We have been working away at an exciting EU project called Narratives of Impact since September 2020 and last month we had our penultimate meeting in the fabulous city of Milan. The partners from Italy, Germany, Poland, Spain and myself (UK) got together to finalise the video guides that we have made to go along with a toolkit created for NGO’s, charities, and voluntary organisations to use storytelling to measure impact.

The toolkit is designed to help organisations, teams and individuals to use storytelling to to see what is working and what needs to be improved. Applying storytelling methods can really help to improve data collection and more importantly help improve services and delivery. Using different storytelling methods can help people to engage with data collection and learning processes in a creative way, enhancing inclusion and access, as well as interest and commitment. 

Each partner has worked hard over the past few months to create their own video guide and it was great to watch the final videos together whilst eating delicious Milanese pizzas. Marco from @COSV hosted us in the COSV offices in Milan and gave us a warm welcome. It was good to meet the staff and see where they do their important work.

The next step in the project is translating the toolkit into Italian, German, Spanish and Polish ready to be published in June.

Kath Peters, project manager, PVM.

Just before Christmas I was lucky enough to go to Valladolid in Spain to get together with our European partners on the Narratives of Impact project. Valladolid is charming old University city, and it houses one of the partners and the host for this transnational partnership meeting, Fundación INTRAS.

Fundación INTRAS is a non-profit organisation dedicated to research and intervention in mental health in the region of Castilla y León, Spain. 

The meeting was held so we could review the video guides that we have produced for the final toolkit and decide on final decisions for the final edit. But we also had the opportunity to –

• meet with stakeholders who are linking into the project 
• explore more creative storytelling activities 
• look at Quality Indicators that help us have a framework to measure success against.

One stakeholder is Abi Horsfield from Collective Encounters, UK. She brought some creative energy along and shared some different creative activities and methods that can be used to help measure impact. Encouraging ‘active listening’ with an activity called Concentric Circles this helped us to really consider the questions that we ask and how well we listen.

Elisha Chiesa from the Consorzio Comunità Brianza in Italy, showed us an interesting presentation about the important EPPICA project that she is working on. And we also heard from Maria from Zamora Rehabilitation Centre outside Valladolid, who showed us a film about how they have been using lived experience storytelling to support their work.

The energy and interest from these stakeholders have emboldened the project and demonstrated how relevant the toolkit and video guides that we are producing are. It’s great to have feedback and interest from other proactive organisations that are doing such important work.

As well as having the contributions from stakeholders we also explored the best way to use Quality Indicators and how to embed this when measuring impact using storytelling. We looked at what specific Quality Indicators each partner organisation would use to measure success against helping each organisation to build a Quality Indicator framework in which to measure success against.

Over the 2 days in the daytime, we were busy being developing creative and robust ways to measure impact, in the evening we were entertained by the fantastic Christmas lights that were throughout the streets of the city and were all lit by solar led lighting. This added a touch of festive magic to the whole experience without adding to climate emergency. What a delight.

Kath Peters – PVM Narratives of Impact project manager

@COSV, @CRN, @digitalstorytelling, @erasmusplus, @INTRAS, @livedexperience, @measuringimpact, @narrativesofimpact, @SNDE, #communityreporting, #livedexperiencestorytelling, @collectiveencounters

NARRATIVES OF IMPACT PROJECT – CO-CREATING A NEW VIDEO GUIDE TOOLKIT WITH EU PARTNERS IN BERLIN

Getting together with our European partners on the Narratives of Impact project is always interesting, productive and dare I say it, fun.

The last meeting we had in Berlin in May was all of the above and more. As part of the project, we are co-creating video guides to go into a ‘toolkit’ for Third Sector organisations to use storytelling as a way of measuring impact. 

In Berlin we ran a ‘living lab’. This is where we test and try approaches and methodologies out. This living lab focused on planning the video guides to be ready to film in July – September.

We spent 2 days at the Atelier Talk Studio. This is an art and design studio and it was certainly the right environment to get creative and to visualise the video guides. Together we worked on scripts, storyboards and generally planned the video production. Leon, one of PVM’s tech wizards joined us online and gave everyone a super presentation in the do’s and don’ts of video production. 

Challenges we have with co-creating video guides in this way are ensuring that they have a consistent design and look. Getting together to plan is a way to check that we are all on the same page.

It was satisfying to come away with a sense of achievement and know that we are all ready, nearly, to start to film.

Kath Peters – PVM Narratives of Impact project manager

This is the question posed by an Eramus + project called UNICORN that PVM are involved in. 

Well, in truth most third sector and non-profit organisations are often too busy working on the ‘coal face’ to put the time into audience building. But we all know how important it is to cut through the overwhelming noise of social media and reach the intended audiences.

Effective audience development can help third sector organisations thrive rather than just survive. However, audience building is very time consuming and needs specific skills, methods, and tools to make it effective.

PVM are working alongside Crossing Borders, Denmark,  Mine Vaganti NGO- Italy, VENSENYA – Germany,Comparative Research Network – Germany, and Change maker in Sweden to create a roadmap that third sector organisations can use to help implement and develop 4 specific areas.

• Audience design
• Storytelling and marketing (message building)
• Audience building
• Distribution. 

The aim of UNICORN is to produce a roadmap that supports organisations to get to know, find and address audiences and their needs, and to build trust and grow a community.

It was refreshing to meet up in person in with all the partners at the end of November in the wonderful city of Copenhagen where Crossing Borders have an office. We were able to continue to co-create the roadmap and start to design training that will happen in Berlin at the end of Jan beginning of Feb 2022.

Crossing Borders gave us a warm welcome and it was great to be in their homely office in the centre of Copenhagen. Surrounded by some superb wall hangings by the artist Anne Hedvard from 1977, that have powerful messages that are unfortunately still so relevant today. And, to meet the team and hear about the exciting and crucial projects that they are currently working on.

Kath Peters – Unicorn PVM project manager

Every year PVM have 2 meet ups with the Community Reporters. This is a chance for PVM to update the Community Reporters with news, opportunities, and developments and to find out what they have been up to and to get feedback from them. 

In September we had our second meeting of the year. The meet up took place online and we update the attendees of the work we have been doing developing our anti-racist commitments and the actions that we are taking to ensure that they are part of PVM’s everyday work, so they won’t be just words without substance.

Actions that we have taken so far –

• using anti-racism as examples in our Responsible Practice training
• increased the diversity of our board members
• increased the visual representation on our website and in the visual content that we gather, use and share.

As well as updating the Community Reporters it’s also a chance to gain feedback. This was positive and powerful with people saying how important it is to have a place of support and solidarity for people to come together to discuss, offload, and support each other. This brought about the idea of creating a regular support group. It was just the beginning of an idea, but we shall be exploring it further.

We also talked about the feedback, reflections and actions from the ICR conference that took place in the spring and discussed how we can take these ideas forward to shape next years conference.

The next online meet up for the ICR will be Thursday 24th of March 2022 from 12:00 – 1:00pm

Sign up through Eventbrite here.

Kath Peters – PVM Project Manager