Six or seven months after People Worth Caring About started a YouTube channel, Peter Murphy Lewis pulled the last thirty days of audience data and asked his host to guess what share of the viewers were men. She had already looked it up over the weekend and had kept rereading it, because it could not be right. Eighty-one percent, he says on the episode, and sixty-seven percent of them under the age of 34.
The host is Susan Ryan, and the show is Elevate Eldercare, a production of AgingIN, the organization formerly known as the Center for Innovation. Peter shared the hour with Erin Hart, who has spent nearly 13 years in long-term care and has run workforce development at the Ohio Health Care Association since 2019. The billing was the power of stories. What the conversation turned into was an argument about the limits of data, made by three people who all volunteer that they love it.
That is what makes it worth an hour. Erin’s day job is advocacy with state and federal policymakers, so she lives on evidence. Peter’s answer, which he credits to Ken Burns, is that you cannot move an opinion by pushing more information into a mind that has already taken in as much as it wants. Stories move emotion, and enough of them move a narrative. The numbers come afterwards, and their job is to tell you which story landed and on whom. There is a written companion to this episode in our article on writing an impact report.
Key Takeaways
1. You cannot change an opinion by adding more data to it
Peter takes the framing from Ken Burns, whom he describes on the episode as the most famous documentarian in the United States. People absorb as much information as they need to make a decision, he says, and then they stop, which is how stereotypes form. “If we want to change those opinions, we can’t do it by adding more data to that person’s mind,” he says. “The person already has enough data that they want to process.” The lever is emotional. ““You can change their opinion through stories, and if you put enough stories together you can actually change a narrative, as long as it’s authentic.””
2. Long form is what lets a contradiction read as honest
Everyone wakes up carrying contradictions, Peter argues. “All of us start every day with contradictions in our values and our ethics,” he says, teaching a child one thing on Monday and doing something else on Tuesday. A short recruitment spot has no room for that, so it flattens people into claims about themselves. Long-form documentary has the room, and he thinks the room is the whole point: it lets someone with contradictions come across as authentic rather than as wrong or dishonest. Complexity, filmed patiently, is what an audience reads as true.
3. The analytics job is to tell you which story landed
The channel was six or seven months old when Peter looked at the last thirty days. He says 81 percent of the viewers were men and 67 percent were under 34, a profile nobody in eldercare communications budgets for. He is precise about the sequence. The film came first; the numbers told them who had actually turned up, and now they can aim at young men who might become CNAs. “So we need both,” he says. Susan had already checked. “It’s just not what you think,” she says. “Everybody talks about the adult daughter.”
4. In a hearing room, a family story outruns the spreadsheet
Erin calls herself a data nerd and uses data constantly, which is what gives her verdict its weight. Data is helpful for demonstrating a point and supporting an argument, she says, but “the argument that sinks into that lawmaker’s heart is this family story.” That is why an advocacy organization chose film as its platform. She says the association has shown episodes to legislators and state representatives, invited Department of Health directors and the long-term care ombudsman’s office to the premiere, and sent a copy with grant applications so funders can see what they are being asked to fund.
5. The director keeps Peter in the dark on purpose
Valentina, the director Peter has worked with for ten years, runs the prep calls with Erin and works out what needs to come out of each building. Peter is not on those calls and does not read her outline. He gives two reaso