98 - How stories connect us to the Last Mile

Abstract Information: Last Mile Health’s mission is to save lives in the world’s most remote communities - what we call the Last Mile. This presentation will feature three separate examples of what telling stories has meant to our organization, our communities, our government partners, and the thousands of community health workers we support. These presentations include:
1. Program Perceptions: on-the-ground qualitative research dedicated to hearing the stories and experiences of community health workers and the families they serve in Liberia. The documentation of these narratives provided extraordinary insight into the work and the people meant to benefit from it.
2. How the use of story-telling brought the results of a successful blended learning training pilot for community health workers in Ethiopia to national attention and adoption. Excellent evaluation results that were thoughtfully disseminated and well-packaged and communicated resulted in a story that captured the Ministry of Health, and multiple new donors.
3. Biannual data reviews that serve as a way of telling stories with evaluation results: with so many different projects implementing and evaluated separately, these in-depth reviews give us an opportunity to look at different types of data and different sides of our data to understand the story it is telling us about if and how our work is contributing to our aims and objectives.
The purpose of the presentation is to highlight the different ways stories can serve us as programs and organizations, and how they shape us - even as we shape them - in our roles as evaluators.

Relevance Statement: As AEA has noted with the theme of this conference, storytelling is essential to evaluation and serves many purposes. It is critical for evaluators and data analysts to be well-versed in the importance of the narrative, how stories themselves create impact, how data becomes a story that explains a phenomenon, and how telling a story gives individuals a voice. In this, evaluators have many responsibilities - to their subjects, to their clients, to the organizations or programs they examine - to the wider public who needs to hear their stories in ways that are compelling, data-driven, and most of all - authentic. This panel will provide a diversity of examples that demonstrate different ways of thinking about story-telling in evaluation. They will show that any organization can - and should - use concepts of story-telling in their evaluation methods, but that we can also use our evaluation results to continue to tell our story, driving more support for and impact from our work. Thinking about these examples has already inspired this panel to further consider how stories factor into our methods, how we can better capture them, tell them, and internalize them. We hope they will inspire others and generate a thoughtful discussion.