Effective Practice #2: Media Engagement

Media engagement and storytelling can bring data out of institutional silos and into the everyday conversations and decisions that shape communities. The best practices below focus on how place-based partnerships can use community dashboards as a springboard for leveraging media and storytelling to build public awareness, support, and accountability to help achieve their shared vision.

Organization

Finding Common Purpose

Organization

Finding Common Purpose

Central to FCP’s mission is the belief that publicly accessible and actionable outcomes data  is key to strengthening the cross-sector collaborations that ensure that working Americans can thrive in ways that matter to them. The infrastructure and practices that support communities in identifying collective goals and tracking progress are essential to catalyzing action and driving the systemic shifts needed to improve lived experience across the country. 

Within this context, community dashboards are an underutilized strategic tool that can accelerate and sustain common purpose and collaboration across the field of place-based work. If deployed well, they can act as vehicles for ensuring public access and commitment to outcomes that advance collectively-held communal goals. In a study of over 572 place-based partnerships,  we identified six effective practices that when implemented together can support the success and sustainability of community dashboards. On a broader scale, these practices are valuable for ensuring the success of other modes of public outcomes sharing.

In this brief, we explore how media engagement and storytelling can bring data out of institutional silos and into the everyday conversations and decisions that shape communities. The best practices below focus on how place-based partnerships can use community dashboards as a springboard for leveraging media and storytelling to build public awareness, support, and accountability to help achieve their shared vision.

Best practices in Media Engagement

The best practices detailed here are aimed at developing impactful storytelling and media engagement strategies to build trust and increase community interest and awareness. When done as part of a broader community engagement strategy, these best practices can be used to help sustain focus and unify communities around their shared goals and vision.

Section 1: Aligning Media and Storytelling Efforts with a Clear Purpose

Storytelling is most powerful when it clearly aligns with a community’s vision and the broader goals of the place-based partnership. Community dashboards are increasingly used not just as data tools, but as narrative anchors that help clarify community priorities, surface insights, and shape the purpose of media and storytelling efforts. A strong communications strategy builds from these insights to help further the community’s vision, identify target audiences, and align messaging, format, and timing accordingly. 

Develop a strategic communications plan that builds from the community dashboard. Ground your communications strategy in the insights, priorities, and narratives surfaced through the community dashboard. Clearly define the purpose of your storytelling and media efforts, identify target audiences, and articulate the intended impact—such as influencing policy, building public will, or mobilizing collective action. Ensure media and storytelling are not siloed activities used only to increase visibility, but are instead integrated into broader strategic, advocacy, and engagement efforts. 

One challenge to consistent storytelling and media engagement is constraints staff may feel in terms of time, media expertise, and funding. Assigning team members dedicated capacity to produce stories, update visuals, and maintain regular communications can help storytelling to function as part of a broader engagement strategy and not as a one-off effort.

Dedicate capacity to translate dashboard insights into storytelling and media engagement. Planning and resourcing are critical to activating a strong communications strategy. Allocate staff time or partner with trusted collaborators—such as community-based media organizations and local storytellers—to create content that translates key dashboard insights into relevant, accessible material for different audiences. Partners emphasize the importance of this kind of sustained, consistent storytelling to keep people connected to long-term vision. Without clear signs of progress and a compelling narrative, public interest can fade.

Use the dashboard to continuously inform and adapt communications strategies. Storytelling strategies should adapt as community priorities and contexts shift. Revisit communications goals regularly as dashboard trends reveal new patterns or gaps, and as initiative milestones are reached. Update messaging to reflect current priorities, challenges, and achievements, and refine audience engagement strategies based on what’s resonating—or no longer connecting—with the community.

Section 2: Centering Resident Voices in Storytelling

Stories are most powerful—and most trusted—when they reflect the lived experiences of the people they aim to represent. Centering resident voice, especially from those most impacted by local challenges, helps ensure storytelling builds credibility in the work of the initiative, deepens trust among residents and institutions, and ensures strategies stay grounded in community context.

Engage residents—especially those most impacted—in interpreting and applying data. When residents help interpret the community dashboard data, messaging becomes more authentic and the resulting stories will more closely reflect the lived experiences of community members. Involve residents early in reviewing dashboard development drafts, shaping narratives from the data, and identifying opportunities for action that reflect local priorities. 

Use storytelling and dashboard data together to personalize stories and elevate what matters most in a community. Stories rooted in everyday realities help bring attention to resident-defined challenges and goals. When paired with data-driven insights drawn from the community dashboard, personal stories—shared through videos, photos, and writing—can make dashboard data more relatable and actionable. In particular, amplifying the stories of those most directly experiencing and impacting challenges in a community can help build attention, motivate action, and ensure solutions and success measures reflect real experiences. 

One challenge to this is that storytelling can sometimes risk flattening the diversity of community experiences—especially across differences in geography, race, gender, and socioeconomic status. Initiatives discussed the value of using community dashboards to elevate a unifying vision that can mobilize collective action in a community, while also acknowledging the challenge of doing so without becoming “gatekeepers” of whose stories are told.

Design dashboards and visualizations with the understanding that data presentation reflects a point of view.  Community dashboards are not neutral tools. Each decision about how dashboard data is displayed—what’s included, how it’s visualized, how it’s explained—shapes how people interpret an issue and what they see as the most urgent or viable responses. Engage residents in shaping community dashboards to ensure that the data is presented in a way that reflects their lived experiences.

Section 3: Tailor Messaging to Specific Audiences

Understanding audience is key to effective storytelling. Different groups—residents, local officials, funders, and community partners—engage with community dashboards in different ways, depending on their context, priorities, and lived experience. To make messaging more accessible and actionable, initiatives tailor how dashboard data is presented and delivered to meet audiences where they are.

Identify your key audiences and shape messaging around what matters to them. Different groups—residents, local officials, school leaders, funders—bring different goals, perspectives, and spheres of influence. Tailor your messaging to speak directly to the priorities of each group, helping them see where they fit in the work and how their goals tie into the broader community vision. This includes adjusting the scale and framing of dashboard data to match familiar geographies or decision-making structures, like city neighborhoods and school districts. This data can also be used to pitch media in a more targeted way by providing them with data that’s most relevant to the audiences they serve.

Translate and distribute content in the languages and formats audiences already use. Language and format shape access. Translate stories and dashboards into the primary languages spoken in your community and share them through trusted channels that audiences already use—like local newsletters, social media, or press in languages spoken by community members—to ensure that messaging reaches and resonates with each audience.

Keep messaging clear, concise, and purpose-driven.
Plain language, consistent visuals, and accessible formats can help audiences quickly understand key insights from the dashboard—what’s happening, why it matters, and what can be done. Many initiatives emphasized first selecting a small set of indicators that align with their goals and are most relevant to each audience; then presenting these key points in accessible formats such as brief summaries, short videos, infographics, and clean visuals that make the data easy to grasp and apply in real-world decision making.

Section 4: Use Data Visualization and Narrative to Make Dashboard Data Tangible and Actionable

Dashboard data is most powerful when people can understand it, relate to it, and use it to inform decisions. To move from information to action, initiatives pair clear visualizations of dashboard data with narratives that provide more meaning and context. This includes spotlighting a small set of key indicators, using accessible formats like infographics and videos, and designing dashboards that help users quickly grasp patterns and progress. 

Select a few high-priority indicators and present them in simple, engaging formats. Focusing on too many metrics can overwhelm audiences and dilute the message. Highlight a small number of indicators that are most relevant to initiative goals and audiences. Use clear, accessible formats like infographics, annotated visuals, or short videos to help people quickly grasp key trends, comparisons, or progress over time. 

Bring meaning and urgency to quantitative data through storytelling.
Community dashboards become more compelling and actionable when their data is grounded in lived experience. Pair key indicators with community stories, quotations, or short videos to help audiences understand the human context behind the numbers so they can feel on a visceral level why the data matters. 

Use storytelling to foster critical connections and collaboration across systems. Stories help illustrate how different systems intersect and collectively shape the outcomes communities care about. Use narrative and dashboard design to highlight how interdependent efforts in a community contribute to the initiative’s primary outcomes and community’s overarching vision. 

Regularly update dashboard data visualizations to reflect progress and maintain trust. Outdated data and visuals can weaken credibility in the community dashboard and reduce engagement. Initiatives emphasized the importance of regularly refreshing dashboards and supporting materials to reflect new findings, highlight recent wins, and stay aligned with evolving community priorities. This can include sharing periodic updates through newsletters, press releases, or social media content, offering partners, community members, and media a consistent way to track progress and stay connected to the work.

Section 5: Build Collective Momentum Towards Long-Term Goals

Initiatives working toward population-level change often navigate long time horizons and complex, interconnected systems. Storytelling is a powerful tool for sustaining commitment over time. By highlighting small wins, shared priorities, and ongoing progress storytelling not only helps illustrate what communities are working toward, but also serves as a critical tool for strengthening long-term engagement across partners, institutions, and residents.

Elevate short-term wins to sustain and build long-term momentum.
Population-level change takes time, and initiatives often face the challenge of keeping attention and energy focused on long-term goals. Tracking short-term wins through the community dashboard and celebrating early, tangible wins—such as stronger resident engagement, improved program outcomes, successful pilot efforts, or shifts in local policy—helps maintain momentum and belief in the work. Storytelling gives these milestones visibility and meaning, reinforcing a sense of progress that may otherwise be difficult to see.

Create regular storytelling opportunities to reinforce vision and buy-in.
Ongoing storytelling—through newsletters, social media campaigns, dashboard updates, and community events—helps connect residents and partners to the long-term vision and the progress being made. These regular touchpoints make the work more visible and meaningful, which helps reinforce shared purpose, strengthens trust, and sustains engagement over time.

Section 6: How to Build and Leverage Relationships with Trusted Media Outlets

Media plays a powerful role in shaping public understanding, influencing policy, and holding decision-makers accountable to community-defined goals. By cultivating ongoing relationships with trusted local and regional outlets (both formal and informal) and sharing trusted community dashboard data in formats that are resonant and accessible, initiatives can elevate resident voice, report on progress, and focus attention on the issues that matter most in communities

Identify and develop ongoing relationships with media platforms that community members trust.
Start by mapping local, regional, and culturally specific media outlets that audiences already turn to for trusted information. Understanding how information flows and who holds influence in different groups helps ensure dashboard data and stories reach the right audiences in meaningful ways. From there, initiatives emphasize the importance of taking time to build long-term relationships with media partners. Use the community dashboard as a relationship-building tool: share timely, reliable, and localized data that speaks to media interests, and engage outlets as thought partners in shaping public understanding.

Provide timely, resident-centered dashboard insights and stories to support impactful reporting.
Help media partners tell stories that reflect community priorities by offering clear, accurate insights from the community dashboard alongside real-life examples and stories. This can include pulling out key findings in plain language that illustrate the impact and work around a specific issue, pairing them with stories from residents impacted by the issue, and packaging them into accessible formats—like fact sheets, press briefs, or visual summaries—that make it easier for media partners to communicate the story with depth and accuracy.

Leverage the dashboard and media to advance community priorities and shape public dialogue.
Community dashboards and trusted media outlets can work hand in hand to shape public understanding, increase accountability, and elevate resident-defined goals. By sharing data and stories that reflect resident perspectives and highlight areas of broad agreement, initiatives can build support for what’s working and call attention to persistent barriers. 

Challenges to building these trusted media relationships should be acknowledged. As local newspapers, radio stations, and community newsrooms shrink or shut down, many initiatives lose vital platforms for reaching residents and for building public accountability.  In some areas, the absence of local media means initiatives must take on more of the storytelling role themselves or invest in building new channels of communication from scratch.  

Even when stories do gain traction, traditional media coverage often centers institutional voices, favors conflict or sensationalism, or oversimplifies complex community issues. This can distort public understanding and sideline the voices of those most impacted. Initiatives emphasized the importance of building strong, ongoing relationships with media partners and proactively providing framing, context, and resident stories to ensure coverage reflects community values and priorities.

Closing

The best practices detailed above are aimed at developing impactful storytelling and media engagement strategies to build trust and increase community interest and awareness. When done as part of a broader community engagement strategy, these best practices can be used to help sustain focus and unify communities around their shared goals and vision.

At FCP, we believe that this investment is a critical component in driving a community-led vision for what it means to thrive. For more information on our approach, or for questions about how to learn more, please complete the contact form at LINK.