Gathering stories for strategy development
Snowball Stories is a technique for gathering stories, in an organic and non-directive way, over a set period of time. It can help to quickly gather a collection of real life experiences which inform and enrich a strategy plan or project you are developing.
Why use this approach?
Snowball Stories can be used to gather rich, deep conversations that describe connections between people and explore different perspectives around connected topics. It can be a useful way to find stories and experiences that we might not usually hear and so can be an inclusive way of engaging with communities.
This approach is adapted from ‘Snowball Sampling’ a non-probability sampling method used by health and social researchers, where new research participants are recruited by other research participants to form part of a sample.
The Launch
When we know the topic we want to explore using Snowball Stories, we begin with a ‘snowball launch’ this means identifying someone to begin the conversation with. Its usually someone we know or have been directed to speak to, and its helpful if this person is someone with direct experience of the topic we are interested in.
Conversation Rounds
During the launch conversation we capture the story (we love to use creative methods to do this, you could also capture through notes, audio or video) and identify 2 more people to speak to, based on what the launch person has shared. They may have talked about a person, place or event, its our job to find and make contact with a relevant person based on this. They may offer to introduce us to that person if possible.
We then have a second round of conversations, with the two people identified in the launch conversation. During these conversations we identify three people we would like to talk to, following our curiosity, finding people to expand on an idea mentioned or seeking alternative views on the topics discussed. Again we might ask for an introduction or complete our own research to find the next people to speak to.
We then have a third round of conversations, again looking out for leads to take us to a fourth round of conversations and so on. We can experiment with group conversations or keep to 1:1 conversations. Each round we capture stories and continue until our time period is up (or until we have collected a set amount of stories)
Heres a visualisation of the process - it can get quite big quite quickly!
Visualisation of the snowball stories conversations
The Capture
The next challenge is to capture the stories and make sense of the learning. We love to use a systems thinking approach to spot significant events, emerging patterns and trends, systems and structures that influence experiences and values and beliefs threaded through the stories …. and thats a whole other journal post!
We are using this approach with 2 of the projects we are currently working on, Calderdale Vision with Calderdale Council and Ideas Alliance and Trauma Informed Communities with Bolton Public Health Team.
