At Scale Making Community Voice Visible

n the current debates around evaluation, quasi-experimental methods are considered by some to be the best way to know what works. They view narrative-based evaluation with some disdain. Stories are, they say, only perceptions. They can’t give you the ‘hard facts and figures’ that are needed to know what works and what to do next. And a handful of stories, no matter how in-depth, cannot lead to insights with wider relevance. Yet story-based evaluation has many advocates. A vibrant global community has grown around the ‘Most Significant Change’ method, for example, with other examples of story-based evaluation being the Listening Project, Swedish Reality Check Approach, and the Swiss Story Guide. But what if there was a way to gather more than just a ‘handful’ of anecdotes? What if we could combine the power of people’s narratives with ways to discern statistical patterns? This could bring together the all-important context and diversity of people’s experiences with the ability to detect trends over time with spatial, thematic and demographic patterns. Cognitive Edge has developed an approach based on asking people to share a significant story and code their own stories to put them into context, thus adding additional information to the story being shared. The self-coding is done with multiple-choice questions and polarities, but also through an innovative triangle. For example, people are asked whether their story about community change efforts is more about social relations, economic opportunities or physical well being. They show how their story relates to those three potentially intertwining meanings by placing a dot on a triangle (see Figure 1 below). Hundreds or even thousands of small, selfsignified experiences are then analysed using the software SenseMaker® in order to reveal salient visual patterns. People then debate these patterns, by reading story clusters, in order to gain insights about what this diversity of ‘voice’ is at scale Making Community Voice Visible