Communicating Impact through Digital Storytelling

Background: How do you convey the rich history of a program that has reached all 50 states, touched hundreds of thousands of lives, and contributed to the decline in underage drinking? To answer that question, SAMHSA created a tool utilizing digital storytelling techniques to capture the sights and sounds of 2016 Communities Talk: Town Hall Meetings to Prevent Underage Drinking events. Digital storytelling has been shown to be worthwhile when used as a learning tool to communicate health information.¹ Research suggests that it is also an effective way to educate undergraduate and graduate students about social determinants of health, making it an ideal technique to convey underage drinking prevention success and inspiration.²

¹de Jager, A., Fogarty, A., Tewson, A., Lenette, C., & Boydell, K. M. (2017). Digital Storytelling in Research: A Systematic Review. The Qualitative Report, 22(10), 2548–2582.

²Hackett, M. & Humayun, L. (2018). Using Digital Stories to Educate Public Health Students About Local Social Determinants of Health. Pedagogy in Health Promotion, 4(3), 211–217.

Program background: Utilizing the power of digital storytelling, SAMHSA developed a tool to educate health professionals about SAMHSA’s Communities Talk: Town Hall Meetings to Prevent Underage Drinking (Communities Talk) initiative. Creative storytellers worked with communities who had hosted successful Communities Talk events to develop digital stories with videos, images, and data. Stories were designed to capture audience attention with at-a-glance summaries and quotes to encapsulate story highlights. User experience specialists and information architects designed a web section on the Communities Talk website for easy access to the stories. The web section was promoted through the Communities Talk e-newsletter and through SAMHSA’s social media channels to increase traffic.

Evaluation Methods and Results: Data from October 1, 2018, to February 19, 2019, was gathered to assess user interest in the digital stories. Users spent a 10 percent higher average time viewing the Success Story pages and 7 percent lower bounce rate (i.e., users left the pages without browsing) than the rest of the website. Approximately 15 percent of viewers accessed the site through the SAMHSA website, compared to 11 percent of those who entered directly from a Google search. Additionally, time spent on the site was longer when viewers accessed the site through the SAMHSA site.

Conclusions: Compared to other pages on the Communities Talk website, the Success Stories garnered more user interest as indicated by the longer time spent on the pages and lower bounce rate. Viewer data indicate the Success Stories web section increases user engagement and Communities Talk is using the pages for its 2019 cycle of events to share the program’s impact and encourage untapped communities to host events.

Implications for research and/or practice: Of interest is the method of accessing the Success Stories web section. Most users located the stories directly (i.e., they typed the URL into their browser), suggesting the need to more aggressively market the web section on social media and topical websites. Evaluative data gathered during 2019 will direct future methods of attracting users.