Get 2 stories per person and

Method: Community meetings to complete the feedback loop and encourage action.

Didn't work. Orgs attended, discussed, but did not take action or coordinate existing work in most places. Not scalable.

Good uses for story data:• Improve organizational performance. Does your project address the right needs in the community?

• Project redesign. Search for new ways to address some complex social problems?

• Pre-evaluations with Grant Proposals – you can now make a more compelling case for your new approach if it is supported by patterns in stories before you try it.

• Advocacy and democracy – unifies voice

SACRENA case study:

The problem (2009)Real world problems are Complex.

Evaluations are not timely, affordable, and don't instruct organizations during the project cycle.

Pilot: Smart phone & computers didn't work; paper worked.

Method: Building and testing a variety of tools, to learn which ones promote organizational learning

Experience working with corporate partners to support employee giving

Method: Technology-aided feedback loops(listening vs. evaluating)Using paper to get stories, with a goal of using smart phone apps, SMS, and web communications.

Democracy branch:If we give communities a common voice, will leaders share power with those who have been given a voice?

Orgs want a more flexible survey design

What is GlobalGiving?A global market for ideas, information, and money that democratizes aid and philanthropy.

How do we work?

We've got 3,000+ organizations worldwide that we've qualified for giving. We are a non-funding, non-implementing partner. Our relationships are rooted in dialogue and mutual benefit. We help organizations do what they do more effectively; in turn, they help sustain GlobalGiving.

Where do we work?

Interactive Community Map shows alignment between an organization and the communities where it works:

VAP organization focuses on youth and education, but stories about youth often mention drugs. Addressing youth & drugs is a "missed opportunity."

Other tools:BigML -- mapping trends with large datasetsGephi -- mapping network relationships

Big picture dashboard: Explain the scope and quality of stories that mention an organization, idea, or location.

Custom Drill Down: Click any part of this dashboard to explore smaller clusters of similar stories by outcomes (success/failure), perspectives, and within-subject benchmarking (compare the 2 stories to each other)

"vaguely right" beats "precisely wrong"

Bubble charts contrast two story text searches:

Listen. Act. Learn. Repeat.Evolution of GlobalGiving's work to harness the power of citizen voices

Storytelling as big data

Method: Use SMS to promote dialogues (cheap, scalable)

Since 2002, GlobalGiving has helped 7,386 projects, non-profits and social entrepreneurs grow their community of donors and volunteers to raise a total of $80,185,026.

The Storytelling ProjectSince 2010 we have collected over 60,000 stories about community efforts in East Africa. Most stories came from regular people, not beneficiaries of our partners' work. Our network of organizations helped us find thousands of individual "scribes", who listened to others in their community, and wrote down these stories. We then tried to direct this feedback to community actors that can learn from it.

Today the challenge is not collecting stories, but turning them into a valuable learning tool for civil society. We continue to iterate on the design of the feedback loop and analysis tools, because this data's value only grows when droves of people use it.

This approach strikes a balance between many design goals:• depth of information• inclusiveness of all civil society efforts• cost-effectiveness - pennies per story• simplicity - because few people will fill out traditional surveys• benchmarking - anyone can ask questions about an org, topic, or location and compare to matched reference stories• real-time feedback loops

Horizon: cheap paper transcriptions!

Orgs want to impress funders by demonstrating their alignment with community needs

RED: Concepts extracted from organization docs

BLUE: words found in many community stories

Yellow: Locations

For more information, scan QR codes:

Built Freelay SMS gateway

SMS from Sadili: Would you like to plant a free tree? Sent thousands of SMS, no response.

Tried storytelling by SMS various ways.

USAID copies the method to understand why Somali youth join extremist groups and it works!

ActionAid

IFC

AidData

Cognitive

Edge

IDF

PLA

RETRAK

TYSA

TYSAVAP

Scribes & Paper

method

WEWASAFO

CHEDRA

SWIM

St. Vincent de Paul

iEarn

Comm. Xformer

s

BOMA

KCDF

EAAG

UN Global Pulse

World Pulse

Media

IPA

VAPMREMBO

Sita KImya

?

USAIDOTI/KTI

Funding dried up (2013)

PACT

YAUKitovu

Moma Africa

CUSO-VSOStorytelling project

Method peer review

What do you do when the community rejects an organization ?

Rockefeller Funding!

Didn't work; too complicated for storytellers.

We get richer stories from face-to-face interaction.

SMS requires a relationship with community itself; we don't have that.

you can benchmark data quality.

Read story:

Story exploration tools

PEDN

C4K

AMREF