The Story Problem

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"Tell a compelling story" is the most common advice in awards guidance and it is right in one context and expensive in the other.

Where it comes from

From programmes judged by discussion, and from case studies of winners. A useful comparison point is this discussion, which approaches the issue from an operational angle.

A panel arguing toward a decision after several hours of reading responds to what it remembers, and a narrative is memorable in a way a list of figures is not. A useful outside reference for comparison is BAFTA, which provides a useful contrast to the specific process described here.

Where that is the process, the advice is sound.

And case studies of winners are survivorship — the winning entries had stories, and so did the losing ones nobody published.

Where it costs points

Against a scoring sheet.

A judge awarding points per criterion is looking for the answer to that criterion, and a narrative arranged chronologically puts the answer wherever it happened to occur.

Which means the reader hunts. And hunting costs attention that was going to the next section.

A story with the point at the end is the specific failure, because attention is highest at the start and the conclusion arrives where it is lowest.

The reconciliation

Answer first, then illustrate.

One concrete instance, told in three sentences, after the answer and the evidence — which supplies what a narrative supplies and costs nothing.

"Response times fell from nine hours to under two. One customer, a manufacturer in the region, had been waiting overnight for parts confirmations; they now order at four and hear by five."

That is a figure, a source and a story, in the order a scoring judge reads.

What a specific instance does

Makes an abstraction concrete, which is genuinely useful to a reader working through many entries.

And makes the claim checkable in a different way — a judge cannot audit your figure and can tell whether the example sounds like something that happened.

Where an entry has covered its criteria, one memorable specific earns its place at the final stage where a panel discusses.

Where the criteria are not covered, it is decoration, and it is the decoration entrants add instead of evidence.

Which process you are in

Read the criteria.

Numbered criteria with weightings mean scoring. Answer them plainly and illustrate briefly.

A general statement of what the programme seeks means discussion, and narrative carries more weight.

Most programmes are the first, and most advice is written for the second.

The story that is actually required

Some criteria ask for one explicitly.

"Describe the journey", "tell us about the challenges you overcame", "what did you learn" — where the criterion asks, narrative is the answer and answering with figures misses the paper.

Read the verb. Describe accepts an account; demonstrate requires evidence, and a criterion asking about learning is asking for reflection rather than results.

Which is the general rule restated: the criterion decides, not the guidance you read elsewhere.

Why the advice is so common

Because it is memorable and because it flatters the writer.

"Tell your story" is an appealing instruction. It suggests that the entry is about you, that the interesting parts are the interesting parts, and that writing well is what wins.

"Answer the question and supply a figure" is not appealing and it is closer to correct against most processes.

Neither is a conspiracy. Advice that is pleasant to hear circulates further than advice that is not, which is true of guidance in every field.

Where narrative is a liability

In a criterion about measured outcomes.

A story in that section is read as an absence of measurement — reasonably, since somebody with a figure would have led with it.

Which means narrative in the wrong place does not merely fail to score. It signals something, and the signal is accurate more often than not.

Length and narrative together

Stories are expensive in words.

A three-sentence instance costs little. A paragraph of background before the answer costs the space that evidence needed, and it is where the limit gets spent wrongly.

Where a story is worth telling, tell it after the criterion is answered and in the shortest form that still contains something specific.

What replaces the founder's story

The question of what changed for somebody else.

Most entries built around a narrative are built around the entrant — the difficulty, the decision, the persistence.

A judge is scoring impact, which is change in somebody else, measured — and the person the story should be about is the customer, the member or the beneficiary.

That single substitution fixes more entries than any editing, and it costs nothing but the reallocation.

The entry that is all evidence

The opposite failure, and it is rarer.

A document of figures with no sense of what the organisation does leaves a judge unable to place any of them.

Two sentences of context at the start of the entry — not each section — is sufficient, and it is what most programmes provide a separate field for.

Where they do not, spend them once and never again.

Photographs and video

Where a programme accepts them, they do what a narrative does at lower cost in words.

One photograph of the thing — the installation, the space, the product — establishes concreteness immediately.

Check what is permitted, since resolution, format and count are usually specified and a wrong format is an administrative failure.

And caption them. An uncaptioned image asks a judge to work out what they are looking at, which is the same cost as an unclear paragraph.

In one line

Answer, evidence, then one instance in three sentences — which supplies what a story supplies and costs nothing.

The short version

• "Tell a compelling story" comes from programmes judged by discussion and from case studies of winners, which are survivorship
• Against a scoring sheet it costs points, because a chronological narrative puts the answer wherever it happened to occur
• The specific failure is a story with the point at the end, arriving where attention is lowest
• The reconciliation is answer first, evidence second, one concrete instance in three sentences third
• A specific instance makes an abstraction concrete and reads as something that happened, which a figure cannot
• Read the criteria to know which process you are in: numbered and weighted means scoring, a general statement means discussion