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After almost 25 years as a journalist, David Powles became chief executive of Norfolk Community Law Service in 2023. In the first of a regular series of columns, he explains what his earlier career taught him about the importance of combining memorable data and human stories.
Find the compelling angle.’ In more than two decades of journalism, this was one of the golden rules of writing and a mantra I often found myself repeating to the newsrooms that I oversaw. I think it’s almost as important in the charity sector, especially when it comes to key areas such asa bid writing, reporting, proving impact and sharing your story through the various media channels.
Despite the many differences, there are also many similarities to my previous role as an editor and that of CEO of a law charity. Management is management wherever you work, and a large part of both jobs is relationship building. Also vitally important for any organisation is getting across your story and your impact in a compact and meaningful way. For Norfolk Community Legal Service (NCLS), while it may not be directly relevant for our core service delivery, it is vital for many other things: building awareness; securing partnerships; hiring staff; successful grant bidding; and convincing people to volunteer.
Good use of data is often at the heart of that, particularly for funders. However, it’s important to stress another golden rule from journalism: data without context and human impact is just numbers. For instance, if I told you that in 2023/24 NCLS supported 4,500 people in Norfolk, what might you think? You might be impressed – or you might think that, in a county of 900,000, that’s pretty small. But if I told you that 4,500 represented an 18 per cent rise compared with the number of people we supported the previous a year, and a 71 per cent increase from four years ago, suddenly you’re being taken down a very different path – one where, as a funder or potential backer, you potentially realise there’s strong demand for the services we offer.
Still, these are just numbers. If, however, we then include some of the stories behind those numbers, the impact of our work really comes alive. For example, the story of a domestic abuse client I will call Lisa, who, without us, would have had no one guiding her through the court process, and who told us afterwards we had ‘made such an amazing difference’ to her life.
One of the first things I noticed when I initially arrived at NCLS was that we had lot of powerful stories but started all our bids with the same dry introduction to the charity. Nowadays, we are more likely to start with a tale of someone we’ve helped, followed by a standout bit of data to really push our impact. It’s important to remember that funders are people, too.
In terms of which data is best to use, my other piece of advice is: keep it simple and make it memorable. For instance, our welfare benefits team recouped a staggering £3.2m in 2023/24 for clients wrongly denied benefits. That £3.2m will be fed back into the Norfolk community through spending in shops and the like – and represents three times the £1m it takes to keep NCLS afloat. This kind of simple, compelling data is also memorable enough for someone to take away and repeat to a friend or colleague.
We’ve just compiled our annual impact report and it’s nuggets like this that are the most important bit. They’re like headlines in a newspaper: designed to grab your attention and make you want to find out more. Here are some examples:
•Ninety-five per cent of our clients are ‘very likely’ to recommend us to a friend.
•Our debt clients’ well-being improved by 20 per cent after receiving our support.
•Sixty-one per cent of our clients are female, because often, in times of crisis, it is women who don’t have the financial means to seek legal support.
•In 2023/24, we ensured that more than £700,000 of debt was written off for vulnerable clients.
These are just some of the ways we use data to share our worth. All of them are short, sharp and simple – and all of them tell a story.
We also use data to spot trends – for instance, a new debt caseworker was employed recently following an increase not just in debt service demand, but also in the complexity of people’s problems. And we track where our clients live and marry it up against Norfolk population data to give us a rough idea of whether we are offering parity of service across the county. We apply a similar data- and human-led approach to our social media and media work.
But the same fact remains: data is often the hook, but data combined with the human stories behind it is what really draws people in.