Transforming Technical Data into Story and Visuals

Not all organizations doing important work can explain it in a way that moves people. The data might be there. The credibility as well. But the story — the version that makes a stakeholder pause and pay attention — isn't.

That gap is exactly where our work with Leading Harvest lives.

As Peter Miller, who led business development at Leading Harvest, put it:

"I know that the most compelling information tells a story — and we needed help with storytelling. Through the process of working WithJasmine, it actually changed how we talk about the organization. It helped us better understand what we do through the lens of others. It wasn't just the collateral that was produced, our overall articulation of value and pitch improved."

Partnering with Leading Harvest

Leading Harvest is a nonprofit working on farmland sustainability. Their Program Users are some of the world's largest farming operations — and their partners are some of the world's largest food companies. What they do is rigorous and hard to explain to someone who wasn't already looking for it.

They came to us with an ask that sounded simple: redesign their technical audit reports to become something beautiful and readable — turning each report into a “Farm Stewardship Profile” with sales capacity.

We Changed the Design Brief 

Before we touched a layout, we did what we always do — we talked to the people who would actually use it. We ran discovery sessions with Leading Harvest's team and, critically, with Program Users themselves: certified suppliers navigating real procurement conversations with real buyers.

What we heard made us take a sharp turn.

These organizations were trying to have a fundamentally different kind of conversation about Leading Harvest with brands and buyers who had never heard of them. The scope needed to change — the audit report was simply evidence buried inside an untold story, not the problem or the solution.

What Peter noticed about that moment:

"You understood what our goals really were. You understood that maybe what we said we needed wasn't exactly what we needed. But because you understood our business case, you showed us how to get what we needed through a better route."

Narrative Strategy Uncovered What’s Hidden

We ran narrative sessions with Leading Harvest's team to excavate their underlying story — not what the certification covered, but what it meant for a buyer trying to make a sourcing decision in a noisy sustainability landscape.

This set of sessions — with their team, with Program Users, with outside industry expertise — was the process of finding the story that already lived inside everything Leading Harvest was doing, and building the infrastructure to make it legible enough to travel.

What emerged was a clearer picture of the real challenge: Leading Harvest represents a paradigm shift in how agricultural certification works and no one was explaining their innovative thinking.

The process of slowing down to do discovery before production was critical. Peter mentioned:

"That time is really well spent because it ends up saving so much time on the back end. The very first version that you produced was so much more complete and mature than I would have expected for a first draft — and it was because of that investment in the front end."

Visual Appeal is Second to Understanding

Transforming audit data into something credible, readable, and visually compelling takes craft and care. But the more important challenge came earlier — helping an organization see that what they had wasn't a design problem. It was a communication problem.

Leading Harvest had worked with other designers in the past. What was different this time was the depth of our understanding.

"We work in agriculture and there's sort of a typical narrative that a lot of designers follow around sustainability. You guys avoided all of those tropes to understand much more of the actual work and the business case. And by understanding the business case, it helped move beyond those tropes. I was most surprised by how well you understood the complexity of our organization and our work."

Our process resulted in core artifacts that are instrumental in produces purposeful content for Leading Harvest moving forward. Besides the final Farmland Sustainability Profile, we developed:

• a content purpose map — a diagnostic that asked, for every piece of information: why does this exist, who is it for, and what should a reader understand, feel, or do after encountering it?

• a communications ecosystem map — a systems-level view of where the Farm Stewardship Profile fit within everything else Leading Harvest was producing, and how it would move through the relationship between all stakeholders. 

• a set of core visualizations — system maps, certification comparisons, impact frameworks — designed not just to live inside the profile but to be extracted. Pulled into a presentation. Shared in a meeting. The story became repeatable, not locked in a PDF.

Ensuring Confidence in Collateral

The Farm Stewardship Profile that came out of this process does several things at once.

It meets the needs of the user. Rather than leading with the certification, the profile leads with the supplier's story — their scale, their practices, their proof points.

It speaks the language of the stakeholder. Every section is written for someone with a sourcing decision to make.

It uses Leading Harvest vernacular. We surfaced the vocabulary that was already earning trust and gave Leading Harvest a way to carry it forward consistently.

The response was immediate. Peter shared an early draft with stakeholders before the project was even finalized:

"I ended up showing an early draft to a few of our stakeholders and they immediately requested copies to use the following week — with some of the world's largest restaurants and food companies."

“WithJasmine will dig in and understand what you want to do better than you can imagine. What they produce is going to be clearer and more valuable than whatever end result you might have in mind."

— Peter Miller, former Director of Supply Chain Engagement, Leading Harvest

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WithJasmine.com works with technically expert organizations to make complex ideas legible to the audiences that matter. This engagement was in collaboration with Maps & Mirror.

Speaking Success into Existence

Some founders know exactly what they’re building. They just don’t yet have the words for it. When the language doesn’t match the vision, everything becomes harder — from attracting the right members to making decisions about what to build next. That gap between what something truly is and how it’s being communicated is exactly where this work lives.

Underneath that: the relief of being fully seen. Of having someone help you say, clearly and without apology, what you’ve always believed — even the parts that felt too big to say out loud.

As Abby Covert, founder of The Sensemakers Club, put it:

“Jasmine’s ability to see both the immediate opportunities and long-term vision is exactly why this ongoing conversation with her is so valuable.”

A Case Study: The Sensemakers Club

The Sensemakers Club (SMC) is a community founded by information architect, writer, and community-builder, Abby Covert. What started as a space for curious people to think out loud has grown, over the course of our ongoing work together, into something more intentional: a community-powered education platform with a defined audience, a clear identity, and an infrastructure built to match its founder’s deepest values.

SMC didn’t need a total overhaul. It needed the right words in the right places — and the courage to mean them.

This is the story of how we got there.

Defining the Audience

SMC’s early messaging was broad — centered on the process of sensemaking itself. Six months in, the club was already thriving — but behind the scenes, Abby was juggling too much. Membership tiers, content, communication — all of it needed definition. She was building something great but struggling to articulate it in a way that could support its growth. Broad positioning wasn’t serving anyone well.

Through our conversations, we narrowed Abby’s core audience to: Curious professionals in transition — people navigating career shifts, creative pivots, or personal reinvention — needing a portable support system.

Identifying this clarified what programming made sense, how to structure content, how to describe the club so the right people immediately saw themselves in it. We developed messaging anchors that positioned her and kept all decisions aligned.

Building a Narrative

One thing I’ve learned working with founders is that the most meaningful mission statements don’t get written — they get uncovered. Leaders often hold back their truest convictions because they worry they’ll sound too idealistic, too sentimental, too “fluffy.” Part of my role is creating enough safety and structure that those convictions can actually surface. That’s what happened here. 

The outcome of this work is a Narrative Statement that acts as a communication map that reaches from a founder’s authentic voice — something Abby could return to anytime she talked about the club, whether on the website, in an interview, or in a casual conversation. 

We began with a structured framework I call Money Grows On Trees, uniquely adapted to each client — a method for helping leaders synthesize purpose, strategy, and direction. Through this process, Abby articulated her core intentions as a leader, her beliefs about growth and success, the values she wanted SMC to embody, and the audience she felt most drawn to serve.

The insights pulled directly from her own words. I listened carefully and reflected back what was already there.

As SMC grew, Abby asked, How do I explain what this is? and How do I articulate what I actually believe this could become? Her mission was evolving, and the existing language wasn’t keeping pace.

We looked outward at what was actually happening inside the community. Working alongside a UX researcher, a business development director, and a social media coordinator, we ran structured surveys, facilitated community feedback sessions, and cross-referenced the organic patterns in how members were describing the club to each other.

What we found: members weren’t just there for discussions. They were there to learn, to be held accountable, to grow alongside people who were serious about their output. The residency program — which had emerged as a way to support members who wanted more than conversation — was pointing toward something bigger.

Through that process, a new north star emerged: community-powered education — now, this guides every decision, from programming to partnerships. A mission that surfaced gradually, through dialogue and deep listening, until it was undeniably true. It reframed everything: what the club was, who it was for, and what it could grow into.

The first phase gave the club structure and language. The second phase gave it a soul. 

We saw nearly 50% increase in new members within the first few weeks of refining SMC’s communication and campaigning.

Redesigning the Experience

A mission this clear deserved a home that could hold it. We redesigned the SMC website — the second full evolution of the site we’ve built together — this time starting from the new identity and working outward.

The previous version had reflected the community well enough. But this one needed to do more than reflect — it needed to invite. We rearchitected the information structure, rewrote the copy to match the evolved narrative, and added the kind of content that makes someone on the outside feel what it’s like to be on the inside: member videos, rich residency descriptions, and membership tiers that help people see themselves before they commit.

We also built in a feedback loop — designing sessions and community check-ins to measure whether it was working, and iterating from there. The result is a site that feels alive. One that sounds like Abby, reflects what members actually experience, and communicates the club’s direction with confidence.

Members now have a felt sense of what the community is about:

• “... the new labels showcase the overall vibes and intentions of the club in a broadly appealing way. Can't wait to see the impact of the change over time!”

• “A lot more clear than before. It provides clear intros and logical grouping, serving both discovery and navigation.”

• “This new website finally helped me understand what this is, and I am part of the club!”

Content & Delegation

A brand style guide followed, creating enough consistency that content creation could be fully delegated. What had been a daily drain became a system that ran without her. We built a content calendar structured around daily, weekly, and monthly themes, then trained an AI model on SMC’s brand voice so Abby could generate on-brand content without starting from scratch.

Content engagement surged, with a +108% increase in organic social traffic and a +63% increase in referrals. But most importantly, Abby no longer creates content herself — a process that once took hours a week now takes an hour or two a month.

A Sigh of Relief

Beyond strategy and growth, this engagement is always about relief — the relief of not having to sacrifice long-term vision because of day-to-day operational pressure. The relief of having words that do the work for you — making you look good, sound good, and feel good.