STORYTELLING AS A TECHNIQUE TO PRESENT AND TRANSMIT MESSAGES

Storytelling technique, which allows transmitting messages appealing to the emotions of readers, is particularly successful applied to the field of development cooperation.

Author: Juncal Baeza

Storytelling is a term which makes reference to the art of telling stories. Over the last years, its perception as a tool applicable to all forms of communication has been reinforced. It has been employed more and more often in professional sectors, and not only in the field of marketing, its most traditional stage.

The maximum value of its use relies on its efficacy when time comes to transmit messages, appealing more to emotion than to reason. The narration of stories allows sharing and interpreting experiences, and helps building cultural, linguistics and generational bridges. Stories, much more than objective messages, work as effective tools of knowledge transfer in a social context. Indeed, the narration has the advantage of exercising a clear effect on the receptor, and can be a platform of new ideas, conclusions, interpretations and thinking processes.

Taking into account the assets characterizing this technique, its presence in the development cooperation field is increasing significantly, resulting especially useful in a context where promoting the potentialities and milestones of interventions requires more and more innovative strategies.

The common display of the results of interventions carried on in the sector of development, or of the contributions provided by Technical Assistances, allows drawing a detailed panorama of models, goals, results and impacts generated. However, in specific occasions it is essential to accompany this panorama with a snapshot whose strength can be the human and subjective reflect of the interventions’ beneficiaries, starting with the answer: which changes in your development as human beings have appeared in the framework of the Programme’s activities?

The Storytelling technique is very flexible, allowing its adaptation to different contexts and realities. Thus, in its application it is possible to design the structure that, from the narrator’s point of view, matches in the most harmonious way with the reality we wish to report. In this sense, Eptisa’s experience has allowed creating two narrative documents reflecting the impact of two interventions of the UE in the beneficiaries’ life. The first of them, young people from El Salvador in a context highly influenced by violence (in the framework of the programme Projóvenes[1]), and the second one, the society related to the mining sector in Bolivia (in the framework of the Programme Empleomin).

In both cases, the implementation of the storytelling technique started from a preliminary phase focused on the identification of key actors (taking into account criteria such as: role performed in the project’s thematic; personal trajectory; capacity of communication) and on the preparation of interviews that will be used for the collection of the primary data for the narration (with models adapted to each interlocutor and their field of influence in the framework of the Programme).

The next phase of field work has been then developed, oriented to the collection of data through visits to the regions of intervention, with the aim to acquire a synoptic view on the Programme. This collection of data, in both cases, has been realized thanks to the technique of Participating Observation, which is mainly used in Anthropology, where the narrator shares with the beneficiaries their context, experience and daily life, to know directly all the information they have regarding their own reality, acceding to the daily life of a group from inside.

In this phase, interviews, with a non-structured nature (open questions, with possibility of modifications deriving from the course of the conversation and clear references to the past, present and future) and non-targeted (focus of attention situated on the person interviewed) were oriented to picking up information coming from both theoretical notes (facts, anecdotes, systems, relations, etc.) and descriptive notes, essential for an exercise of storytelling, since it brings the immaterial part of the experience: emotions, feelings created, personal perceptions, etc.

The last stage of the process has been focused on the elaboration of products, in other words the literary reconstruction from the information registered in the previous phase. This stage is focused on a purely creative process, consisting in the framing of the information, creation of crossed stories, romanced writing of the most characteristic events of the realities reflected, etc. The stories of life and their actors are transformed in central and fundamental elements in the narration, the subjective component reaches a maximum in the literary expression, always starting from a basic message of what we wish to transmit, and the life of the beneficiaries is enhanced, creating a special content used to reach potential readers.

The diffusion of these fictionalized narrations represents an effective mechanism of visibilization of the impacts engendered by the interventions. Their reading builds a bridge providing knowledge of the beneficiaries’ subjective perception regarding their life and the changes experimented, hardly accessible through other tools.

Finally, the exercise of storytelling, especially in complex contests with strong personal implications, supposes an additional work of knowledge diffusion with an innovative nature and creating a permanent value able to substantiate and orient deeper reflections on the realities related.

This blog has been written for the blog http://www.societygov.org/

[1] Click here to consult the book “Vidas infinitas” in digital format (in spanish)