How to Bring Your Work to Life with Participants’ Stories

Whether you are seeking new clients, participants, donors, funders, or volunteers, you need your writing to bring your work vividly to life so they will imagine what it is like and want to receive it or help you provide it. Quotations and stories are the best way to illustrate what your work truly feels like to real people … but only if you use them effectively.

The last Flight Log explored what makes a quotation strong, how to fit them when you have very little space to work with, and how to collect good ones. Now let’s talk about how to effectively use participant stories.

How to Illustrate the Impact of Your Work

For your story to effectively promote your work, it must show that your work brought about a positive change in the participant’s life, and that change must be one that achieves your mission. If your work is about supporting youth facing barriers to success, for instance, it is not enough just to show that a 16-year-old single mother enjoys coming to your programming – you need to show how it is helping her overcome her barriers to success.

The following frameworks can help you guide participants to tell their stories in a way you can really use:

• • Before & After: Ask what life was like before participating in your program and what it is like now. How has life changed because of the program? You might find out that the young mother had no support to help her manage parenthood and school until she joined your program.

• • With & Without: Ask what the participants’ life is like now in the program, then ask what she imagines it would be like now if she had never joined the program. She might say that without the program she would probably have dropped out of school by now.

• • Internal & External: Ask about both internal and external changes, or you might not hear about both. If you ask, you might find out that she has learned parenting techniques like how to get her baby to sleep and that she has lost her fear that having a baby means giving up her dream of being the first in her family to get a college degree and a job above poverty level.

• • Do & Get: To really get at how the participant was involved in your programming, make sure to ask what she did and what she got. What groups or events did she attend? What activities did she join? What services and goods did she receive? Your story needs to show which program(s) she benefited from. If you don’t ask this question, you may also miss key information like that she received a refurbished laptop to help her do her homework and was connected with free childcare, as well as attending a support group and regular coaching sessions.

• • Staff & Peers: People often forget to talk about relationships in participant stories, even though relationships can be what makes the most impact on the person’s life. Ask how the participant has been treated by and connected with your staff and volunteers. If appropriate for the kind of work you do, ask how she has been treated by and connected with her peers at your organization or how working with organization has changed the way she relates to others in her daily life. You may learn that there is one staff member who she can confide to in a way she cannot do with anyone else in her life, and this person has helped her develop better relationships with her mother and baby.

Click to page 2 below to read tips on how to handle confidentiality when collecting participant stories.