multiple generations. For many of the coordinators and volunteers, working with Educate Girls has also given them the agency to bend and test regional taboos by giving them a chance to express themselves and voice their opinions freely with their peers, irrespective of their gender. There is so much potential here to create content that really connects with a wide audience. The stories that were emerging from the field did not seem to be tapping into this potential.
The Comms Ninja Storytelling Workshop
After multiple conversations with the team from Educate Girls, we realized that the organization’s biggest challenge was that they had fallen into a pattern in which they gathered their stories. They really wanted to change their process. We studied their existing case studies to create a rough framework for the evaluation of their content.
We spoke to the regional communications team to try and better understand what they expected out of the workshop. This helped us understand that they needed to:
reflect on their internal processes, how they approached their stakeholders and built a relationship with them so they could get them to open up about their experiences
reflect on their own assumptions and belief systems that were shaping their observations and
think of other ways to document experiences and share content.
The workshop was then into three parts: identifying, extracting, and writing a story.
Identifying the roadblocks:
Activities were designed to get the team to reflect on existing processes, understand “the problem” they were facing, and brainstorm a new approach to the problem. In the first half of the workshop, the team discussed how they developed their stories. They talked about how stories that had a “twist” so to speak, were interesting to read. We pushed them to understand what this twist really meant. Did it necessarily imply making a sensational discovery or writing about a tragic event? We kept steering the conversation back to the idea that the team needed to focus on internal transformations as much as external events. Documenting the process by which a parent was convinced, or reflecting on a volunteer’s personal obstacles and challenges that shaped their worldview, helping them build a convincing argument when talking to a particularly stubborn parent or grandparent was as important as dramatic events in the lives of their beneficiaries. We were trying to get the team to focus on identifying the larger patterns behind the successes they were seeing on the ground.
Extracting solutions through role-playing:
We followed these discussions with a role-playing activity. This helped the team reflect on the way they approached their beneficiaries and how they conducted their interviews. A number of important insights emerged from this activity such as the fact that without developing a strong bond with their own volunteers, they would find it hard to extract meaningful insights from their beneficiaries. Their volunteers and field coordinators were the ones who spent the most time on the ground and they needed to be engaged independently and in a manner that helped the regional communications team really know them. The participants identified this potential area of growth through the discussions following the role-play activity.
Writing a story:
The final segment of the workshop focused on writing. The team was given three samples of text they had written and were asked to think of ways in which they could improve the text. The idea behind this activity was to get the team to think about their use of specific phrases and words such as, “despite being disabled” or “simple middle class” or “nation building”. This was an important activity but it had to make way for a very insightful talk by Sneha Philip, head of the editorial team at India Development Review, an independent media platform for the development community. Sneha helped the team understand that the focus of a story should not be decided before it is written. The focus, “angle” or “twist” only emerges after all the people who influence the story have been spoken to. This once again tied in with the idea that each story was part of a larger pattern of change that was being observed as a direct result of the work being done by Educate Girls. To get the team to think of these larger patterns, we shared a number of different writing samples with them from other organizations working in a similar field.
Some of the key insights that emerged at the end of the workshop were:
A story develops an angle only once every stakeholder has been spoken to and the writer has conducted a field visit to observe the people they will be writing about and the challenges they face. Pre-deciding an angle makes it sound formulaic.
Writers don’t have time to develop a relationship with the people they are writing about and this makes it hard for their stories to sound authentic because they aren’t able to draw out details that would help add dimension to their story. They need to develop a stronger bond internally, with their grassroots workers.
Writers need to develop their practice by questioning their own assumptions and beliefs and spending time reflecting on their own processes.
Workshops such as this one are an important exercise for any organization that wants to strengthen and empower its field team to collect meaningful and insightful stories. With the diverse array of communication tools on offer and the expectation that people working at the absolute grassroots level will capture even the smallest hint of positive action in motion and share it while it happens live, the pressure on organizations to train their teams is only going to grow. This workshop gave us a chance to help Educate Girls address this need and it will help us to tailor our interactions going forward.
