Hello and happy Fall Reader,

It’s been a minute - Community Threads was on summer hiatus for a couple months and when our hiatus began, I shared the hope that it would be a summer of practicing being still and listening.

If you have experiences from the summer of being still and listening, please share! Our family traveled this summer and new places and people and experiences helped inspire us to be still and listen (well, some of the time, at least!). Our girls having recently discovered birdwatching, we spent an afternoon on the Scottish island of Lunga, watching puffins. They were so darn cute - see for yourself:

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Weeks later, our girls still love telling the story of how the puffins would swoop into the water to grab a little fish in their beak and then bring it back to their nests for their baby puffins. Sometimes the simplest and most universal experiences are also the most awe-inspiring.

But it is the storytelling piece I want to dive into further in this issue of Community Threads. Because there is a time for being still and listening, and there is a time for telling a story.

When it comes to community health improvement, we often find ourselves in situations where we need to tell a compelling story. To name just a few:

• We need to convey the impact and value of a particular health issue to a policymaker so they are motivated to write or pass legislation that would help address it.
• We need to share the impact a policy or program is having with our funders and communities so they are inspired to help sustain it.
• We need to share data from a community survey so community partners understand the top health-related needs community members are facing so that their organizations can take action to meet those needs.

PoP Health is knee-deep in each of these types of storytelling at the moment. And we’re often using data - both quantitative and qualitative - to tell these stories. We typically have a LOT of data - thankfully we work with amazing analysts who can synthesize this data into powerful, digestible visualizations.

But visualizations only tell a story if you can interpret them effectively.

One of the things I’ve come to appreciate deeply is the immense power of a storytelling sentence.

Take a data visualization and ask yourself, what do I want the person seeing this to takeaway from this?

And then write that down as simply and briefly as you can.

That’s your storytelling sentence.

Maybe it’s the title of your graph or visual, maybe it’s a summary sentence you place to the side or below.

It sounds so simple but it’s amazing how often we skip this step. This happens a lot especially with data dashboards.

You might build a high-quality, dynamic data dashboard. But will a community member or community partner seeing that dashboard know at first glance what they should be taking away from it? If you add those storytelling sentences, they will!

So this is a call to tell your story. Don’t leave it to chance or someone else’s interpretation. Don't assume the numbers speak for themselves. It's your story - so, tell it!

Until next time,

Vinu

PS Learn something in this newsletter? Spread the word! Forward this email to a friend or colleague who might want to weave their own community threads.

PPS Want to learn more about PoP Health and how we partner with community coalitions and collaboratives to transform health in communities through policy and systems change? Check out our website!

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