Storytelling for researchers

As well as our project work for civil servants, we also offer training to researchers and academics to help them work more effectively with government. We hope this will improve the interaction between evidence and policy across government overall.

We’ve recently been developing a new training offer on storytelling. One of the things we find in our work with academics is that they often struggle to explain their research to non-experts. Where they have years or even decades of in-depth knowledge in a particular subject area, their policy-maker counterpart is likely to have spent far less time in their role.

Research by Paul Cairney, Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the University of Stirling, discusses the limitations policy-makers act under, and how storytelling techniques can be an effective way of communicating evidence.

Using this research, our own experience of writing for policymakers, and drawing on expertise from journalism we have developed a storytelling training offer of 3 one hour modules for up to 20 participants. In these sessions we explore various storytelling techniques in a policy context, such as story arcs and symbols. We also look at how to tell a relevant story at the right time, helping academics to consider the incentives and interests of policymakers and what they might find most useful.

Early feedback from these sessions has been very positive, and we hope to continue to develop and deliver the training to more academics. We are also considering offering a version of this training internally to other civil servants.

As these sessions are run for groups rather than individuals we suggest that people organising training sessions for their teams or departments get in touch in the first instance.

If you are interested in discussing our training offer please email enquiries@openninnovation.gov.uk.