Your Storytelling and Community Engagement Toolkit

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Oh, hi!

Here’s your Storytelling and Community Engagement Toolkit, a resource I built for teams who need to connect with their customers and residents more effectively and don’t need one more content brainstorm.

If you’ve been at this for a while, you know the truth. You’re sitting on a mountain of material—feedback, quotes, stats, screenshots—that already says what you want to say. It’s just buried in inboxes, decks, and docs no one’s opened since 2021.

This kit helps you work with what you’ve got and finally make it land.

The 3R Method: My Go-To Move for Teams

1. RESURFACE: Start digging. Not for new ideas, for moments you already lived. That email thread with the CEO or mayor? That one presentation that got great feedback? It’s all usable.

2. REFRAME: Look at it sideways. What haven’t you said yet? Who felt something? What shifted?

3. RECHARGE: Now give it power. Plug that story into the formats that are trending anywhere your audience is already looking.

Your Audit Checklist: Where Should you Look?

Start here:

• 📩 Emails with customer and community feedback (even the short ones) 

• 🧾 Survey comments, especially the unexpected ones 

• 📊 Event recaps and project summaries

• 💬 Social threads or DMs that hit a nerve

• 🗂️ Old press releases or slides that felt strong at the time

• 🙋 Slack wins, team shoutouts, internal praise

Pro tip: If someone felt something—gratitude, frustration, relief—you’ve got something worth repackaging.

📝 Real-World Reframes:

You should always aim for an emotional hook. Just repeating back information doesn’t create connection and there’s more than one way to say the same thing.

Here are before and after examples:

See the difference?
Each of these examples starts with a basic fact—but the reframed version adds clarity, emotion, and purpose. That’s what turns updates into messages that move people.

Using What’s Hot (Without Getting Burned)

You’ve seen it: brands using memes, trending audios, or pop culture moments to stop the scroll and spark a reaction. It works but it can feel risky.

Here’s how to use what’s working out there without going off-brand or off the rails.

1. Start with what you are seeing—on your feed, your team's feed, or the group chat.
If a meme or moment keeps resurfacing, pay attention. Is there a pattern, a joke, a format that’s gaining traction?

2. Don’t force it. Translate it.
Good trending content doesn’t copy the original—it adapts the energy. You’re not doing a “Gen Z” post. You’re borrowing a format that people already understand to say something meaningful, fast.

3. Ask: would this make my team chuckle in Slack?
That’s your litmus test. If your own crew would roll their eyes, your audience will too.

Want to go deeper with your storytelling this summer?  

I’m hosting a live, hands-on workshop later this summer: Storytelling That Moves People.

It’s for communicators who are tired of translating their work into corporate-speak and want messaging that actually connects.

Seats are limited—because this one’s interactive and practical. 

Talk soon,  

Dana

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