GlobalGiving offers a powerful example of how storytelling can support evaluation, learning, and decision-making in international development. By gathering thousands of short community stories, or micro-narratives, the organization creates a form of qualitative data that helps grassroots groups, funders, and development practitioners see patterns, understand local experience, and identify what kinds of change are actually taking place on the ground.

Overview

Project summary: A method for gathering micro-narratives from large numbers of people in the communities where partner organizations work. The stories produce qualitative data for program assessment, organizational learning, and strategic growth, while also contributing to the broader field of international development.

Narrative challenge: Building a story-gathering process that can keep stories coming in organically and at scale, often with community-based staff and lightweight local infrastructure supporting the effort.

Evaluation metrics: The number of organizations that use story data in grant proposals, planning, and decision-making, along with the value of the data for identifying patterns, surfacing innovation, and improving programs.

Related links:
GlobalGiving
GlobalGiving storytelling form
Stanford Social Innovation Review: Amplifying Local Voices
Narrative Arts Story Guide

“Rebecca’s life has come to an end with doctor’s announcement that she was pregnant. Her father immediately disowned her and her mother ran short of options…” It sounds like the opening of a novel, but it is actually one of the many short community stories gathered through GlobalGiving’s storytelling work in East Africa. The power of the method lies in this contrast: each individual story is specific and personal, but together thousands of stories become a body of evidence.

GlobalGiving launched its Storytelling Project to learn more directly from the communities where grassroots organizations work. The project asked people to respond to a prompt about a time when a person or organization tried to help someone or change something in their community. The storytelling form also asked people to describe what the story was about, how it made them feel, and other details that could later be analyzed for patterns and themes. The form is still publicly available and shows how the process blends open storytelling with structured reflection.

“This project addresses the challenge of how to evaluate a portfolio with many small discrete projects that were not planned together. It combines the human aspect of individual stories with an analytical way of analyzing trends and patterns across the body of stories to see the bigger picture.”

— Nancy MacPherson, Rockefeller Foundation

Micro-narratives and qualitative data

The term micro-narrative is useful because it captures what makes this method different from both a standard survey and a long-form case study. These are short stories, often just a paragraph, but they still contain meaning, feeling, perspective, and context. When gathered at scale, they can reveal patterns that would be hard to spot through anecdote alone and too subtle to capture through numbers alone.

This is one reason the method matters for international development and social impact evaluation. GlobalGiving’s approach does not force a false choice between stories and data. It treats stories as data while still respecting the human complexity inside them. That makes the model especially valuable for organizations that need qualitative evidence but do not have the resources for expensive formal evaluation systems.

Storytelling for monitoring and evaluation

Many small and mid-sized nonprofits struggle with monitoring and evaluation because traditional systems can be expensive, rigid, and difficult to manage. GlobalGiving’s storytelling process points toward a more accessible approach. Community members share stories, local partners support collection, and the resulting narrative data can be used to identify needs, see changes over time, and learn which organizations or interventions appear to be making a difference.

The Stanford Social Innovation Review article on the project described this as a way to amplify local voices while also making the stories useful for analysis and action. It also noted later expansions in Uganda and Tanzania and the publication of a guidebook on story evaluation methods.

Community feedback at scale

One of the strongest aspects of the method is that it broadens who gets to participate in evaluation. Instead of hearing only from formal grantees or the most visible beneficiaries, the project gathers many voices from within a community. That helps reduce self-report bias and creates a wider picture of what people are experiencing, what they value, and what kinds of support they believe are working.

That kind of community feedback is useful not only for program assessment, but also for organizational growth. Stories can reveal local innovation, flag gaps in service, and help funders and nonprofits make better decisions. They can also surface questions that numbers alone would miss.

GlobalGiving, philanthropy, and the development field

The Rockefeller Foundation’s support helped make the project relevant beyond GlobalGiving itself. The larger opportunity was field-wide: could story collection become a practical method for evaluating many small, diverse development efforts that were never designed as one unified program? That question remains important today, especially in philanthropy and international development, where organizations continue to search for more democratic and context-sensitive ways to understand impact.

GlobalGiving’s current platform continues to focus on connecting donors with grassroots projects around the world while providing nonprofits with tools, training, and support. That ongoing mission makes this case study more than a historical experiment. It is part of a larger effort to strengthen how local organizations are seen, supported, and understood.

For Narrative Arts, this example is important because it shows how stories can serve both human connection and rigorous learning. Storytelling is not only a communications tool. It can also be part of research, evaluation, strategy, and decision-making. When stories are gathered carefully and analyzed thoughtfully, they help organizations understand not just what happened, but how people experienced change and what those experiences may suggest for the future.

For more on our approach, visit the Storytelling and Social Change Strategy Guide.

Explore: View GlobalGiving’s storytelling form and read the Stanford Social Innovation Review article “Amplifying Local Voices” for a closer look at how micro-narratives can support evaluation and learning.