What are some innovative methods or tools for presenting and disseminating your narrative research results?

For those interested in a storytelling platform, Medium has an interface that makes it easy to format your piece engagingly. Medium also has a vast library of content that can help you find inspiration – from images, videos, and illustrations to custom fonts. Additionally, Medium allows you to add multimedia elements, such as audio clips or videos, which can help provide further context and depth to your narrative research results. Medium also offers an analytics dashboard that shows how readers engage with your content – giving you valuable insights into what resonates best with them. This data can be used to refine your story further and ensure it reaches the right audience.

We have used archetypal journey/story structure to create segmented customer journey narratives. These archetypal journeys are universally understood and contain identifiable phases, drivers, and characters to help spark creativity and imagination in identifying strategic solutions and ideas. Personas help us understand who customers are today and archetypes can show us who they want to be.

This may go without saying, but when planning this type of research, make sure to share upfront the various ways it may be reported so that people know what they are consenting to and what protections are in place for their identity. Some people may not be comfortable with audio or video or, would be comfortable but only with certain accommodations. Always make sure the people you are collecting data/information/stories from know how it could be used and presented to the world and feel comfortable with the approach. This means, once you've laid out the plan for dissemination, they have the opportunity to opt-out without repercussions.

We've created podcast deliverables for our clients to receive a top-line summary of the research outcomes. They incorporate audio clips from our interviews as well as a narrator or commentary from our research team. It gives our clients a leave-behind or opportunity to share insights with teams before a presentation workshop. It's especially helpful for projects that require an extra layer of privacy, but it still provides that emotional connection with audiences without the video.

I have seen storyboards (on the lines of graphic novel/manga) as effective modes of storytelling. Communication via images helps mitigate language barrier, to some extent. Using the story board for qualitative data presentation as a discussion piece with the target audience would also take the dialogue forward rather than one-way presentation. I am working on developing storyboards to visualize and disseminate data from my fieldwork in South Asia. Any inputs and further suggestions are welcome!

Word cloud or cluster is also very helpful to draw meaningful conclusion from the data around certain themes and thus lead towards developing subthemes. Further, this helps to lay out data to highlights patterns, themes and crossover relationship.

Charts, tables and graphs were my preferred method in my book because it was a nice break visually from the text and it was the easiest way to shared the lived experiences of my participants.

Another way is through photos and films where the participants or community members can express themselves more freely. It gives them a sense of shared ownership that can catalyse behaviour change for better outcomes ( ex. health outcomes).

Create a story wall - ask all participants to free write along the narrative reactions, thoughts, ideas, suggestions and then collaboratively look back at all the reactions to craft next steps.