United Way: Impact Stories
Hired as a Freelance Writer/Storyteller for the United in Care program led by the United Way of Northern New Jersey, I’ve written impact stories to advocate for more government funding.
Deep Dive: How I approached this project and measured its impact
Brief: Write a long-form impact story that is rooted in interviewing program leads and childcare providers on the importance, challenges and successes of safer, more educational, and efficient childcare programs.
My Approach:
Pre-Interview
Information-Gathering
Before writing interview questions, I wanted to better understand the industry at large. I did desk research using government publications, news stories, and previous United in Care stories to understand:
poverty levels in the region that affect families and childcare providers
the difficulty of providing quality child care for smaller, low-cost providers
what factors contribute to “quality” care
process for state funding body to fund small providers based on their assessments of quality
how Northern NJ funding compares to the rest of the state and nation.
Using this information, I sketched out an outline to prepare questions that aligned with the most important or underreported facts.
Interview Preparation
Armed with information on how this story fits into a larger context, I:
Gathered information on each interviewee by reviewing their business website and any other information I could gather on the person through Google.
Why? This helped me understand the size of their business, their value propositions (i.e. were they mostly an outdoor program to give kids more tactile learning environments?), and get a feel for what matters most to them.
Getting a better feel for each person allowed me to visualize how I would approach each interview. (For example: ‘Should I lean in to their achievements — or does it seem like they would want to talk more about what challenges their business is facing?’, ‘Would sharing my own experiences of child care show empathy and encourage them to be more authentic in their answers?’, ‘Should I be more casual or a little more buttoned-up?’.)
Pictured: Interviewee Yahaira Ayala with her laptop provided by the program. Photo credit: United in Care.
This research also allowed me to ask more specific questions, too. (For example: ‘Why was it important for you to first do capital improvements for your learning environment, instead of digging into your educational goals?)
Decided on my interview approach, I wrote interview questions and selected an audio auto-transcription software. Using Otter.ai allowed me to focus on the conversation and be present enough for follow-up questions and communicate nonverbally to show interest in what the interviewee was saying.
Post-Interview
Writing
Before writing, I reviewed the previous stories published by United in Care to get a feel for the program’s voice and searched for the best-of-the-best impact stories (aka Charity Water) to spark ideas about how I could help weave together multiple perspectives.
With a written transcript of all the interviews, I did a paper edit to find themes in the interviews and arranged excerpts of their direct quotes to develop a cohesive flow for the story.
It was important to me to get a really great quote to hook the reader at the get-go. I also wanted to use as many direct quotes as possible
Editing
The program’s Communications Manager and I went back and forth for two rounds of editing, and the piece went through the program’s internal editorial review process before we published it. First, he did a generative edit, then a line edit with some tweaks to the language the program uses consistently to describe what they do.
Results:
Quantitative:
First impact story with the United Way of Northern New Jersey received the highest amount of engagement on the website at the time of publishing.
Qualitative:
“I just wanted to share with you that your piece on GrowNJKids caught the eye of the Commissioner of the NJ Department of Human Services and their child care directors... We regrouped as a team after the call and the first thing that a member of our executive leadership team said is, “ Congrats, our impact story made such an impact, they wanted to speak with us.” We were proud of that.
They could have easily just dismissed it and moved on. But they respect our work in the community so much that they took the time to meet with us. We do rely on them for funding, so we have to respect their position and our relationship with them of course.
Just know that you did such a good job that it literally made an impact!””
