Assessing Impact through Storytelling & Numbers

Managing environmental and social impacts is essential for businesses, investors and governments regardless of sector and geography. Whether driven by compliance under national legislation or international standards and treaties, today all organizations are accountable for identifying and managing the impacts associated with their operations.

• Storytelling provides a powerful means to obtain information and learn about the best practices and impact of projects and activities of grassroots groups from community members’ experiences and viewpoints. 
• The narratives offered by provide meaningful information that can highlight both the strong points and weaknesses of a project, as well as any unintended consequences. Storytelling can bring out rich, colorful, and emotionally compelling information. Sharing and listening to stories builds bonds of trust and opens doors for relationship, which is essential for creating change.

How storytelling can help impact evaluation?

• Impact assessment and evaluation generally doesn't excite people. This needn't be the case. Impact assessment is finding out about the changes that work has made in people's lives. This should be exciting!
• It's not the "why" that's the problem; it's how we're doing it. If you really want to understand things, you have to look below the surface. So here at Paradigm Shift, we've been working to find an alternative approach to evaluation.
• Narrative Based Impact Assessment through Story Telling and Story Collection - It aimed to capture the experience of people by asking them to tell stories about their involvement with a project, and uses different pedagogical methods; forum theatre, deep democracy and digital tools to aggregate these stories to give an overall understanding of impact.
• Digital technology allows rich stories of change to be stored, analysed and aggregated much more easily, cheaply and quickly than ever before.