Project Storytelling Guide: The Power of a Narrative | Infusing Emotion into Data

PNW Fairy | Alexandra Hagel
Mar 19, 2025
7 min read

Updated: Mar 22, 2025

Article written by Alexandra Hagel, Director of Agency Communications for AMA PDX

AMA PDX Agency Storytelling Team Framework

Key Resource: Project Storytelling Guide Storytellers craft team stories and capture the experiences of generating metrics and impacts.

AMA PDX Agency is a powerful pro-bono marketing agency offering free marketing consulting and campaigns for community-based organizations focusing on impactful changes in our community.

What is Storytelling? The Power of a Narrative.

Narratives can be a powerful tool for driving successful project outcomes, creating a sense of purposeful, impactful work, and enhancing project deliverables. Storytelling strengthens memory and recall, fosters deeper connections, and motivates volunteer engagement. When we infuse meaning into our narratives, we amplify the impact of our work beyond basic reporting.

All communication is a form of storytelling! It’s not just sharing the big wins or successes, but every moment in between. Each phase of this project presents storytelling opportunities, challenges, and needs. Your role is to decide, shape, and share these stories in ways that align with your team’s values, organization mission, and community in the most impactful ways. Once we add meaning and enhance the impact through a communicated narrative, these stories are felt at a higher level than simple business reporting.

Your stories should reflect and resonate with your team values, your organization's project scope, your team skills and ambitions, and the impact on your communities!

Creating Powerful Narratives in Our Work

Crafting Meaningful + Valuable Stories (Measuring Impact in Creative Ways)

Create a narrative that centers on your team story + your nonprofit impact- this could be team progress or a unique journey, roadblocks, struggles, successes, and impacts you’ve noticed along the way. You can highlight specific metrics, or build narratives within the broader scope of your team impact. This is flexible, creative, and up to your interpretation - I'd love to hear your ideas!

Consider these question prompts to kick off and guide your storytelling and describe your team volunteer work:

What gems or key metrics can you pull forward to highlight?
How do you capture and track insights for reporting storytelling metrics?
What is the most important value or impact of your team’s work?
What goals are you helping achieve, and how? (organization level, and community level)
Can you tell a personal story, impact story, or team story?
How can you transform marketing metrics and impacts into compelling narratives?
What does it feel like generating these metrics/impacts? Tell the experience
What unique tasks and milestones can be told as stories?
Is there a unique founder story you'd like to capture and share in addition to your volunteer stories?
What type of calls to action should these stories have?
How can we inspire future AMA volunteers?
How can we highlight volunteerism’s impact and encourage more engagement?
What types of stories speak to you? Identify key messaging tactics!

TLDR: Why Storytelling Matters

-Strengthens community connection and awareness

-Enhances volunteer engagement and retention

-Adds meaning and emotion to project milestones

-Drives impact through compelling calls to action

-Moves beyond metrics to create lasting impact

Key Messaging & Content Strategy

Storytelling Tone:

Community-oriented, inspirational, and mission-driven.

→ This is where you will feature your team of dedicated volunteers and your experiences making a visible and measurable difference. Our goal is to empower the community with our impactful stories as a vehicle for change and amplify the important causes and impacts with a clear voice that resonates with our community. ←

Storytelling Content Ideas:

Volunteer Impact: Showcase team contributions and transformations.
Mission-Driven Work: Frame stories around nonprofit goals and community change.
Challenges & Successes: Emphasize resilience and problem-solving.
Collaborations & Partnerships: Highlight unique alliances formed.
Stewardship & Sustainability: Illustrate long-term, meaningful impact.
Personal Narratives: Share firsthand volunteer experiences.

Storytelling Mediums & Formats

Measure your impact in the most creative ways! Here are some ideas:

Team testimonials
Visual Storyboards & Before/After Imagery
Video content or short video snippets
Surveys: written, verbal, other?
Work session photos
Written articles and reports
Video testimonials
Infographics
Podcasts or audio snippets/soundbytes
Social media style highlights or blurbs (before-and-after photos, if applicable)
Successes, failures, learning opportunities, project shifts, roadblocks, and realignments
Find more compelling ways to share vs simple numerical metrics—adding the feeling of these impacts and stories around what makes them important to you, to your organization, and your community- find the deeper meaning!
Other forms of ongoing storytelling tactics and strategies

What other ideas do you have? How can the stories captivate and influence audiences, and transform the organization? What essential stories should teams create and share to tell more effective, compelling, and authentic stories?

Conclusion / Major Takeaways:

Your storytelling role: produce a clear voice and identity representing your team's ideas and experiences along the way in creating these impactful community changes, the organizational changes, and the experience working with Portland’s communities.

Highlight a broader, cause-driven narrative
Focus on the stewardship and volunteer impact at every level: team, organization, and community
Generalizing individual project tasks into larger narrative syntax
Tying storytelling narratives to volunteer outreach—is there a call to action for future volunteers these narratives could contain? Add mission-driven components
Build awareness and share experiences rather than reporting metrics
Further highlighting volunteerism’s marketing impacts—describe the project as a reflection of contributions to spaces/communities you’ve been able to perform these impactful changes + areas you’ve helped improve (local, state levels, etc)
Showcasing partnerships and collaborations formed through these roles. Have you discovered unique partnerships within these roles?

These storytelling strategies are adaptable based on your specific team projects and nonprofit initiatives. Use this framework for further programming and as a guide for communications around the soul of your agency teamwork!

Potential Team-wide Final Deliverable:

A video compilation of clips shared throughout the project timeline.

Project Storytelling Structure

1. Project Launch: Setting the Narrative + Creating the Story

Build a narrative of your transformation stories to set the stage and rally teams around a shared vision.

Align storytelling with team strategies and nonprofit goals.
Visualize the impact journey from the beginning.

2. Project Plan: Building the Narrative

Think out of the box of narratives that align with your team project strategies that could bring these stories to life, with more feeling and emotion than pure metric reporting. Visualize these outcomes!

Move beyond traditional reporting—infuse emotion into data.
Identify key storytelling moments and milestones.
Develop themes that resonate with audiences.

3. Project Execution & Deliverables

Share small steps, successes, and overcoming challenges along the way. Capture the feelings (such as a shared sense of pride or accomplishment among the team, resistance experienced, and ways of creatively overcoming this). Highlight team efforts in creative story forms.

Capture wins and challenges through narratives.
Showcase team efforts creatively.
Share pride, struggles, and breakthroughs along the way.

4. Monitoring Progress: Narrative-Based Reporting

Use narratives to craft the project journey and share progress, rather than sharing data. How do the numeric metrics positively impact the community? What other impact snippets can you pull forward for these beneficial changes made?

Use narratives to craft the project journey and share progress rather than just data.
Explain how numeric metrics positively impact the community.
Share in narrative form how your team identified roadblocks, adjusted strategy, and moved forward.
Create an overarching story of project performance and milestones, making data more meaningful.
Look for moments of vulnerability: add human meaning and emotions to craft compelling narratives that resonate deeply and speak to audiences on all levels.

5. Storytelling Narrative Mediums & Formats

Here’s where you can get creative! What tools are appropriate to report craft and capture these narratives? Since imagery is key to feeling, what imagery will you include and why? Will storyboarding be helpful for you?

Get creative with reporting formats.
Choose the best tools for crafting and capturing narratives.
Explore different mediums: written articles, video, infographics, podcasts, social media blurb snippets, sound bytes from team meetings, live-action visuals, illustrated, animated, voice-over, etc.
Leverage imagery strategically—it’s key to storytelling impact.
Consider narrative storyboarding: graphic representations of narratives before execution, for example, a comic strip with pictures in sequence representing each shot, to help visualize the story before execution.
Draft sketches and outline attributes to define key elements of the story (traits, conflicts, relationships, motivations, backstory) about different narratives for the story. Writing these beforehand helps form a mental picture.
Keep notes! Jot down any ideas whenever they strike and capture ideas as they come. Decide to incorporate them (or not) into the story during revisions.

6. Project Wrap-Up: Reflecting on Impact

Build a narrative to reflect on the entire journey of transformation and impact. These stories should capture the project evolution, initial challenges to team achievements, and successes. Use data to support these stories and bring them to life! Are there any lessons learned through these story narratives? Have these stories helped you better understand aspects of your project or your community? Or your role as an agency volunteer? What valuable insights did these stories help you capture and gain along the way?

Craft a concluding narrative that encapsulates the project journey.
Showcase transformation from initial challenges to successes.
Use data to enhance storytelling and add credibility.
Consider each team member's role and their contributions to success.
Reflect on lessons learned and how storytelling helped shape your understanding of this project.
Provide insights or final thoughts for future volunteers and agency storytellers in our impact-based community work.

This is our foundation for creating impactful, engaging storytelling. Let’s bring these stories to life in a way that resonates, inspires, and drives meaningful change!

Project Deliverables

These are flexible!

Next Steps & Ongoing Support

How else can I support you? Contact me for additional storytelling tools, internal meetings, or check-ins.

Our goal is to create meaningful, compelling, and authentic stories that inspire action and demonstrate the real impact of our volunteer work. With your storytelling role, we will ensure that our efforts are not just seen—but truly felt!

We want your team to feel deeply connected to your roles and the incredibly impactful work you are creating throughout this project—while also ensuring these impacts are ‘baked in’ to your narrative strategies and storytelling models, and further amplifying their reach in our local communities.

Let’s collaborate, innovate, and share our voices in ways that will leave a lasting effect. Looking forward to your ideas and contributions!

Supporting Your Storytelling Efforts:

Internal meetings and check-ins
Storytelling tools and resources
Content brainstorming sessions
Video and media strategy support

Additional Resources + Tools:

Four types of narrative styles for business and project storytelling:

Value Story: To convince customers they need what you provide.
Founder Story: To persuade investors and customers that your organization is worth the investment.
Purpose Story: To align and inspire employees and internal stakeholders.
Customer Story: To allow customers and users to share their authentic experiences.