a STEMsaic Research Impacts LLC media property
You're preparing to present your partnership update to stakeholders - maybe funders, maybe leadership, maybe new potential partners. You know there's a compelling story to tell, but something keeps fragmenting.
You can talk beautifully about WHY the partnership exists. This is great, talking about the shared vision, the aligned interests, the combined capacity. But when someone asks about actual programs and activities, you have to shift gears completely to a new non-specific vocabulary, different energy, disconnected narrative.
Then when you try to describe how people actually experience the partnership. What are the journeys of faculty, students, industry partners, community members? The answers tend to extend the disconnected stories.
Sound familiar? The partnership is real and valuable, but the story keeps falling apart because you're telling parts of three different stories that don't connect as well as they should. This isn't a communication problem. It's a continuation of common partnership design problems. Using the Layered Partnership Design (LPDesign) changes how you build, evaluate, and sustain partnerships forever.
Figure 1 - STEMsaic Story Evaluation Framework
Transforming Story Elements into Metrics. Instead of treating evaluation in isolation, this diagram shows how metrics emerge naturally from the LPDesign layers. By tracing the connections between Aligned Vision (Foundations), Programs (Offerings), and Experiences (Pathways), partnerships can identify natural touchpoints for continuous improvement and impact measurement. This design model naturally creates the stories of impact.
The Aha Moment: Story Elements ARE Evaluation Metrics
In the last issues of the team guide, we introduced Layered Partnership Design (LPDesign) - the framework showing that partnerships operate simultaneously across three layers:
Partnership Foundations: Purpose, capacity, and resources (the ecosystem)
Partnership Offerings: Programs, practices, and events (the menu)
Partnership Pathways: Individual and collaborative journeys (the experiences)
Here's the transformation: The same story elements that make your partnership narrative compelling become your natural evaluation touchpoints when they bridge across all three layers of the partnership.
Think about any good story. It has consistent elements: characters, setting, conflict, resolution, transformation. The characters don't change randomly between chapters. The setting maintains continuity. The conflict connects to the resolution.
Table 1: Now apply this to your partnership:
Story Element | LPDesign Foundations Layer | LPDesign Offerings Layer | LPDesign Pathways Layer |
|---|---|---|---|
Characters | Partnering organizations | Target audiences | Individual journeys |
Setting | Shared problem space | Program contexts | Personal contexts |
Conflict | The gap that brought partners together | Challenges programs address | Obstacles individuals navigate |
Resolution | What the partnership enables together | What programs deliver | What individuals achieve |
Transformation | How the partnership ecosystem changes | How audiences change | How individuals change |
You can see when teams discover these story patterns internally. Partnership teams can articulate consistent story elements at every layer with consistent characters, conflict, and transformation vision whether they were describing the partnership foundation, their innovation programs, or individual user pathways.
When teams couldn't maintain story coherence across layers, the partnership may struggle to see their roles and connectivity across the partnership. Not because they lacked resources or commitment, but because they were fundamentally telling different stories that could influence how they enact their role in the partnership. Its not that everyone needs to have the same story, but the partners should see their connected roles in the stories they tell.
Bring the Opportunity to embed Evaluation Activities
Traditional evaluation asks: "Did we achieve our objectives?" and measures outcomes. This can work well, but often doesn’t embed within the partnership operations.
Story-based evaluation asks: "Are we living and understanding the stories of our partnership across all layers?" and measures coherence as well as impact outcomes - which turns out to align to operational sustainability far better than outcome metrics alone.
STEMsaic Story Evaluation Framework is aligned with Layered Partnership Design, featuring the three layers of: Partnership Foundations, Offerings, and Pathways. Applying a standard story arc framework to STEM partnership design is the first stage to develop evaluation metrics that relate directly to the participants, programs, and partners, as well as develop embedded participatory models of evaluation to understand multiple layers of operational and exploratory journeys to evaluate based on the agreed-upon evaluation focus. Applying this framework will generate many more evaluation elements than can likely be supported in the project, but it is a concrete method to see how elements of continuous improvement and mapped evaluative feedback can help to understand the dynamics of the partnerships within and across layers.
The STEMsaic Story Evaluation Framework Audit
Before (or as part of) your next partnership meeting, try this 15-minute story coherence check. This is pulled directly from the STEMsaic Story Evaluation Framework (graphic above). The STEMsaic Story Evaluation Framework can be applied to partnership planning for grant development or applied to existing and developing partnerships:
Step 1: List Your Story Elements of the STEMsaic Story Evaluation Framework (5 minutes)
Grab a whiteboard (in-person/online) or document and write these five categories:
Characters
Setting
Conflict
Resolution
Transformation
Step 2: Fill In Each Layer of the STEMsaic Story Evaluation Framework: (8 minutes)
For each story element, write the answer at each layer:
FOUNDATIONS: At the ecosystem level, involving the partnering organizations
Who are the character organizations?
What shared problem space (or individual partner challenges) brings partners together?
What gap requires collective or collaborative action?
What do partners collectively enable (resolution)?
How will the ecosystem / ecospace change (or be reinforced)?
OFFERINGS: At the program level, involving your target audiences
Who are the target audiences, participants, partners?
What contexts for partnership interactions do programs create?
What challenges are being addressed for each partnership at a group/department/team level?
What do your programs deliver (resolution)?
How will audiences and/or partner programs change?
PATHWAYS: At the individual level, involving specific journeys
Who are the individual characters navigating your partnership
What academic/professional situations do individuals/partners start from (setting)?
What obstacles do individuals that are part of the partnership (or audience) face?
What and how do individuals achieve (resolution)?
How might individuals personally transform?
Step 3: Check Coherence (2 minutes)
Look at your answers. Do the story elements connect across the layers?
Do the character partner organizations (Foundations) serve the audience characters (Offerings) who become the individual characters (Pathways)?
Does the conflict at each layer relate to the same fundamental challenge?
Does transformation accumulate - individual transformation contributing to audience transformation contributing to partnership ecosystem transformation?
Where story elements don't connect, you've found your partnership design gaps.
Team Meeting Agenda: Story Coherence Workshop
Copy, paste, and use the Step 1, Step 2, and Step 3 as part of your next partnership team meeting. Make modifications appropriate to your team size and how you operate across your partnerships.
Meeting Opener (10 minutes): Individual Story Element Exercise
Have each team member (or representatives of a particular partnership) independently complete Step 1-2 from the STEMsaic Story Evaluation Framework above. No discussion yet. Capture individual perspectives on the partnership story at each layer.
Expected outcome: Reveal whether team members are telling the same partnership story or can map the story of the partnership they are involved in.
Mid-Meeting Activity (15 minutes): Story Comparison and Gap Identification
Share individual story elements on a shared board. Look for:
Where team members agree or have related elements (story strengths)
Where team members have very different answers (story gaps)
Where nobody has an answer (story voids)
Expected outcome: Identify specific story elements that need collaborative development
Story-to-Metric Conversion (10 minutes): Early Evaluation Design Focus
Ideally you will have a member of the team or partner who has expertise and experience in partnership evaluation. If this is not possible try to stay away from designing assessment elements that solely track “satisfaction” measures. For each story element where you have coherence, create an evaluation question that moves across at least 2 layers of LPDesign:
Characters coherence: "Can we track individuals from audience to pathway journey?"
Conflict coherence: "Are we addressing the same challenge at each layer?"
Transformation coherence: "Can we trace individual transformation to ecosystem change?"
These become your embedded evaluation metrics - questions you answer continuously through partnership work, not externally at reporting time. The next Team Guide (3) will focus on refining all the possible options of story evaluation to a practical and embedded evaluation plan.
Expected outcome: Partnership story elements become your evaluation framework
Closing Action (5 minutes): Assign Story Development
For story gaps identified, assign development owners:
Who will clarify the Foundations story element?
Who will strengthen the Offerings story element?
Who will map the Pathways story element?
Set a 2-week check-in to share developed story elements.
Expected outcome: Clear ownership of story coherence development
Forward this agenda to your partnership team now - story coherence work is most valuable when done collaboratively. Within 30 days, your team will have a unified partnership narrative that doubles as your evaluation framework.
Quick Reference: The Five Story Elements Across Three Layers
Use after the team STEMsaic Story Evaluation Framework Audit session(s) (above) when designing new partnerships or auditing existing ones:
Rate how well each story element connects across all three partnership layers
Scoring Scale
Score | Coherence Level | Description |
|---|---|---|
1 | Disconnected | Story elements isolated at each layer |
2 | Weak | Some connection but significant gaps (or stretch to connect) |
3 | Moderate | General alignment among at least 2 layers with some disconnection |
4 | Strong | Clear coherence with examples across 3 layers (minor gaps are ok) |
5 | Unified | Ideal alignment - clear multi-directional flow across all layers |
Story Element Assessment
Story Element | Think... | Score (1-5) |
|---|---|---|
Characters | partners ↔ audiences/groups ↔ individuals | ____ |
Setting | problem addressed ↔ program context ↔ personal situation | ____ |
Conflict | gap ↔ challenge ↔ obstacle | ____ |
Resolution | enables ↔ delivers ↔ achieves | ____ |
Transformation | ecosystem ↔ audience ↔ individual | ____ |
TOTAL | ____/25 |
Score Interpretation
Total Score | Rating | Next Steps |
|---|---|---|
20-25 | Excellent | Partnership narrative is unified and evaluable |
15-19 | Good | Some story development work needed |
10-14 | Moderate | Significant story gaps to address |
5-9 | Low | Partnership is telling multiple disconnected stories |
What's Coming
Next Up LPDesign Team Guide 3: "The Evaluation Embedding Workshop"
How to convert your story coherence audit into practical evaluation protocols that are embedded in existing partnership activities - not added as extra reporting burden. We'll show how extramural grant project teams can build continuous evaluation into their partnership touchpoints. The focus will be to capture partnership stories through the artifacts your participants are already creating; presentations, portfolios, posters, and debriefs that become both evidence and evaluation.
The Partnership Designer is a newsletter from STEMsaic Research Impacts LLC. This issue is part of a purchasable team guide package designed for use by faculty community and industry partners with connections to partner-infused programs such as the Regional Engines program, NSF CAREER award, NSF ExLENT, NSF EPIIC, and developing/ongoing research impacts partnerships across the continuum. We help partners design STEM collaborations that have sums greater than their parts - efficiently implemented, meaningfully assessed, systematically sustained.
One thing you can do right now: Forward this to a colleague who's preparing a partnership presentation or proposal. The STEMsaic Story Evaluation Framework transforms how they'll structure their narrative - and gives them a built-in evaluation design.