Nonprofit Collections of Digital Personal Experience Narratives

Abstract

Nonprofit organizations have long used the personal experience narratives of clients, staff, and stakeholders in their communications. This study explores digital-age practices with this text form, analyzing 82 collections of digital personal experience narratives (DPENs) housed at or linked to Web sites of nonprofit organizations. Results are reported on the variety and frequency of the modes, featured constituencies, narrative perspectives, and digital interface features in the sample. Overall, the nonprofit DPEN collections sampled showed limited use of new digital production and distribution possibilities. Practice, however, differed notably between two segments of nonprofits: networks and service organizations. To explore these results, the article discusses key examples of DPEN collections from each segment.

Rethinking nonprofit service disintermediation through service communication interactions

“…A beneficiary mindset wants information to understand how the problem might affect them or their family. A fundraiser mindset will be motivated by hearing the emotional stories of volunteers or victims (Pera and Viglia, 2016; Escales, 2004; Dush, 2016). The use of digital personal experience narratives to tell stories has been seen as a significant opportunity for nonprofits, with Aaker and Smith (2010) encouraging “storybanking” to enable authentic stories to be deployed at the most effective time.…”

Untitled

“…11 Research experience is crucial in providing a platform to develop data handling and analytical skills, and gaining a deeper understanding of the theoretical principles. 15 In this article, I account my experience as a research mentor over 7years (2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015) using a multi-case [17][18][19][20] personal narration [21][22][23][24][25] approach involving 22 pre-university students in 6 research and development projects with several intentions-(a) to demonstrate that pre-university students can carry out useful research, (b) summarize my learning experience in this journey, and (c) providing some pointers and encouragement to my fellow mentors and intended mentors. Personal narration, sometimes also known as storytelling, 21 is autobiographic in nature with rich emotional and contextual cues 22 that are required to describe the human experience.…”

Stories They Tell

“…Many business and technical communication artifacts do not serve singular purposes (Campbell & Naidoo, 2017; Choi & Chung, 2013; Dayton, 2002; Markel, 2009), and scholars often examine, through interrogating the strategies, narratives, and audience perceptions of the arguments (De Groot, Nickerson, Korzilius, & Gerritsen, 2016; Dush, 2017; Kedrowicz & Taylor, 2016; Moreno & Casasola, 2016), how different communication artifacts function to achieve their intended (or unintended) purposes. The strategies and narratives—or more simply put, the stories—that workplace artifacts tell provide a rich resource for understanding the nature of work in an organization and the perspectives of both management and employees in a workplace.…”