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Pippin & Franklin was built by journalists who believe in the power of storytelling. Before we shaped narrative strategy for organizations, we spent years investigating the stories institutions would rather leave buried: water systems that failed the people who depended on them, communities erased from the record, histories rewritten by whoever held the pen. That training shows up in how we listen, what we notice, and what we refuse to simplify.

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We work with nonprofits, organizers, and leaders who have a story and need it told with the rigor it deserves.
 

WHERE WE STARTED

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We started in Southern newsrooms, in the tradition of Zora Neale Hurston and James Weldon Johnson — writers who understood that telling a story honestly is itself a form of preservation. We reported for some of the largest news organizations in the world on the stories that defined their era. That work taught us the same lesson every time: the facts alone rarely move anyone. The narrative built from the facts does.

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We left newsrooms, but we didn't leave that discipline behind. We asked a new set of questions. Not just what happened, but what needs to happen next.

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We built a curriculum that taught teenagers, with no journalism experience, to do the work we'd been trained to do: research, interview, and tell a story. They raised $60,000 to eradicate youth homelessness.

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WHAT WE BELIEVE​

 

Our job is to find an organization's story, verify it, and shape it so that it's impossible to ignore.

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Three things are constant in how we do that:​​

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Listen First

We start with investigation, not messaging. Interviews, records, time on the ground. The strongest narrative isn't the one we shape. It's the one that was already true.

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Trust Your Voice

Most organizations are taught to sound like an institution. We've found the opposite is what moves people: a voice left alone, not corrected, is the more persuasive brand.

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Measure Impact

We don't measure a story by how it reads. We measure it by what changes after it's told: A board votes. A donor decides. A reader changes their mind. 

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A Houston housing initiative had been approved under one administration and was inherited by the next. It wasn't a bad project. It belonged to someone else. The work was showing the new administration what the project would mean for them. The board approved it.

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HOW WE WORK​

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Find the story. Build the case for it. Put it to work.

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Discovery

We start the way a newsroom would: interviews, records, time inside the community or institution we're working with.​​

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Strategy Development

From there, we build the narrative case alongside you — specific enough to survive scrutiny, sharp enough to cut through everything competing for attention.

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Implementation & Impact

A campaign. A classroom. A direct conversation with the one person who can say yes. We take the story wherever it needs to go, then track what happens.​

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