Narrative Ethnography for
Mission-Driven Organizations
The foundation work that comes BEFORE branding, marketing, and communications
When organizations experience narrative chaos:
Leadership tells one story
Staff tells another
Marketing uses borrowed language that doesn't fit
Supporters describe something different entirely
I'm a narrative ethnographer who stands in narrative chaos WITH you. I witness what's invisible, name what's painful, and synthesize what you're too close to see.
You reconnect with your organizational truth so leadership, staff, and supporters recognize shared impact.
WHY FOUNDATION COMES FIRST
Your foundation starts from the top.
When your narrative is incoherent, every external investment — branding, campaigns, content — will fail. Why? Because your marketing team is absorbing the invisible labor of competing narratives.
The execution isn't bad. The foundation is missing.
I'm a narrative ethnographer with 12 years inside mission-driven contexts. I've lived this. I know what it feels like when everyone's working hard, but nothing lands.
Through embedded ethnographic partnership, I synthesize your organizational truth and discover your fire — the coherent narrative rooted in who you actually are, not who you think you should be.
No borrowed frameworks. No aspirational language. Your actual truth.
The Fire Framework™
A Rapid Ethnographic Approach to Narrative Clarity
Over 8-12 weeks, I use an intensive engagement known as focused rapid ethnography to map your narrative landscape across your entire stakeholder ecosystem. This is a validated methodology used by Microsoft, WHO, and Intel for organizational cultural analysis.
My process is two-fold:
Immersion & Synthesis: I embed in your organization to understand how your impact is experienced internally and externally, then synthesize into a coherent infrastructure
Delivery & Transfer: You receive the Narrative Hearth™ plus training in how to use it
Your deliverable is The Narrative Hearth™, a customized, comprehensive narrative infrastructure system that serves your entire organization — and anchors all your external-facing work. Your development team uses it for fundraising. Your programs team uses it to explain the work. Your board uses it for governance.
Not brand strategy. Not copywriting. Foundation work that makes those investments succeed.
The Narrative Hearth™
Your deliverable is a comprehensive narrative infrastructure system that includes:
Your narrative core - Clearly articulated, grounded in stakeholder reality
Language guide - What language fits (fire) vs. what doesn't (smoke)
Messaging frameworks - How to talk to different audiences
Implementation toolkit - Decision filters your team uses for years
WHO THIS WORK SERVES
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You're about to invest in marketing, branding, or communications. You sense narrative incoherence. Leadership can't articulate who you are without jargon. Your team tells different stories. You need foundation work before execution.
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Your development team struggles to write compelling proposals because program staff describes the work one way, leadership describes it another, and board members tell different origin stories. Your beneficiaries experience something that doesn't match what's on your website.
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You've been hired to "create content," but you're actually doing invisible synthesis work — mapping competing narratives, building coherence. This is ethnographic labor. It should come upstream.
The order matters:
Organizational narrative synthesis → THEN brand strategy → THEN execution (marketing, fundraising, communications).
INVESTMENT & SCOPE
Organizations typically invest $100-500K in marketing, capital campaigns, rebrands, and communications built on narrative chaos. This work ensures those investments actually land.
Engagement tiers: $48,000–$85,000
Founding rates available through March 2026: $38,000–$68,000
Why stakeholder count matters: Each voice represents a distinct narrative thread. The more voices in the ecosystem, the more complex the synthesis work—and the richer the final infrastructure.
Stakeholder count includes internal (leadership, staff, board) and external (donors, beneficiaries, partners) voices. Final scope confirmed during discovery call.
This work serves organizations $3M-$50M+.
Foundation tier is designed for smaller organizations with concentrated leadership.
Limited to 5 founding engagements
Meet Jeannie
I'm a narrative ethnographer — a practitioner-scholar with 12 years inside mission-driven organizations and an M.A. in Anthropology.
I've lived what you're experiencing. I was the marketing person absorbing the invisible labor of competing narratives, building coherence from chaos.
Now I practice focused rapid ethnography, the foundation work that comes before marketing. I embed in your organization to synthesize the truth you're too close to see.
12 years of field experience + anthropological training = the ability to do rigorous ethnographic work in 8-12 weeks instead of months or years.
Not brand strategy. Not consulting from outside. Embedded partnership that changes culture, not just messaging.
