The Toolkit
Design
First, take inventory.
Audience
Who is your project for? Is your audience and participant pool the same, or are they different? Do they come from different backgrounds, speak multiple languages, span generations, have different styles of accessing public information, or different geographical locations?
It’s important to focus on your audience and participant pool because their needs and interests will drive your project. Undoubtedly, you will learn more about them as time goes on. Maintain flexibility and openness in your project design so you can incorporate and respond to new information about your audience.
Urban Forest
What trees do you want to highlight with this project? Are they in a specific neighborhood or park, or are you including all trees within your participants’ memory or imagination? Are there historic trees or significant species that you’d like to include? If you are surveying your entire city limits, do you need to represent certain tree species, historic trees, or iconic park trees from each neighborhood for the project to feel complete?
Intent
In general, story-sharing projects seek to build community consensus and stewardship values around urban trees. What do you specifically hope to achieve for your community? What do you hope to achieve for yourself, personally?
Brainstorm the primary and secondary goals for the project. This could include providing employment to artists and youth; learning more about your community; building bridges between community groups that are in conflict; addressing common misinformation around local tree issues; or increasing public engagement from certain groups of people or around public places that you believe would benefit from additional attention.
During this process, think about your unique perspective, background, and any assumptions you are bringing to the table. Consider your strengths and weaknesses in this role and how you might monitor them during the project. Keeping a personal project journal can be helpful to track and process your own experience.
Team
At minimum, your team should include a project director, an artist or interpreter, and a community advisor. It is technically possible for one person to fill all three roles—but that will be a lot of work!
The Project Director is responsible for managing project design and execution as well as maintaining the integrity of the information presented.
The Artist or Interpreter provides the vision and craftsmanship required to knit disparate story submissions into a unified whole.
The artist/interpreter role is essential to the project’s success. If you do not have the funding or access to hire a professional, do not give up. There are many wonderful guides for designing and producing interpretive projects to inspire your team. Elevating the final presentation of story submissions with thematic interpretation will give your project the impact, meaning, and longevity that it deserves.
The Community Advisor guides the team towards relevant topics in the community and makes introductions to potential participants and partners.
The community advisor provides the team invaluable insights. However, remember that they are only one voice of your project’s many stakeholders; stay open to other perspectives and sources of information.
Who else?
Think about who else you may need over the course of the project—a graphic designer, web developer, volunteer coordinator, community ambassadors, event staff? Can you partner with other departments in your organization or other community groups that might help you with these needs?
Who else in your organization needs to be involved—upper management, the Public Information Officer, Accounting? How can you convince them that this project is worth their time?
Identify the Project Topic and Theme
The project topic should generally refer to the people and trees in your community, or the park, neighborhood, or other geographical category that defines your project scope.
The project theme communicates what makes a place, tree, or experience special.
Discuss this with your project team. Your final presentation of stories can be interpreted by theme individually and united as a collection by the project topic. Or, you can seek to collect and relate many story submissions to one specific theme. In general, the theme(s) will be reflected by the presentation or media style employed by your artist/interpreter.
Presentation and Media Styles
If there is a style of media presentation that you know to be especially popular, proven, or accessible to your audience, it may be a good choice for your project.
However, do not be afraid to select a style of art or media that you personally enjoy and, most importantly, that you believe best captures the project theme. It could be woodworking, anime, film, sound design, comics, fiber arts, printmaking, dance, origami—your enthusiasm will help translate the project to a wider audience; find an artist/interpreter that you work well with; and avoid the pitfalls of using media that you don’t fully understand.
Social Media
You may feel anxious to tailor your project to share on social media platforms or a dedicated website. Digital spaces are valuable, but they can also be limiting. Relying on digital media can unintentionally exclude offline community groups and depersonalize the project experience. Building an online audience from scratch can also be challenging. Consider partnering or sharing posts with organizations or influencers with a large following if your organization does not already have one. Also think about other kinds of media that you could pitch for an interview or press release, like a local podcast, newspaper, city council meeting, or government access cable channel.
Any style of project can be translated into entertaining online content. First focus on engagement that reinforces a sense of place and community in the real world.
Project Timeline
Story-sharing projects take time. Consider designing your story collection and production as a series of pilot programs, so that you fine tune your process and inspire others to participate.
It is important to allow for the sometimes slow process of collecting stories, while also creating artificial deadlines for the team and your participants—they are only human, after all!
For more information on nature interpretation and working with artists, see our Resources page. For a sample project proposal, go to the toolkit in Google Drive.
Urban forestry engagement tends towards tree owners and park users. Consider nontraditional audience and participant types like…
Apartment renters
Veterans
Designers
Animal lovers
Athletes
Tourists
Business owners
Sam Ham’s Principles of Nature Interpretation (1992)
Interpretation is pleasurable.
Interpretation is relevant.
Interpretation is organized.
Interpretation has a theme.
Produce
Now that you know your audience, team, and project theme, it is time to start collecting stories.
Story Collection
After you’ve determined the size of your project area, try to collect stories from at least two different modes or locations. This could be from a combination of in-person events, email, social media, phone messages, postcards, or story-sharing stations at the local library or community center. Gathering stories from diverse locations is one way to reach as many participants as possible.
Story Prompts
Brainstorm story prompts with your project team. Prompts that are open ended and personal are the most effective.
Review and Curate
After you’ve received the first submissions, discuss with your project team whether your outreach is working as intended or if you need to adjust your methods. If you feel like stories are getting left out, network with partners to identify the participants you would like to include.
Adding Educational Material
Thematic interpretation involves adding educational material to your final presentation. Think about what information is interesting, meaningful, and relevant to your theme and audience. This is a good opportunity to increase awareness about tree care, local natural history, or other topics.
The most common question that people seem to have about trees is—”where is it from?” Explore the many ways this question can be answered. You can describe not only the country or area where the tree is from, but the habitat, its companion plants, the people who use and enjoy the tree in its native range, its significance to local culture and religion, and also the animals who interact with it. See the Tree Species Cheat Sheet in Google Drive for an example.
Show a Proof of Concept, and Repeat
The more you can share with participants what the final interpretive product will look like, the more interest your project will attract. Try to generate an early, small component of this product with your project artist so that you can share it with potential participants.
Ethics and Permissions
Focus on the wellbeing of participants and the new relationships you are building through this process. Even as you make efforts to be inclusive and strive to create a fully representational community project, be aware that the first step is building trust and rapport.
Remember—the most lasting and powerful legacy of your project should be the relationship you develop with your stakeholders. Reflect often on the experience that you are giving your participants. Brainstorm respectful and appropriate ways you might compensate participants for their time or make access easier.
Finally, do not forget to say thank you!
Budget for tokens of gratitude to all participants that make them feel valued and proud to have joined the project. If nothing else, a simple handwritten note will suffice.
Share, Display, and Celebrate
Search for related events, openings, art exhibits, or other community happenings and consider asking to partner with them and share audiences. Your project can have many wonderful iterations across digital and physical media, event spaces, and displays.
Think carefully about where you want your project to live at the end of the process. Imagine places and spaces where it can be accessed in perpetuity online, seen every day in an office or public facility, or shared as part of an annual school tradition. Try to make the project a part of the community’s cultural landscape—even if it’s just a tiny part!
For more information on ethical principles, story collection strategies, and rolling out the final interpretive project, see our Resources page.
Brainstorm groups
to contact such as…
Hiking, recreation, foraging, and other community clubs
Senior centers
Cultural and civic associations
Homeowners associations
Places of worship
Assistance centers
Local Facebook groups
Try personal prompts like…
What tree reminds you the most of home?
Is there a tree you find yourself visiting every time you go to a certain park or trail?
What is your favorite tree in the neighborhood?
Is there a tree you’ve known since you were a child?
Evaluate
Usually, evaluating an engagement project involves counting attendance at events, social media clicks, and the final number of participants. Those are valuable metrics (and typically required for grant reporting). In this case, evaluation refers to an optional but encouraged final review of the story submissions received.
Qualitative Research and Coding Your Story Collection
Qualitative research is used to understand concepts, opinions, or experiences that can’t be quantified by numbers or objective measurements. The stories you have collected include incredibly valuable information about your community's feelings, preferences, and priorities about urban trees.
Tree Stories Toolkit offers a simple method of reading and analyzing tree stories submitted from the public for common urban forestry themes. You might be surprised by what you can learn from a relatively simple process of “coding,” or by identifying and labeling significant themes and repeating patterns across the story collection.
For a detailed guide to performing a qualitative content analysis of your story collection, see our Resources page and download or make a copy of the Tree Stories Toolkit folder on Google Drive.
