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 reasons: people fall ill and plans change, so briefing him a week early wastes her time, and she wants the day to stay authentic. What he gets on arrival is a one-page agenda of where to be and with whom. “There are no words or no questions,” he says, only a one-line bio.
6. The sector has a pride problem before it has a staffing problem
While training as a CNA, Peter heard an administrator say something he still repeats: “We don’t have a staffing problem, we have a pride problem.” He asked what she meant. She had people who introduced themselves with an apology. “I’m just a CNA, I’m just a med pass, I’m just a kitchen aide.” Peter, who once lost his business and went from founder and CEO to living in his parents’ basement, takes that word personally. His hope is that in ten years people thank a CNA in the street the way they thank a police officer.
Rapid Fire Q&A
Q: Where did the title People Worth Caring About come from?
A: Thirty minutes before he had to record the opening trailer for the Nebraska season, with nothing written down. The preposition settled it. We do not care for caregivers, Peter says, that is what they do for a living. We should care about them, because they took care of his grandparents.
Q: Who is actually watching the docuseries on YouTube?
A: Not the audience the field plans for. Over the thirty days before recording, Peter says 81 percent of viewers were men and 67 percent were under 34. Susan Ryan had checked the figures herself over the weekend and says she had to keep rereading them.
Q: How much of the filming is scripted?
A: Almost none. Erin’s team runs prep calls about who will be present and which part of the building the crew will use, and nothing about questions or answers. One schedule change was permitted: a weekly pop-up market that residents queue for moved a day so it could be filmed.
Q: Who paid for the Ohio season?
A: The association’s educational foundation, which Erin says hands out about $275,000 a year in scholarships. She describes the season as one hundred percent donor funded, with the member company HCF Management giving the proceeds of its annual golf outing, roughly a third of the cost.
Q: Which episode should someone watch first?
A: Erin points to the Welcome Nursing Home episode and June, a woman in her nineties who found love and married; her husband David does carpentry in the shop out back. Peter sends people to Covenant Village and the two sisters who were working at Subway a year earlier.
What This Means for Data-Led Marketers in Senior Care
If you market a care organization, the useful thing in this conversation is the order of operations. Data will not change what a family, a legislator or an 18-year-old believes about your building. It will tell you what they already believe and how many of them believe it. The change comes from footage of people doing the work. Treat the dashboard as the instrument you check afterwards, not as the argument you lead with.
Then measure the right thing. View counts alone would have told the Ohio team the series was working; the audience split told them who it was working on, and it was not the adult daughter the sector plans around. Watch a few episodes of the People Worth Caring About documentary series and the reason is visible on screen. The people on camera look and sound like the young men who showed up to watch them.
Budget for the second life of the footage. In Ohio, Erin says the same episodes went to legislators during a workforce amendment, into grant applications, into orientation for new staff, into companion guides for HR teams, and into conversations with nursing schools and career technical centers. That reuse is where the economics change, and it is the argument behind Strategic Pete’s senior living marketing services. A campaign that dies when the media spend stops was never worth what you paid for it.
Last, protect the part you cannot plan. The moments that carried the Ohio season came out of things going wrong. A COVID outbreak in Toledo the night before filming left Erin about 90 minutes to find another building. Two housekeepers stepped in with half an hour’s notice. A resident who had not eaten in the dining room in four years decided, on camera, to go. Erin says long-term care has a serious image problem. The answer is not a better claim about the work. It is more of the work, filmed.
Listen to the Full Episode
“The Power of Stories in Long-Term Care” was published on 29 October 2025 on Elevate Eldercare, hosted by Susan Ryan and produced by AgingIN, the organization formerly known as the Center for Innovation. Susan is a nurse by training who spent the bulk of her career in long-term care settings, and the questions show it. Listen to the full conversation with Susan Ryan, Erin Hart and Peter Murphy Lewis.
