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Ravishankar Iyer

#SOTD 93: Starting with the big picture (Vidhya Vidhai)

Published over 1 year ago • 1 min read

This week I'm sharing good storytelling examples from the social development sector in India.

On Monday I profiled Aavishkar which started its deck with the story of an individual beneficiary and yesterday we looked at The Bodhi Tree's use of contrasting visuals.

Today we look at Vidhya Vidhai, which works with government school leaders.

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So, you work on a specific area of a sector. How do you start describing your work?

Not by directly diving into it - but by giving people a big picture overview of the space and then zooming into your area of work. Bonus marks for using an analogy in doing so!

Here's how Vidhya Vidhai Foundation's pitch starts off with an overview of the government education sector - using a simple analogy.

This picture depicts the traditional view of education - as a pyramid with the school leaders (headmasters etc) at the top, the teachers in the middle and the students "receiving the benefits" at the bottom.

Instead of a pyramid, Vidhya Vidhai urges us to look at the system as a tree - with the school leaders (SLs) forming the roots, the teachers being the strong stem and the students manifesting as the leaves, flowers and fruits!

I loved that simple analogy.

In the next slide, Vidhya Vidhai identifies its area of focus - improving School leaders skills:

They even mention on the slide how they focus on the heart of the education system. Having this big picture overview makes it easy for us to understand their area of work.

(One feedback I had for this slide was to grey out the other boxes and visually highlight only the School leadership box).

#SOTD 93

Ravi

PS: Here is the context for #SOTD and the 'Ultimate Guide to Storytelling Techniques' framework I use - in case you joined this series late! Here is the archive of previous posts. Click here to subscribe.

Ravishankar Iyer

A Storytelling Coach More details here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ravishankar-iyer/

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