CASE STUDY

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH & METHODOLOGY • OPEN SOURCE • CROSS-FUNCTIONAL

StoryEngine: Turning community voices into strategy

RESULT

Produced 120+ impact narratives at Mozilla alone — used across strategy, communications, fundraising, UX design, and external evaluation. The methodology has since been deployed for other clients including Creative Commons, IREX, Hispanics in Philanthropy, and eCampusOntario, and adopted independently by organizations like the James B. McClatchy Foundation.

SITUATION

Organizations running complex programs — networks, fellowships, grantmaking initiatives — were sitting on a goldmine of stakeholder experience they couldn’t access or use. Surveys produced thin data. Grant reporting was cumbersome and rarely fed back into strategy (for grantees or grantmakers). Communications teams lacked authentic stories. And evaluation happened too late to shape decisions. Mozilla Foundation needed a better way to systematically listen to its global network and turn what it heard into something useful — for strategy, communications, fundraising, and learning — all at once.

TASK

Co-design a narrative-based research methodology from scratch: one that could gather deep qualitative insights at scale, generate usable communications assets, and do so in a way that was relational and non-extractive — benefiting participants as much as the sponsoring organization.

ACTIONS

Co-created StoryEngine.io and led its design, build-out, and adoption across Mozilla and beyond:

• Designed the end-to-end methodology — blending human-centered design, participatory research, and open knowledge practices — and open-sourced it under a Creative Commons license

• Built the publishing infrastructure and interview-to-insight workflow: from hour-long recorded interviews through transcription, co-editing with participants, synthesis reports, and board-ready presentations

• Recruited and managed a distributed team of interviewers, contributors, and transcriptionists to enable scale and organizational adoption

• Activated StoryEngine at MozFest as “Humans of the Internet” — capturing 80+ narratives over two days, producing live content and community connections

• Co-authored Building a Better Feedback Loop, documenting StoryEngine as an “empathy machine” and scalable constituent feedback system

• The corpus fed directly into an external impact evaluation of Mozilla’s Open Science Fellowships — giving outside evaluators a rich body of qualitative data without requiring them to re-interview grantees

• UX and design teams mined the narratives to build audience personas — validating existing strategy documents, surfacing gaps, and building shared team alignment around user research that would otherwise have required separate data collection

• Program leads used the corpus for grant writing, award nominations, and strategic planning — pulling specific evidence and quotes to make abstract impact claims concrete for funders

• Revisited 80 Mozilla interviews in 2025 to surface seven design principles — from care as infrastructure to localization as strength — demonstrating the long-term analytical value of the corpus

• Deployed the methodology for additional clients: IREX (internal learning and leadership development), Hispanics in Philanthropy (incoming CEO positioning), eCampusOntario (open learning evidence narratives), and Creative Commons (community storytelling)

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT

StoryEngine is regenerative, not extractive. Participants own their stories. Each interview is co-edited with the interviewee before publication, and stories are licensed under Creative Commons so participants can use them for their own purposes — blogs, portfolios, grant applications, social media. And because one process produces outputs that serve strategy, communications, fundraising, evaluation, and UX research simultaneously, it delivers value across organizational silos without requiring each team to commission their own research. As one Mozilla program lead put it: Funders don’t connect with abstract impact claims until you show them how a program changed a specific person’s life. That’s what the corpus makes possible — at scale, and on demand.

PLATFORMS

WordPress • Airtable • Creative Commons Licensing • Google Workspace • Miro • In-Person Workshops

SKILLS

Qualitative Research Design • In-Depth Interviewing • Narrative Synthesis • Sensemaking • Communications Strategy • Open Knowledge Practices • Stakeholder Relations • Community Engagement • Organizational Learning • Human-Centered Design • Workshop Facilitation • Distributed Team Management