Storyboarding
Transplantation Tales
Transplantation Tales is a public health education project led by researchers at Queen’s University Belfast, School of Nursing and Midwifery. Working with secondary school pupils, the project used creative storyboarding to raise awareness of kidney disease and organ donation, with winning entries shortlisted for animation and display on public transport across Northern Ireland.
Storyboarding
Turn what your participants know into a story they draw themselves – and let the pictures do the proving.
Phase 0: Logic Model & Topic Mapping
Identify the “Evaluation Gap” this method fills. It is best suited for measuring knowledge transfer after a public education or awareness activity and capturing attitude change in participants who respond better to making than to writing.
Primary Objective
To make visible what participants have understood, remembered, and internalised from a learning or engagement experience – using the storyboard itself as the primary evidence, not a separate survey.
Key Stakeholders
Young people, community groups, participants in public health or awareness programmes, facilitators who need portable evidence of knowledge gain without lengthy data collection tools.
Part 1: The DIY Step-by-Step Method
Map What You Need to Prove
Before participants pick up a pencil, you need to know exactly what knowledge or attitude change you are trying to evidence. Write this down as a short list of two or three things – these become the invisible framework behind your storyboard prompts.
The Details:
- Action: Write out the specific things you want participants to demonstrate they understand – not topics, but concrete facts, processes, or shifts in attitude. For example: “participants can describe the steps involved in X” or “participants feel more confident about Y.”
- Tip: Keep this list to three items maximum. If you try to evidence everything, the storyboard prompts become unwieldy and participants lose the thread of the story.
Design the Story Scaffold
Give participants a narrative structure to hang their knowledge on. A beginning, middle, and end – with each section of the story mapped to one of your evaluation aims. The story does the work; your aims ride along inside it.
The Details:
- Action: Create a simple brief card for participants. Give them a central character and a situation to start from – then leave the rest open. The brief card should name the number of panels (six to eight works well), suggest a starting scenario, and indicate that each panel needs a caption.
- Tip: Resist the urge to over-script the story. The more open the brief, the more authentic knowledge participants will surface – and the more clearly you will see what they have actually understood versus what they have guessed at.
Run the Session
Keep the introduction short – participants need less guidance than you expect. The storyboard format is intuitive, and over-explaining it before they start can make participants second-guess themselves. Get them drawing as quickly as possible.
The Details:
- Action: Introduce the brief in under five minutes. Provide pre-ruled panel grids (printed or hand-drawn), pencils, and fine-tipped pens. Allow forty-five minutes to an hour for the drawing phase. Keep the room low-pressure – drawing ability is explicitly not what is being assessed.
- Tip: If you have the budget, a live scribe capturing the room in real time adds a powerful layer of visual documentation and raises the energy in the space – participants see their work reflected back and invest more fully in the task.
Document Everything
The storyboards are your data. Treat them accordingly from the moment participants finish. Photograph every entry before anything leaves the room – captions included, and close enough that individual panel text is legible.
The Details:
- Action: Photograph all storyboards flat against a neutral surface. If a live scribe has been present, collect their visual record too. Where participants have consented, note any verbal comments they made during the session – these often add context to the drawings that the image alone cannot carry.
- Tip: Number each storyboard before photographing and record it against your participant consent log. This becomes important if you want to cross-reference storyboard content with any pre/post survey data collected on the same day.
Analyse the Outputs Against Your Aims
Go back to the list you made in Step 1. Now read through the storyboards with that list in your hand. You are not marking them – you are counting how often each of your evaluation aims appears, and noting any surprises that fall outside your framework.
The Details:
- Action: Create a simple coding grid: one row per storyboard, one column per evaluation aim. Mark each cell with a tick (clearly present), a question mark (partially present or ambiguous), or a cross (absent). Then add a free-text column for anything the storyboard shows that you did not anticipate. These unexpected entries are often the richest data.
- Tip: Ask a colleague to code a sample of storyboards independently using the same grid, then compare. Where you disagree, discuss why – this simple check strengthens the credibility of your findings and is worth a line in any report you write.
Part 2: The Realist Pathway
Evidence Manifest
Documenting how the Mechanism was verified through specific data collection.
| Evidence Type | What it Proves | Data Source |
|---|---|---|
| Visual Artefact The Storyboard Outputs |
That participants were able to sequence, narrate, and visually represent knowledge gained through the programme – demonstrating comprehension beyond surface recall. Panel content and captions can be coded directly against your evaluation aims. | Photographed storyboard entries collected at the end of the session, coded thematically against the pre-defined evaluation framework. |
| Pre/Post Survey Knowledge and Attitude Questionnaire |
That measurable change in knowledge and attitude occurred between the start and end of the programme. Provides a quantitative baseline that storyboard data can be triangulated against. | Validated or adapted questionnaire administered before and after the activity, with open text questions to capture responses that fixed-answer formats cannot reach. |
| Live Documentation Scribe or Facilitator Record |
That the session was conducted as intended and that participant engagement was observable throughout. Provides a contemporaneous record of room energy, spontaneous comments, and any notable moments that the storyboards alone do not capture. | Visual record produced by a live scribe during the session, or structured field notes made by a facilitator observer using a simple observation template. |
| External Validation Selection or Public Outcome |
That the quality and communicative power of the outputs was recognised beyond the immediate project team – a form of peer or public validation that strengthens the case for impact. | Evidence of external recognition: competition selection, commissioning for animation, display in a public venue, or use in an advocacy or awareness campaign. |
Don’t just describe what participants drew. Show it, quote the captions, and let the panels carry the argument for you.
The Panel as Evidence
A single storyboard panel – drawing plus caption – can demonstrate knowledge comprehension more clearly than three paragraphs of report text. Decision-makers who would never read a methodology section will stop and look at a drawing.
The Caption Count
The written captions participants add to each panel are a goldmine of quotable, attributed evidence. They are the participant’s own words, produced in the moment, without a researcher asking a question – which makes them particularly valuable in a report.
The Before and After Story
If you have pre/post survey data alongside your storyboards, you can construct a triangulated narrative that moves from “here is what participants said they knew” to “here is what they showed they understood” – with the storyboard as the centrepiece of that argument.
The “One-Sentence” Report
“Because we used storyboarding, participants in our community programme felt confident and invested enough to create visual narratives that demonstrated measurable knowledge gain – outputs powerful enough to go on to be used in public advocacy.”