Planning tools
Data STORYtelling
Plan a court's data story from strategy to yield: a worksheet for the plan, and pickers for the evaluation behind it and the figures inside it.
The framework is from Cultivating a Court's Data STORY, Trends in State Courts, 2025. Presented at the National Association for Court Management.
The five elements
Strategy
What the story is for, where it will live, and who will tell it.
Target Audience
One narrow, well-defined audience, named as specifically as you can.
Observations
What the data show, where they came from, and what could have bent them.
Representations
The narrative and the illustration that carry the finding.
Yield
How the story goes out and how you will know it worked.
The Tools
The worksheet holds the plan; the evaluation picker produces the findings a story needs before it can be told, and the display picker serves the Representations step.
The Data STORY Worksheet
Seventeen fillable steps, strategy through yield, with a one-page plan to print or download at the end; it will not write the story for you, but it will show you which parts still need planning.
Open the worksheet →Companion tool: format picker (which deliverable fits)
Which Evaluation Should We Do?
Answer up to seven questions about your program, and every evaluation approach sorts into what fits, what is ruled out, and what could fit with more time or data.
Open the evaluation picker →
Seeing Qualitative Data
Answer up to six questions about what your coding produced and how many cases you have, and thirty-nine displays sort into what fits, what could fit with more, and what is the wrong tool here.
Open the display picker →