Abstract
Nonprofit organizations have long used the personal experience narratives of clients, staff, and stakeholders in their communications. This study explores digital-age practices with this text form, analyzing 82 collections of digital personal experience narratives (DPENs) housed at or linked to Web sites of nonprofit organizations. Results are reported on the variety and frequency of the modes, featured constituencies, narrative perspectives, and digital interface features in the sample. Overall, the nonprofit DPEN collections sampled showed limited use of new digital production and distribution possibilities. Practice, however, differed notably between two segments of nonprofits: networks and service organizations. To explore these results, the article discusses key examples of DPEN collections from each segment.
Digital media would seem to offer new possibilities for a text form that has long been of interest to nonprofit organizations, the personal experience narrative. In the history of nonprofit communication, the collection and distribution of personal experience narratives for rhetorical use dates back at least to the first “house organs” of the early 20th century, when organizations published periodicals such as the Red Cross Magazine, which regularly featured narratives describing the experiences of service recipients and staff (Rozario, 2003). Like the Red Cross, most nonprofits, regardless of mission, are rich with compelling personal narratives that document their human impact, humanize their mission, and make tangible the work of staff members and clients. These narratives can be used for a range of rhetorical objectives, including recruiting clients and staff, demonstrating impact to funders, and motivating potential donors.
Prior to the digital age, nonprofit personal experience narratives were distributed through print newsletters, magazines, and organizational yearbooks; in videos; and through live testimonials at events. With new media comes new potential. Organizations can now collect personal experience narratives in an expanded range of forms and media, and they can aggregate these narratives into digital interfaces optimized for increased circulation and user engagement. Indeed, nonprofit organizations of all missions and sizes—from the Peace Corps, to the College Board, to the Church of Scientology, to Bucknell University, to local service organizations—have put financial, technical, and human resources toward building substantial online collections of digital personal experience narratives (DPENs). Some nonprofits group these narratives on a stories page of their Web site; others build self-standing collections, at times with artful and immersive interfaces.
My interest in this form has developed over the last decade, during which I have taught the digital storytelling methodology (Lambert, 2012) in academic and nonprofit settings. Convinced that digital stories produced by nonprofits had affinities with other personal experience narrative forms I saw online, I began aggregating examples into an informal resource that I created for students and service-learning partners, the Stories That Work database. 1 Using as my unit of analysis the collection of 10 or more DPENs housed at or linked to the Web site of a nonprofit organization, I report here on a systematic analysis of 82 nonprofit collections of DPENs from that larger database. The purpose of this study is to document the range of practice across both the narratives and the online collections into which these narratives are aggregated and to explore if and how nonprofit organizations are designing collections of DPENs to take advantage of the new production and distribution possibilities that come with digital media.
I report my results in two segments: the practice of nonprofit networks, which distribute information and unite people around an issue or cause, and the practice of nonprofit service organizations, which offer programs or services. In this study’s sample, the practice of nonprofit networks was notably different from that of service organizations. This distinction is less usefully interpreted as reflecting a fundamental difference in nonprofit types than it is as suggesting the different broad functions that can be served by personal experience narratives. Nonprofits might, that is, start a DPEN project with the aim of building an engaged network, or they might do so with the aim of collecting and distributing DPENs in ways that showcase the quality and impact of their programs and services. These different rhetorical aims require different choices of production and distribution methods.
I have found relatively little evidence in this sample to support the hypothesis that nonprofits might be producing and distributing new narratives in new ways, given the possibilities of digital media. The text narrative accompanied by a photo that was ubiquitous in the print era still dominates, and there is far from universal uptake of available digital interface features, such as those that make stories shareable or sortable or that open collections for user submission. This low uptake might be due to the challenges posed by implementing new forms and technologies. But it also might be due to nonprofit organizations’ reluctance to introduce social and interactive features to collections of potentially sensitive personal narratives.
Before I present and discuss the results of this study, I first review the literature on personal experience narratives, in general and in the digital age, and provide the method used for my analysis.
Literature on Personal Experience Narratives
This study focuses on collections of DPENs gathered by or for nonprofit organizations. Although scholars have previously described the rhetorical utility of personal experience narratives in professional and civic settings (Faber, 2002; Flower, 2008; Ganz, 2011; Higgins & Brush, 2006; Lay, 1999), there is far from universal agreement about the characteristics that define a personal experience narrative. Distinctions between narrative and story, and story and nonstory, have been a source of considerable contention among narrative theorists. But in defining what I would count as a personal experience narrative for the purposes of this study, I aspired to accommodate as much as I could of the wide variety of text types that nonprofits are calling stories.
The primary characteristic of a personal experience narrative as I define the term here is that it relays and reflects on an individual’s personal experience: The focus of the text is a central, main character and that character’s firsthand experiences, reported in either first-person or third-person narration. Not all texts with biographical details are personal experience narratives. For example, most nonprofits have staff biographies online, with each text describing some combination of the staff member’s education, work history, and current roles. I did not consider these texts DPENs. But I included in the study sample variations of this form that contained more personal experience, such as the online collection Stories from Nurses on the Web site of the national nonprofit the Nurse–Family Partnership. In these narratives, nurses in the program describe how they came to work at the organization and their personal experiences with clients. The distinction between these two text types—professional biographies and the nurses’ personal experience narratives—is that the latter move beyond professional details to present more personal experiences and reflection on those experiences.
Beyond having content that describes and reflects on personal experience, a personal experience narrative must have a minimal feeling of “narrativity” (Prince, 2008; Ryan, 1992). The narratives included in this study, however, need not have a well-structured plot or other features of carefully crafted literary stories. While much of the literature of nonprofit storytelling proposes an ideal story form with an expertly crafted plot (see McKee, 1997, and in the literature about nonprofit storytelling, see Goodman, 2013; Meyer Foundation, 2014), limiting personal experience narratives to this ideal unnecessarily limits the form. As Gerrig (1993), one of the early theorists of the potential of stories to transport and persuade, has noted, even a short clip of dialogue can take listeners out of the here and now, engaging them and making them susceptible to persuasion. Following Bruner’s (1986) well-known juxtaposition of “two modes of thought,” I use both story and narrative to designate a wide range of texts that persuade via personal detail and appeals to emotion rather than rational arguments and data.
In summary, in this study, I consider a broad set of personal experience narratives ranging from professional video documentaries that the Union Rescue Mission produced about their clients, to user-submitted written and Webcam testimonials about abortion experiences gathered by the prochoice 1-in-3 Campaign, to straightforward veterans’ profiles collected on the Wounded Warrior Project Web site.
The Personal Experience Narrative in the Digital Age
Nonprofit DPENs are displayed and distributed in digital media via the networked, public Internet. While new media never make a completely clean break with old media (Bolter & Grusin, 2000), the evolution of digital media production and distribution practices has introduced several new possibilities for nonprofit personal experience narratives.
Prior to the digital age, the cost and complexity of media production tools limited the kind and number of personal experience narratives that a nonprofit could gather. But today, staff can access prosumer hardware and software to create many narratives in a range of modes beyond text, including audio, video, and photographs. Scholarly research has begun to explore organizations’ uses of these other modes: Waters and Jones (2011) have documented the use of video by nonprofit organizations, and McNely (2012) has explored the rhetorical potential of organizational photographs shared on Instagram. In the past several years, the increasing availability and affordability of blogging platforms and multimodal, browser-based authoring tools such as Exposure and Medium have made digital text publication much easier for novice producers. These tools enable authors with no design or Web-coding expertise to combine text, images, and, optionally, audio and video, into attractive online texts in ways that would have been impossible a decade ago.
Distribution and circulation possibilities for such narratives are also different in the digital age. Narratives collected in networked digital spaces—on a social platform like YouTube or on an organization’s Web site—can easily be readied for procedural operations (Manovich, 2002; Murray, 2011), such as user sharing or sorting. Because networked spaces encourage two-way rather than broadcast communication, they allow users to both submit their own narratives and comment on those of others. And of course the narratives’ potential reach—both in geographical distance and circulation speed—is much increased. This potential for increased circulation suggests that DPENs might help organizations build publics oriented toward social change (Davis, 2002; Ganz, 2011; Polletta, 2006; Vivienne, 2016; Warner, 2002).
DPENs are addressed in the recent practitioner literature of nonprofit storytelling, which collectively argues that the digital age has brought new possibilities for nonprofit storytelling (Goodman, 2013; Miller, 2010, 2013; Portnoy, 2012). The practice of “storybanking” (Aaker & Smith, 2010), popular in online discussions of best practices in nonprofit storytelling, suggests that nonprofits should collect and archive large libraries of personal experience narratives, so that they can strategically deploy particular stories as the need arises. Some of the most compelling recent work on digital-age storytelling has been commissioned by philanthropic foundations, which aim to build the capacity of their grantees to tell and circulate impact stories. Examples include the Rockefeller Foundation’s (2014) Digital Storytelling for Social Impact report and its related Hatch project 2 and the Meyer Foundation’s (2014) Stories Worth Telling: A Guide to Strategic and Sustainable Nonprofit Storytelling report. Both reports argue that today’s nonprofits have unprecedented opportunity to collect and distribute personal experience narratives.
Despite these possibilities, research in professional and technical communication suggests that promising new technologies are often slow to be implemented. We might expect to see practices from old media—in the case of nonprofit storytelling, practices developed for print periodicals or formal agency videos—to be the initial default in new media. New technologies and genres are always deployed in existing ecologies (DeVoss, McKee, & Selfe, 2009; Nardi & O’Day, 1999), with existing social practices and physical environments circumscribing the possibilities for the new. Also, nonprofit organizations might choose to move slowly in implementing new digital technologies. As the digital ethicist Ess (2009) has argued, digital media are “greased,” meaning nonprofit DPENs can now travel far beyond their initial distribution contexts, introducing new ethical complexities. Increased circulation is not always desirable, particularly when texts are highly personal. Practitioners of digital storytelling have been particularly sensitive to the ethical perils of wide distribution of personal narratives (Dush, 2013; Gubrium, Hill, & Flicker, 2013; Lambert, 2012; Vivienne, 2016; Vivienne & Burgess, 2012, 2013).
We have little research on how these possibilities and challenges have influenced nonprofits’ practice with DPENs. The Meyer Foundation (2014) report is an important precursor to this study because it presents the only available quantitative findings about nonprofit storytelling in the digital age. For that report, researchers from Georgetown University’s Center for Social Impact Communication surveyed the Meyer Foundation’s grantees, studying 355 stories across 150 nonprofit organizations, and drew conclusions about both the nature of these stories and how the stories were distributed. The report predicts many of this study’s findings, noting a dominance of text stories and third-person stories and little use of digital interface features such as share buttons or user-submission mechanisms.
Method
Two sets of research questions guided this study:
To investigate these questions, I worked with a small team of graduate-student researchers, using the key principles and procedures of qualitative text analysis (Kuckartz, 2014; Merriam, 2009; Saldana, 2012) and qualitative content analysis (Altheide & Schneider, 2012; Mayring, 2014). These methods all suggest that researchers must select a unit of analysis, determine an appropriate and feasible sampling method, achieve coder reliability, code data, and analyze results. Several important challenges and priorities, however, informed how I deployed these core processes. First, sampling was a challenge because nonprofit DPEN collections have no central repository. I can claim, then, that my final sample of 82 collections is diverse but not that it is representative. Second, because of the paucity of prior research on the DPEN form, I needed to take particular care and use recursivity when developing coding variables and values. And third, this study was connected to an ongoing project to build and test a practitioner and pedagogical tool, the Stories That Work database. In tandem with that project, graduate students identified DPEN collections for the final data set and coded data. The students’ assistance was essential in helping me to broaden my set of collections and test and revise coding schemes.
Data Collection and Selection
The 82 DPEN collections analyzed in this study were part of a larger set of 223 collections that I, along with several graduate-student assistants and students in a graduate-level digital storytelling course, gathered over a 3-year period for inclusion in the Stories That Work database. Each collection meets the following criteria:
It includes at least three narratives. It is housed on or linked to the official Web site of its sponsoring organization. It includes only personal narratives that present stories or biographical details of particular individuals, and these details are not just related to the individual’s profession. Its narratives are used for noncommercial aims (i.e., they serve a nonprofit or public service organization or cause). It was first put on the Web between 2006 and 2015 and is still online at the time of the analysis.
The larger set of collections in the online database came from four main sources: (a) media practitioner referrals; (b) mentions by popular press, industry press, scholarly literature, or a prize-granting entity; (c) serendipity, including referrals from social platforms and word of mouth; and (d) targeted searches using Google or Charity Navigator (used to find DPEN collections by nonprofits with missions underrepresented in the study). Table 1 shows a breakdown of the sources of the collections I analyzed.
Sources of the 82 Nonprofit DPEN Collections Sampled.
Note. DPEN = digital personal experience narrative.
To select the collections for analysis in this study, I eliminated those produced as media or documentary projects, which were not appropriate for this study of nonprofit practice, as well as those containing fewer than 10 narratives. I selected the final sample of 82 with an aim toward a balanced distribution by date and organizational mission across two primary segments of nonprofits that were identified in an early round of coding as networks and service organizations.
Nonprofits in the networks segment included societies, affiliations, and initiatives that primarily distribute information and unite people around an issue or cause. Nonprofits in this segment included public health campaigns, societies and foundations (e.g., the National Multiple Sclerosis Society; the American Cancer Society), and umbrella organizations for some service providers (e.g., the official Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). Nonprofits in the service organizations segment include brick-and-mortar organizations that provide programs or services. Nonprofits in the service organizations segment included schools and educational programs, individual churches, hospitals, and social-service and human-service agencies.
An equal number of DPEN collections from networks and service organizations were included in the sample. The final set of 82 included collections from nonprofits in six key nonprofit mission categories, with representation of sectors as follows: human services (n = 31), health (n = 20), education (n = 16), religion (n = 6), environment (n = 5), and gender, sexuality (n = 4). The set included DPEN collections initiated between 2006 and 2015, with most of the collections (69 of 82) posted between 2010 and 2015. Tables 2 and 3, respectively, show the sample’s exact distribution by nonprofit missions and by the year that the first narratives were posted in DPEN collections.
Distribution, by Organizational Mission, of the 82 Nonprofit DPEN Collections Sampled.
Note. Mission was assigned by choosing from a slightly modified version of the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities Core Codes (NTEE-CC). Two categories were eliminated from the NTEE-CC codes: arts and culture (too few collections of this mission were identified) and youth (in all cases, such organizations could be coded with another mission). DPEN = digital personal experience narrative.
Distribution, by Year, of the 82 Nonprofit DPEN Collections Sampled.
Note. Year represents the year that the first DPEN in the collection was posted. Dates were determined by examining posting dates on individual stories; when no date could be found, we searched the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/index.php), which keeps snapshots of Web sites archived by date, until we found the earliest archived page with and without the stories. DPEN = digital personal experience narrative.
Finally, while all collections in the sample included at least 10 personal experience narratives, collections varied in size: Of the collections analyzed, 21% had 10–19 narratives (12% of network collections, 29% of service organization collections), and 79% had 20 or more narratives (88% of network collections, 71% of service organization collections).
Data Analysis
The analysis variables and values that I used in coding these collections (see Table 4 and Appendix A) were developed and applied over three rounds of coding. Along with a graduate assistant, I conducted the first round in November 2014: By open coding 89 DPEN collections, we devised a set of provisional variables and values to account for the variation we saw in the collections. We recorded, for all variables coded, except for collection features, both dominant and secondary values. For example, for a collection of text narratives that also included several videos, we recorded the mode, dominant as text only and the mode, secondary as videos. We revised problematic variables and values—those that we found difficult to apply or that had low intercoder agreement—and a second round of coding was done as an assignment in my graduate-level digital storytelling course in June 2015, in which 18 students applied the revised variables and values to a total of 90 new collections. After this exercise, I revised the coding scheme again to address problems of clarity and intercoder agreement.
Variables and Values Used to Analyze the Nonprofit DPEN Collections Sampled.
Note. DPEN = digital personal experience narrative.
We completed a final round of coding in July 2015, using the revised coding scheme in Table 4 and the 82 DPEN collections included in the final sample. I coded all the DPEN collections, and a graduate assistant tested reliability by coding 22% of the sample. Intercoder reliability by percentage of simple agreement ranged from 78% to 89%, with an average of 85%. In most cases, lower intercoder agreement was due to one coder overlooking a secondary type in the collection, such as when a smaller set of staff narratives were buried within a collection composed primarily of client narratives.
After coding the data, I used Microsoft Excel to calculate frequencies and identify trends within and across the network and service organization segments. Pivot tables were key in this process (Jelen & Alexander, 2013); with this relatively small data set, pivot tables encouraged movement between quantitative tallies and attention to and exploration of the collections themselves. For example, by double clicking on a tally number in a pivot table, I could isolate for closer scrutiny a list of collections with a particular feature and revisit these collections within their organizations’ Web sites. I also reviewed the primary and secondary counts to verify only or dominant or present, but not dominant frequencies in results.
Once frequencies were established, I selected collections to report on in the Discussion section. Because these collections are online, they might have been revised, updated, or even deleted by their sponsoring organizations subsequent to my analysis. To account for this possibility, I provide detailed descriptions, links to archived versions of collections (see Appendix B), and, where possible, screenshots so that readers can have an accurate portrayal of the collection as it was when I analyzed it.
Results
In this section, I discuss the findings for the two sets of research questions that guided this study.
Nonprofits producing DPENs have a variety of options for what modes to use, who to feature in their narratives, and what narrative point of view to use. Within the 82 collections, narratives were told in the following modes: audio recordings, audio–photo slide shows, text only, text with photographs, and videos. Narratives were told by or about main characters with the following relationships to the sponsoring organization: clients, staff, other affiliates (e.g., donors, volunteers, and board members), and unaffiliated issue stakeholders (i.e., people unaffiliated with the sponsoring organization but who have a direct interest in the issue addressed by the project or organization). Narratives were either in first-person or third-person perspectives.
The analysis of frequencies that follows suggests three overall conclusions that frame the individual results reported here. First, the sample displayed notable differences between the practices of networks and service organizations. Second, the majority of collections in the sample were homogeneous in their approach: Of the 82 DPEN collections, 49 (60%) contained narratives in one mode, 63 (77%) featured just one organizational constituent type in their collections, and 57 (70%) told all narratives from the same perspective. Third, despite the possibility that nonprofits might produce narratives in new ways, given new media, the majority of narratives in the sample echoed forms established in the print era.
Modes: Text Narratives With Photographs Were Most Common
Table 5 shows the distribution of modes across the 82 collections, segmented by networks and service organizations. The most represented modes across both segments were text narratives with photographs—this was the only or dominant mode in 57 of the 82 (70%) of the collections analyzed. These texts often contained only a single photograph. Nonprofits in the service organizations segment had higher numbers of text narratives with photographs as their dominant or only mode (32 of 41, or 78%) than did nonprofits in the networks segment (25 of 41, or 61%).
Representation of Modes in the 82 DPEN Collections Sampled.
Note. DPEN = digital personal experience narrative.
The next-most prevalent mode in the sample was videos. Although videos were seldom the dominant or only mode (8 of 41, or 20%) for both segments of nonprofits, they were often present in collections dominated by other modes. Videos were present but not dominant in 15 of the 41 DPEN collections of networks (37%) and in 8 of the 41 DPEN collections of service organizations (20%). While the digital age theoretically allows nonprofits to tell narratives in a plethora of modes, some modes were barely represented in this sample: Neither audio recordings nor audio–photo slide shows were present in more than 5% of the collections.
Featured Constituencies: Service Organizations’ Narratives Primarily Featured Clients
Of the 82 collections, I can report on the constituencies featured in the collections of the 41 service organizations. My research team found it impossible, however, to identify whether those featured in the collections of networks had an affiliation with the sponsoring organization. Because we were unable to make a clear assessment about the featured constituencies in the network collections, I report only on those of the service organizations. Table 6 summarizes these results.
Representation of Featured Constituencies in the 41 Service Organization DPEN Collections Sampled.
Note. DPEN = digital personal experience narrative.
For service organizations—brick-and-mortar organizations that provide programs or services—the vast majority of people featured in narratives were clients: those receiving the services of the organization sponsoring the DPEN collection. We classified as clients those receiving both paid services and free services, such as members (e.g., of churches, of botanical gardens) and students in educational organizations. Organization clients were the featured constituency in 35 (85%) of the 41 service organization DPEN collections. Three organizations (7%) featured only or primarily staff in their DPEN collections. But more common were those organizations whose DPEN collections were primarily client narratives but had some supporting narratives about staff (12 of 41 service organizations, or 29%). A small number of collections (3, or 7%) featured only or primarily other organizational affiliates, who were either donors or volunteers, and 8 (20%) of the service organization collections included some narratives that featured these other affiliates.
Narrative Perspective: Network DPEN Collections Included More First-Person Narratives, and Service Organization Collections Included More Third-Person Narratives
In the overall sample, there was a relatively balanced representation of first-person and third-person narratives: First-person narratives were the only or dominant perspective in 45 of the 82 collections (55%), and third-person narratives were the only or dominant perspective in 37 collections (45%). But when we look at the results by segment, we see a notable difference between the practice of networks and service organizations. As Table 7 indicates, the network DPEN collections included more first-person narratives: First-person narratives were the only or dominant perspective in 29 (71%) of the 41 network collections. Service organization collections included more third-person narratives: Third person was the only or dominant perspective in 25 (61%) of the 41 service organization collections.
Representation of Narrative Perspective in the 82 Nonprofit DPEN Collections Sampled.
Note. DPEN = digital personal experience narrative.
Nonprofits today can apply a range of features to their DPEN collections, enabling different possibilities for circulation of narratives and audience engagement. My second research question explored the actual implementation of these digital interface features in collections. Overall, while nonprofits in both segments made little use of these features, networks used them more than did service organizations.
Neither Networks Nor Service Organizations Consistently Used Digital Interface Features, Though More Network DPEN Collections Had These Features
Table 8 summarizes the digital interface features that characterize collections in the sample, again segmented by networks and service organizations. The most used digital feature was shareable stories. Collections with this feature either hosted their narratives on a platform like YouTube, which has sharing features built in, or included a share button by individual narratives: Of the 41 network collections, 30 (73%) had shareable narratives and 23 (56%) of the service organizations enabled sharing. The next-most prevalent digital feature was sortable stories. Collections with this feature allowed visitors to search and find narratives by theme, location, or some other facet: Of the 41 network collections, 24 (59%) were sortable as were 13 (32%) of the 41 service organization collections. Collections that included features typical of online communities, in which visitors can create an account and comment on narratives or converse on a social platform via a hashtag or a related Facebook page, were more prevalent for networks: Of the 41 networks, 17 (41%) had collections with online communities whereas only 4 (10%) of the 41 service organizations had collections with this feature. Finally, mechanisms that allowed users to submit their own narratives, including Share Your Story buttons and online submission forms, were also seen more often on network collections: Of the 41 networks, 15 (37%) allowed user submission whereas only 5 (12%) of the 41 service organizations had this feature.
Digital Interface Features of the 82 Nonprofit DPEN Collections Sampled.
Note. DPEN = digital personal experience narrative.
Discussion
In this section, I discuss key examples of DPEN collections to explore why practice differed between networks and service organizations, as well as why the uptake of digital possibilities is low across both segments.
Why Practice Might Differ Between Networks and Service Organizations
The results of this analysis suggest that the networks and service organizations in the sample built different sorts of collections of DPENs. Networks aggregated more first-person narratives, used a wider variety of modes, and created more collections with features that allowed for increased circulation and user engagement than did service organizations, which primarily displayed client narratives, often as third-person profiles. The vast majority of the service organization narratives were told in text accompanied by a single photograph, and collections more often lacked digital interface features that would allow for increased circulation and user engagement.
Many of these differences between the practices of the two segments are likely caused by their often-different rhetorical purposes. Those nonprofits in the networks segment primarily distribute information and unite people around an issue or cause. Many such nonprofits share the rhetorical aims of recruiting members and stakeholders and personally investing them in their issue or cause so that these individuals might make use of their resources or act as issue advocates. The centrality of these aims suggests that these nonprofits might make gathering and sharing narratives a core part of their work—using stories as part of their strategy to recruit and invest members and stakeholders—and thus devote more time and resources toward novel and labor-intensive DPEN practices.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) Stories of Connection (see Figure 1) is one example of a collection from a nonprofit in the network segment that uses personal experience narratives to recruit and invest members and to connect members to resources. This large collection of DPENs consists of professionally produced short videos, in which veterans of different wars and from different demographic segments describe their particular reintegration challenges and how they overcame them. Each story encourages members of the veteran audience to “Make the Connection”—with other veterans, with caring civilians, and with services of either the VA or other health-and-wellness professionals.
Screenshot of the Stories of Connection page of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Web site, Make the Connection.
The VA’s Make the Connection Web site uses DPENs to encourage visitors to see themselves as part of a veteran community, and the narratives serve as emotional hooks to encourage veterans to engage with nonnarrative resources. Figure 2 shows what visitors see when they click on a particular story, which includes related stories and a tailored set of resource links in the right-hand sidebar. When users click on a topic in the sidebar, they are led to still more narratives and detailed descriptions of particular challenges and health issues, strategies for coping, and useful individuals and institutions to contact.
Screenshot of an individual story’s page on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Web site, Make the Connection.
These narratives’ utility seems linked to the demographic variety and range of experiences represented in Make the Connection, where personal accounts add more tangibility to the emotional challenges of veterans’ reintegration than could nonnarrative texts. The collection’s sortability by a range of facets (e.g., gender, military branch, life event, postcombat symptom) helps visitors to find those personal narratives most likely to engage them. The collection has an associated online community hosted on a Facebook page, which was approaching three million likes. The online community here enables the wider audience on Facebook to watch, share, like, and comment on individual stories. The narratives posted to Facebook have notable engagement, many with thousands of likes and shares and hundreds of comments. Strategic use of hashtags, such as #Veteran and #USArmy, and tags within posts to the Facebook pages of military branches further increase the narratives’ circulation through the social network. Traffic also flows from Facebook back to Make the Connection and all of its resources because each post links back to the story on the Web site. Overall, this is an excellent example of a DPEN collection that makes optimal use of digital-age possibilities.
An interesting network collection to explore alongside Make the Connection is My Coverage Story, a project of Families USA, a national health care advocacy nonprofit. This large collection of personal testimonials about individuals whose lives changed for the better after health care reform includes narratives in multiple modes—video, text with a photograph, and text only. The collection foregrounds an invitation to visitors to contribute their personal experience narratives with a Tell Us Your Story button at the top of the collection. Families USA created a core set of polished video narratives, which are anchored at the top of the collection, serving not only as vetted, on-message content that occupies the most visible area of the online collection but also as sample texts to guide visitors in composing their own narratives. While the user-submitted stories in the collection push the definition of narrative—many have only what Ryan (1992) might call “embryonic narrativity”—these texts are optimized less for slow reading and reflection than for sharing on social media platforms: Share buttons are visible on each narrative, and when clicked, these buttons generate either a tweet prepopulated with the hashtag #mycoveragestory and a link to the My Coverage Story collection or a Facebook message that invites story sharing and links back to the collection.
Families USA posted this collection in the months before the U.S. Supreme Court was to hear a challenge to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a time when the collection might help to build a public that was personally invested in defending the ACA. While My Coverage Story certainly seems optimized for the digital age—full of smart features that should increase circulation of and engagement with these stories about the human impact of health care reform—the number of likes, shares, and comments is dramatically lower than for the VA narratives—in the tens versus the thousands. We could speculate why: For one, My Coverage Story has only 40 narratives whereas Make the Connection has more than 600. The VA also promoted its narratives more than did Families USA, which tweeted and shared only a few narratives on its official social channels. The subject matter of the narratives may also be a contributing factor: Some narratives (e.g., the redemptive stories of veterans) are easier to like and share than are others (e.g., narratives focused on a fairly contentious politicized issue such as health care reform). Thus, digital interface features alone do not necessarily result in a public forming around narratives.
In contrast, the service organizations primarily displayed client narratives. These narratives—often third-person profiles told in text accompanied by a single photograph—were gathered into collections without digital interface features that would allow for increased circulation and user engagement. Service organizations’ approaches to DPEN collections might differ from those of networks because of the two common rhetorical aims shared by many service organizations: First, these organizations must prove their quality—especially as compared to other organizations that provide similar programs or services—and second, they must demonstrate the impact of their programs or services. Stories from satisfied or “transformed” clients can effectively serve both of these ends.
Furthermore, the audiences for service organizations’ personal experience narratives are often more concrete than those for networks: Rather than inviting an unknown audience to support their cause, as do many networks, service organizations often want to attract a certain sort of client or to prove their impact to a particular donor population. When audiences are known, features that increase circulation and encourage user interaction may be less of a priority. These narratives may also still circulate through the Web and other media but in ways more strategic than mass sharing (e.g., in an organization’s electronic newsletter or in donor communication e-mails).
One example of a service organization collection is that of Achievement First, a system of urban charter schools. While this organization was difficult to classify as a network or service organization, we considered it a service organization: Although it calls itself a network of charter schools, Achievement First ultimately acts less to distribute information and unite people around an issue or cause than it does to attract people to its programs and services, in this case, to its member schools. Achievement First has built a collection of 35 personal experience narratives (see Figure 3), the majority of them third-person profiles in text, illustrated with a single photograph. The entire collection is accessible from the About Us tab on the organization’s Web site, where site visitors can click a profiles link and explore personal narratives in one of seven subcollections: teachers and leaders, students, parents, alumni, network support, operations, and diversity and inclusiveness.
Screenshot of Achievement First’s digital personal experience narrative collection (reprinted with permission of Achievement First).
The variety of featured constituencies in this organization’s DPEN collection is atypical in our sample, yet it illustrates the potential advantages of collecting stories from a diverse set of constituents. Because these subcollections are built on separate pages of the organization’s Web site, each can be linked to from other locations. For example, the Quick Links prominently displayed at the top of all pages on the organization’s Web site direct certain key audiences—teachers and school leaders, parents, and donors—to the most relevant parts of the DPEN collection. Parents are directed, via the Parents quick link, to the parent and the student profile pages; donors are directed, in their quick link, to the student and alumni profiles. Separating the narratives by population also allows different “calls to action” to accompany each subcollection. For example, the subcollection of teachers and leaders narratives is accompanied by a Join Our Team button for prospective employees and the student narratives page has an Enroll Your Child button. Here, digital possibilities allow the organization to push different personal experience narratives to their most relevant audiences, encouraging with each set of narratives distinct and audience-appropriate actions.
Except for four first-person videos, all the narratives in Achievement First’s collection are standardized into a form that dominated many of the collections sampled: the third-person text profile. Each narrative provides some backstory and personal details on the individual featured, giving potential students and their parents, as well as potential donors, a sense of the type of people that constitute the organization. The narratives are branded well—they appear in a pop-up window that echoes the organization’s yellow and blue brand colors—but the pop-ups do not have share buttons or unique links, and so visitors cannot share individual stories. There is also no mechanism for users to submit stories and no online community around these narratives. Ultimately, however, in light of the organization’s aims, its DPEN strategies make sense: The collection functions as a curated gallery that delivers appropriate personal narratives to targeted audiences.
The DPEN collection of another education provider, Oberlin College, is interesting in that its narratives and collection features are in the minority among service organizations. This collection presents some novel possibilities for service organizations, especially those interested in using DPENs for network-building ends. The Oberlin Stories project contains just under 300 first-person narratives, all of them user submitted (though revised with coaching from Oberlin’s communications staff). The collection is part of a centralized marketing effort in which the collective “we” that is Oberlin is mutually defined by its students, faculty, and staff (Jones, 2008). The collection is presented in an interface that encourages surprise and exploration. Figure 4 shows the collage of personal photographs that is the primary entry into the collection of DPENs from Oberlin’s home page. But once in the collection, users can use a faceted list in the sidebar of each story to find other personal experience narratives sorted by theme and interest area, such as music/conservatory or social justice/activism.
Screenshot of the entry page to the Oberlin Stories digital personal experience narrative collection (reprinted with permission of Oberlin College).
Oberlin’s collection shares Achievement First’s aim to promote the organization to prospective clients—in this case, prospective students—and it maintains a professional and branded feel, but it accommodates more and more personal narratives and holds potential for increased circulation of these narratives. While the project began with an unsuccessful push to collect 1,000 stories in 1 year, it has had notable staying power: Seven years after the first narratives were posted, the collection is still steadily growing. This continued momentum is likely because Oberlin seems to have developed the elusive “culture of storytelling” that nonprofit communicators are told they should aspire to: This collection can be accessed from Oberlin’s home page, where it is gathered beside a number of other personal storytelling links, including those to student-authored blogs and to Flickr and YouTube accounts, under the heading, “Learn About Oberlin, Straight from the Source.”
The Oberlin Stories are posted steadily, but by no means frenetically, on Oberlin’s Facebook page: During slow times, one story is posted every few months; during peak times (e.g., admissions season), multiple narratives are posted each week. The stories get respectable engagement, often hundreds of likes and double-digit shares and comments. Oberlin’s collection suggests both that there is a role for network-building DPEN projects in service organizations and that coordinated deployment of multiple story projects may be a promising way to build an engaged network.
Why Uptake of Digital Possibilities May Be Low Across Both Segments
DPEN collections that take advantage of digital possibilities, as do those of Oberlin and the VA, are less the norm than the exception. While the digital age presents a variety of DPEN forms and interface features, the uptake of these new possibilities, at least in this sample, is low.
The lack of technical and personnel capacity might be one reason why digital possibilities go unused in nonprofits’ efforts to produce and distribute DPENs. Among this sample of 82 DPEN collections, those nonprofits that took the greatest advantage of digital possibilities—creating more narratives, in modes beyond the familiar text narrative with photographs, and building them into collections with the latest digital interface features—were most often national organizations that had more personnel, bigger budgets, and likely more technological capacity compared to others in the sample. The sponsors of the two network DPEN collections I presented fit this description: The VA is a large federal agency, and Families USA has received foundation support for its story collection and distribution efforts. Indeed, collections like these require an organization’s attention and resources not only as they are being created but also after they are built, when staff and resources must be devoted to maintaining the collection and monitoring the circulation and engagement around narratives.
The dominance of text narratives with photographs in the sample was particularly notable, especially because, with few exceptions, those narratives were illustrated with a single, small photo, neatly reproducing the long-standing form of the print profile in an organizational magazine or newsletter. This is a form of personal experience narrative that has changed little since the early Red Cross Magazine stories. Although as recently as several years ago it would be technically difficult to include multiple high-resolution photographs in a personal experience narrative, content management systems such as WordPress—on which many nonprofit Web sites are built—as well as free or inexpensive multimodal authoring platforms make it relatively easy to craft truly multimodal photo-essays. But even though these Web-based authoring tools make the final combination of text, image, and video fairly straightforward, working with these media requires organizations to implement new practices into their existing technological ecologies (Nardi & O’Day, 1999). For example, nonprofit personnel may have little knowledge of how to take and edit the high-quality photographs necessary for a professional photo-essay, and organizations may lack the hardware, software, and procedures for archiving photographs. Finally, while the formal expectations of the print profile are likely quite familiar to most nonprofit communication professionals, those of multimodal storytelling are likely less so.
Such problems of capacity and implementation frame the low uptake of digital possibilities as a problem or shortcoming. But organizations may also intentionally resist using new production and distribution tools and techniques for DPENs. As my discussion of Achievement First’s collection suggests, innovative possibilities are not always in line with an organization’s dominant rhetorical aims. An organization may prefer targeted outreach to mass sharing, and today’s Web-based tools make the latter much easier to accomplish than the former. Many new tools are by default social, subjecting narratives that may be quite personal to potentially wide and inappropriate circulation. For example, the Heartland Alliance, a Chicago-area human services agency, has created an arresting set of client narratives using the photo-essay platform Exposure. But anyone browsing the Causes tag at the Exposure Web site can also see these narratives, and Exposure holds the right to circulate any public text made with its software to promote its services. Nonprofit staff might wish to keep personal narratives contextualized within their own Web sites and therefore have good reason to resist using some of these social tools and platforms. As Vivienne and Burgess (2012) have noted, the digital storytellers whom they worked with often avoided posting their personal narratives to platforms such as YouTube, where virality, rather than targeted circulation, is the default aim. Nonprofit staff, then, must consider the prospect of subjecting personal experience narratives to likes, counts, and potentially hurtful online comments before using social platforms to create or distribute personal experience narratives.
In summary, although the cost and technical expertise required to compose narratives with new production tools may be relatively low and the potential audience for personal experience narratives circulating on social platforms may be larger, organizations may wisely opt for other tools and practices that both make the story-creation process less daunting and lessen the risk of inappropriate audiences viewing their personal experience narratives.
Conclusion
This study provides a baseline understanding of nonprofit organizations’ practices with DPENs. In closing, I suggest three promising, related research avenues. First, researchers might investigate antecedents of DPENs—the personal stories told for well over a century in the house organs, yearbooks, newsletters, and videos of nonprofits—to better understand the history of nonprofit personal experience narratives and the range of rhetorical aims that organizations have had for this form. Second, researchers might conduct text analyses of different nonprofit DPENs in order to better delineate recurring plots and subject positions. And third, researchers might conduct qualitative studies with organizations that are making or have made DPEN collections in order to better understand practitioner aims and the social and technological obstacles to achieving these aims. To do this work, a theoretical approach like that of Thumin (2012)—which moves beyond textual analysis to use ethnographic methods in order to understand institutional and cultural factors influencing narrative projects—is critical.
Overall, we have much still to learn about the personal experience narrative and its potential role in the communicative and rhetorical work of nonprofits.
Footnotes
Appendix A
Appendix B
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank DePaul University’s University Research Council for funding to support the development of the Stories That Work database. Also essential to this project was the methodology advice of Jessica Bishop-Royse of DePaul’s Social Science Research Center as well as the research assistance of graduate students Aim Larrabee, Tasha Sookochoff, Meaghan Zang, and the summer 2015 students of NMS 509/WRD 530: Digital Storytelling.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.