The Road to Employability: Austrian Program Brings “Computer Driver’s Licenses” to Vienna’s Most At-Risk Women

Abstract

Evidence narratives are cousins to human-impact stories. While everyone likes a good statistic, collecting meaningful, large-scale quantitative data in the settings where Microsoft grantees operate is often not cost-effective. Stories are a powerful alternative. They can illustrate a meaningful dynamic. They can convey emotion. They are memorable. They can be retold. They spread like good gossip. The problem is that most impact stories feature “poster children” that are so obviously exceptional that it is impossible for the story to represent typical beneficiaries. Evidence narratives attempt to harness the power of storytelling and apply an academically rigorous methodology so that stories are selected and analyzed for their typicality. The mantra of the evidence narrative is “from anecdote to evidence.” Sometimes “remarkable” stories only describe an individual and don’t provide evidence of more general impact. Sometimes, however, “remarkable” stories become more impressive — the “poster child” really is representative of the larger population. TASCHA designed a methodology for developing evidence-based human impact stories (re-named “evidence narratives”), as well as a toolkit to guide organizations to produce their own narratives. Using this methodology, TASCHA produced 22 evidence narratives documenting the impact of people and training organizations in 14 countries. Microsoft disseminated these studies at a number of regional events.