The Ethnographic Interview - Nonprofit Storytelling with Elisabeth Reinkordt

We talk to Digital Strategist Elisabeth Reinkordt about interviewing techniques that can help improve nonprofit video storytelling.

As we continue to talk to our friends in the nonprofit and communications space, we set up shop at Alma del Mar in South Philly’s Italian Market. Digital Strategist Elisabeth Reinkordt started her career in documentary film production and has a broad background in communications. She is also trained as an ethnographic researcher, which gives her a unique frame of reference.

The ethnographic approach

Elisabeth uses her experience and training to apply the ethnographic approach, where instead of “observing from the outside and with a cold distance from someone, you're engaging in a conversation that is about the life conditions of a person and really tries to follow a through line and find their story.”

Preparing an interviewee

Part of having a good interview is doing the work beforehand to ensure its success. One way to do this is with a pre-interview. This doesn’t have to be done by the person conducting the interview while filming, “but by someone who can assuage their fears and make them feel comfortable, while doing a practice run.” Applying the ethnographic approach to this prep can mean starting with “questions that are not about where you're going, having people talk about themselves a little bit; and they might not understand at first why you're doing that.”

The last question

One of the rewards that this pre-interview process can help to reap is making the interviewee feel more comfortable when answering what could be the final question: What do they want to talk about that they haven’t already? “Oftentimes, it means that the last question you ask is the one that gets the best answer. Sometimes they'll take it to all sorts of places that you wish they would have gone a long time ago. But it doesn't matter if you got the content.”