Story Strategy & Film Production
Your story, told with integrity, to the people who need you most.
We are creative partners who believe the most important work an organization can do is understand who it actually is and learn to communicate that with integrity. We ask questions most strategists won't, sit with complexity most processes skip, and help you find what's real before we tell you how to say it. Most communications work starts outside and moves in. We work the other direction. Identity first. Story second. Expression third.
We sit with organizations at moments of tension, transition, and transformation. Not to hand them a framework, but to do the slow work of listening that makes the right framework possible. The story is always already there. The work is drawing it out.
We are especially at home with faith-based organizations, global initiatives, and mission-driven work — contexts where story carries weight that goes beyond marketing.
The Problem
Plenty of agencies will grow your impressions. They'll build a website, run a campaign, produce a video. But if the story underneath doesn't reflect the actual depth and uniqueness of your organization, none of it sticks. You end up with better packaging around a message that was never properly found. We start underneath.
Brand Misalignment
Your external messaging no longer reflects who you actually are. The brand feels off. Your team can feel it and so can the people you're trying to reach. No amount of new design will close that gap if the story underneath is not solid.
Story Drift
Growth, transition, or change has quietly, unintentionally separated your narrative from your actual mission. Somewhere along the way you lost the thread. You keep producing content, but it doesn't land the way it used to.
Communication Breakdown
If you ask five different people in your organization what you do and get five different answers, you have a story problem. That problem is showing up in every meeting, every pitch, every piece of content you produce.
Threshold Moment
In stories, thresholds are transformation moments. A new leader. A pivot. An expanded mission. Moments of transition are also when identity is most at risk of getting swept up in newness until you lose sight of your core.
How We Work
Identity
Most organizations have never had a room where someone asked the real questions. Through facilitated sessions with your stakeholders, we surface the foundation your organization is actually built on. When it's done, your team is aligned and can speak from that foundation with confidence.
Story
Once we know what's real and authentic to your work, we build the language that carries it. We craft a story framework your team can speak from without us in the room. Messaging that holds together across every channel, audience, and context because it all originates from the same true place.
Expression
We produce films, campaigns, and content built on what we've uncovered together. The difference between our production work and anyone else's is that ours originates from what's distinctly yours — not a brief, not a brand deck, but the real thing. Birchwood and its network of specialists — documentary filmmakers, content strategists, writers, and creatives, some of whom come from within the communities we serve — translate your story into the content your organization needs to reach your audience.
Founded by
Valerie McGowan spent over a decade inside two worlds that rarely speak to each other: the highest levels of the entertainment industry, and the ground-level work of mission-driven organizations. In entertainment, she learned that the difference between a story that moves people and one that doesn't is almost never the budget. It's the clarity underneath it. Prior to entering social impact entertainment, she worked in nonprofit community development, where she learned how to earn trust inside organizations doing work that matters, and how to help them reach beyond their traditional boundaries without losing their core identity. Birchwood is where those two things meet.
The Collective
Birchwood's collective is a curated network of some of the best people Valerie has worked alongside over a decade in strategy and film marketing — documentary filmmakers, content strategists, writers, and creatives who listen well, work at a high level, and bring the kind of craft and care that mission-driven work deserves.
Your mission exists to reach the people who need it most. Birchwood helps make sure your story is strong enough to find them.
We work with a small number of organizations at a time.
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