Storytelling and Documentation

Every community has a story to tell.

Learning to tell that story effectively within your creative placemaking project can help you advocate for additional funding, learn from mistakes, and plan for the future. Communicating and celebrating successes—even small ones—as part of this process can help keep spirits high and stakeholders engaged. As practitioners, we know the benefits of creative placemaking projects aren’t always easy to quantify. Use these resources to help you capture the real impact of your projects within the community and share those successes compellingly and authentically.

WATCH: 

Documenting the Process and Communicating Success
A solid documentation and communication strategy help community members stay up to date on a project, inform potential constituents, and provide a record of the project for the future. In this video, Scott Oshima, at the Little Tokyo Service Center in Los Angeles will speak about a project that was well documented and Alexis Stephen of Policy Link will provide a great overview of how to craft and implement a communications plan.

Project documentation

Why is project documentation important? How do I communicate the value of our work? A solid documentation and communication strategy helps community members stay up to date on a project, informs potential constituents, and provides a record of the project for the future. In a fundamentally interdisciplinary and collaborative field like creative placemaking, robust documentation and reporting also allows practitioners across the country to learn from each other through platforms like this.

These resources cover the basics of documenting and communicating the value of a creative placemaking project—use them to help you share your work with the world.

Things to consider:

✔  What is the overarching story of your work together?
✔  At what points during the project can we plan for communication?
✔  What information or content should we plan to collect for communication?
✔  What personnel do we need to facilitate the communication?
✔  What channels, outlets, opportunities should we plan to use

Develop your story

• Know why you are communicating at this stage of the project.
  • Build support
  • Recruit volunteers or participants
  • Fundraising
  • Gather information and input
• What is the goal of the communication?
  • What do you want people to know or understand about the project?
  • Is there an action step you want listeners to take?
• Who is the audience for this story?
• General public?
• Potential volunteers or participants?
• Funders?
• Public officials?
• Peers?
  • If there is an action step? Who needs to hear the message to take action?
• When should you consider communicating?
  • Do you need information?
  • Do you need residents as participants?
    • Do you need funding?
  • Do you need public policy action?

What story will you tell?

• What is the umbrella for the message, the big idea?
  • The overall organizing idea for your project should be the starting point for all messages as the project unfolds. Repeating this idea each time you report or offer a call to action creates an echo chamber and offers a model for others to follow. Keep it interesting by changing the words— there’s no need to memorize an opening sentence or paragraph.
  • Example: A street painting project may have primary goals of pedestrian safety and community connection. Repeating these big ideas at the beginning of every discussion helps to build understanding that the art is achieving important shared community goals.
• How will you connect the big idea and your story to what the community knows and cares about?
  • Making the story framing relevant is critical to capturing the attention of the residents and other audiences. Because creative placemaking projects are responsive to and often led by community residents, this shouldn’t be hard. It’s helpful to use a news hook when you can.
• Is there a personal story that makes the point of your overall message in a useful way?
  • It can be helpful to generate interest by having a community member talk about the project. It is also tricky to tell a personal story without drawing the reader away from the community goals and focusing on the individual’s circumstances. Think about identifying a spokesperson who exemplifies the primary organizing ideas in ways that discourage a shift to individual circumstances. Even when offering a personal story, start with the big idea and then offer the individual experience as it fits under the umbrella.
  • Example: Hundreds of neighborhood residents are coming together to create a colorful street mural at the The Main Street Painting Party. Mary Smith is looking forward to meeting new neighbors and creating a stronger network while at the same time making her neighborhood safer for everyone. “This is going to be a great chance for long-time residents like me to meet some of the newer people—and that big flower in the intersection will make drivers slow down! I hope some of the people driving through will decide to stop and visit our hardware store or the diner too,” she said.

What information do you have for telling the story?

• Anecdotes and simple facts support the story
• Information gathered in community engagement
• Photos and video from engagement, activities, community meetings

→ Special Note About Data: Don’t overdo it on facts and data in public storytelling. These can be helpful in private meetings with decision makers, but are not usually easy to understand or persuasive in dialogue with the public.

Who tells the story?

• Lead with community voices
• Other voices can help too:
  • Artists
  • Community activists
  • Respected leaders
  • Elected officials

Where will you tell the story?

• Earned media (reporting in media outlets)
• Social media like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Next Door, LinkedIn, You Tube
• In-person events
• Webinars
• Email blasts
• Blog Posts
• Op-ed outlets

Do you have the right personnel for your storytelling?

• Artists
• Graphic designers
• Writers
• Videographers
• Photographers

→ Sometimes volunteers can provide these services, but in general creative personnel should be paid for their work.

Does your evaluation and data gathering offer material for storytelling?

• What needs to be measured or collected?
• Can you show how many people you reached?
• How many you engaged?
• Can you show what’s changing or changed?

Collecting stories

Basic research techniques offer opportunities to gather story material.

• Observations
  • Your observations, and the observations of core partners and residents, are central to the process of discovering what a project is all about. The challenge is to collect, share, and synthesize what you’re observing.
  • The methods you use to discover a community can help the project in many ways—they can in themselves be the focus of the creative placemaking initiative, they can be a part in a culminating event or project, and they can help you in your evaluation efforts.
• Photography and videography
  • These are common discovery methods. Consider engaging youth and professional documentary photographers and filmmakers to accompany the project and document the discovery process, design, and implementation. With photography, use common sense to protect the privacy and safety of residents, particularly with youth. You can post signs at events indicating that photos and videos taken at the event may be used in communications. Ask adults for permission to capture the image of children with them.
• Debrief meetings
  • Collect and document observations during regular meetings with partners or special meetings to debrief after observation opportunities.
• Report forms
  • Create a simple form with prompts: “Location, time, people present, what did you observe?” to note your observations. We have included a sample in the Appendix to inspire you.
• Journaling
  • Observations of partners, participants, neighbors, artists, etc. can be recorded in a journal (paper, voice recorder, phone apps, etc.)

TELLING YOUR STORY
→ Download the Worksheet

Additional Resources

Curated for you by the LISC team, the resources below provide models of best practice, insights from our Resource Team, and other extras we hope will be useful to you as you navigate your creative placemaking projects.  

WATCH: 

Communicating Your Project's Value
Communicating the value of your project for stakeholders, participants, board members, and funders can feel daunting. What stories do you need and want to tell? To whom? How will you reach them? And how can you convey your project’s impacts? In this session from the November 2020 Learning Lab for Our Town Grantees, Dr. Tasha Golden draws on her work as both an artist and health researcher to help attendees think through their goals, priority messages, and ideal audiences—and ultimately leave with concrete next steps. With experience in program evaluation and earned media, Golden reframes the dissemination process so that you feel more confident and creative moving forward. In breakout rooms, attendees will brainstorm ideas and successes, building on the group’s strengths and creativity.