Telling Your Story: A multilane highway

Imagine your constituents as cars on a multilane highway. Some of those constituents are donors, others are end users, community members, colleagues or potential partners. Each vehicle has a multitude of needs, often changing over the course of time as they arrive at their destination. They need different ramps to get on or off of your highway, rest stops and safe shoulders, fast and slow lanes and definitely lots of appropriate signage to help them make good choices along the way. Now instead of vehicles on a highway, imagine these are individuals interacting with the information your organization shares. Whether it is in the boardroom, on your website, or at the point of service, each individual needs to have access to the right sets of information at the right times to ensure their journey is comfortable and gets them where they want to go. 

Some situations require communicating only quantitative data, other times a story is the right fit, but most situations call for a mix - your full highway of information.

To truly understand what your organization delivers, why it delivers it and to whom requires a full range of data points. And while some entry points require fewer touchpoints (e.g. you are offering a service I need at a price I can afford) most relationships will require every type of data over their lifetime.

The lane for quantitative data tells a particular kind of story. I like to think of these as being on the far left side of the highway. These lanes offer your constituents a way to understand the size and scope of your organization or a particular program. Budgets, program outputs and evaluative data are in the right lane for those seeking to understand a particular kind of impact or a programs’ efficacy. It can be a critical onramp for donors and employees who need to understand the big picture of operations. A story about achieving milestones for a grant, for instance, requires a quantitative definition of the milestone and the relevant numeric data demonstrating its success. 

Qualitative data or stories belong in the middle lanes. These emotionally based stories usually present a deeper picture than quantitative information alone. This data helps individuals understand the impact your program or organization is having on either individuals or groups of people through the lens of human experience. It helps people connect with outcomes or the needs that are trying to be satisfied, to make them relatable. A story about wanting to address a problem requires both quantitative and qualitative data but is likely to start with a qualitative explanation of the problem first,  the emotional connection to what needs to change, followed by some numeric quantification of the scale or scope or the problem and how it can be addressed.

Finally, there are the pieces of data that don’t seem like data at all. Images and videos are the final piece of the highway. Illustrating your work so people can develop an emotional, relatable connection without background details behind it is also a critical way to reach people. 

Making an impact on constituents requires both quantitative and qualitative data, demonstrating the numeric achievements and their relevant personal impact, so telling those stories requires the same scope of information. In every communication about a program or the organization at large it is critical to consider the kinds of data you have access to and the kinds of stories you can tell with it. Do the pieces of information align? Does the information support the story you are trying to convey? 

Let’s go back to the cars on the multilane highway. Each set of constituents you work with needs multiple ways to access your story: their own GPS system helping them get on and off the highway at the right places at the right times. These directions about the multitude of ways to connect with your organization and services are your responsibility. Some decisions, like receiving services or small-scale mutually beneficial partnerships, might need one kind of data, a story about the impact you can deliver or the scope of the impact a particular program can have. Other decisions require deeper understanding, like multi-year grants. Those need a different kind of story that includes a broader understanding of the work itself, the impact it can have as well as a specific emotional attachment to understand its importance.

In some cases, the driver will need to spend time in each lane to fully understand what you do, how you do it and, most importantly, why you do it.