Turn your technical content into a compelling story for any audience!

Workshops

Choose from any of the two-hour workshops listed below, or you can request a customized workshop.

Distilling Complexity

All communication is a process of distilling complexity. This can be a daunting task, but with a few simple tools, it can be fun and gratifying! Whether you want to improve your pitches, interviews, abstracts, reports – or simply not get flustered the next time someone asks, “What do you do?” – this workshop will help you prepare for any communication opportunity.

Key Skills:

  • Connect with your target audience through your personal motivation for your work.

  • Engage and maintain the interest of your target audience.

  • Distill and prioritize content into clear ideas for your target audience.

Developing Science Stories

Science can be both engaging and empirical – if you know how to distill a cohesive story! Translate your technical content or personal experience into a story that is meaningful, memorable, and accurate. Great for developing a piece of writing or a presentation in any format!

Key Skills:

  • Develop a cohesive and compelling story using strong narrative structure and relatable characters.

  • Make your story broadly appealing while also considering the cultural context of your target audience.

Story arc showing icons from “Developing Science Stories” image, now in story board thumbnails anchored to major points in the story. Thumbnails at peaks (high narrative tension) have warm colors, those at low points (low tension) have cool colors.

Visualizing Science Stories

Take your slide decks, posters, and figures to a new level! Learn how to create aesthetic and informative visuals that will support your science story in any medium using principles of story art and graphic design.

Key Skills:

  • Use color, tone, shape, and layout to both convey information and evoke emotion.

  • Balance precision with accessibility.

  • Develop a visual progression for any story requiring a series of images (e.g., for a slide deck).

A diverse audience represented by multicolored circles. A word bubble coming from multiple audience members contains the Science Through Story logo, a DNA double helix made of film strips.

Engaging Diverse Audiences

Communicating science is an essential skill. But if we really want to reach our target audience, we must consider everyone in that audience. In this interactive workshop, we will explore how to engage diverse audiences with technical topics through active listening, multicontextual strategies, and accessible design. We will especially consider how to make our content inclusive for audiences that are often marginalized from science.

Key Skills:

  • Engage your target audience while considering the cultural context of your interaction.

  • Distill and frame the main point of a topic for different audiences.

  • Utilize best practices for accessible design in presentations.


“Sara’s presentation of integrating stories with science is a tall order and she delivers on many fronts. These workshops provide the science community with the opportunity to relate to, and engage, the broader public in a uniquely creative manner that perhaps they did not know they were capable of.”
— Randal M. Dutra, Fine Artist/Filmmaker/Animation Director

Check out these FREE webinars to see examples of my approach!

Science Through Story

Download the accompanying worksheet here.

Science Through Visual Stories

These webinars are sponsored by The Leakey Foundation.


Workshop Design and Facilitation Training

Do you want to learn how to run your own workshops? I can coach you on best practices that will suit your program needs, whether in person or online.

If you are looking to build your own workshop specifically on communication skills, I can also provide you with some non-proprietary content covering best practices to help you get started. We will also work together during the coaching session to customize your content to meet the needs of your target audience.



Selected past clients:


Would you like to request a workshop?