The facts of it are short. In 2001, a famine hit Malawi. William Kamkwamba's family, who farmed maize, could no longer grow enough to both eat and pay his school fees, and so, at fourteen, he had to leave school. A school record would hold that much: fees unpaid, no longer enrolled. Those are the facts. What happened next is the part worth telling, and it was never written down.
With no school to go to, William spent his days in a small library, a bicycle ride from his home. It was a single room of donated books. His English was thin, so he worked mostly from the diagrams. One book showed how a windmill could turn wind into electricity. His village had no electricity. Once the sun set, there was no light.
He decided to build one.
For months he gathered what other people had thrown out: a broken bicycle, a tractor fan, a stretch of plastic pipe, poles cut from blue gum trees. Neighbors watched him pick through the scrapyard and thought he had gone mad. He kept at it. He wired a bicycle dynamo to blades he had cut and shaped, and raised the whole machine on a tower of scavenged wood. When the blades caught the wind and turned, a small bulb in his hand came on and stayed on. He was fifteen. He had taught himself from a library book, built the machine from scrap, and brought electric light to his family's house.
Notice what happened to you while you read that. You already know the general facts of hunger and hardship; you have seen numbers like these before. And still, for a moment just now, you were there on the tower yourself, holding the bulb, waiting to see if it would light. That is what a story can do.
That shift has a name, and it has been studied for years. In 2000, Melanie Green and Timothy Brock published a set of experiments in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. They gave people stories to read and measured how far each reader was carried into the world of the tale, a state they called being transported. The more transported the reader, the more their beliefs moved toward what the story showed.
A review by Tom van Laer and colleagues, in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2014, pooled well over a hundred results and found the same thing: a reader drawn into a story shifts in feeling, belief, and intention. A more recent review, by Rahmani and colleagues in the journal Behavioural Public Policy in 2025, went wider. It gathered 77 experiments across a dozen countries and found the effect is real, and that it can last from weeks to a year. It is worth understanding what kind of difference that makes. A clear, well-made message already helps people understand what happened. A story builds on that understanding by helping them feel why it mattered.
There is a reason it works, and it runs deeper than persuasion. The psychologist Jerome Bruner argued, in his 1986 book Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, that story is its own way of thinking. We take in a list of facts one way and a person's story another way, and the second way reaches parts of us the first leaves untouched. When you feel what William's windmill meant, you understand the facts more fully.
Here is where it turns toward your own work. You hold facts about the people you serve all the time: a number on a report, a line in a record, a name on a list. Each one has a person behind it, and a story, the way "fees unpaid, no longer enrolled" had William behind it. The facts tell you, and everyone you pass it to, what happened. The story tells them what it meant. Tell that story, following one real person or one real moment, and keep the one true detail that matters most. Told that way, you give people the meaning, and not just the information.
That is its own kind of deposit. Telling someone the story behind the facts shows them you understood what those facts meant to a person, beyond what they recorded. It shows them you care, which is a large part of why anyone is trusted. A story told well is care made plain, because you took the time to carry what the data meant.
For everyone who works in education, the reason for telling these stories is the same. Whether the audience is staff, a board, families, or the wider community, the story helps people see what a decision could mean for a student. The numbers in a table are still important. They show what is happening and give people the facts they need. But a table cannot show what those numbers look like in the life of one child. A story can add that missing part. It helps people see the student behind the information and understand why the decision in front of them matters. When people understand both the facts and their effect on a real student, they are more likely to act with that student in mind.
William Kamkwamba's own story reached the world. He told it in a book, written with the journalist Bryan Mealer, and later from a stage. People who would never read a report on rural electricity came to understand something true about his part of Malawi, because they had felt it through one boy and one windmill.
Your stories can do the same work. When you tell the story behind the information, people do more than understand it. They feel its meaning, and they are more likely to remember it.
There is one more thing even the best-told story needs: it has to reach the people it is meant for, in a form they can receive. That is where we turn next.