Story Strategy & Film Production
The gap between who you are and how you're showing up.
We close it through story strategy, film, and content built to the standard your work deserves.
About Birchwood
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. A new website, a new campaign, a new video, each one built on a story that was never properly found. A brand audit that reviews existing materials without asking whether those materials reflect something genuinely true is just housekeeping. We work the other direction. Identity first. Story second. Expression third.
We sit with organizations at moments of tension, transition, and transformation. If your messaging feels off, if your team gives different answers about who you are, if you've invested in campaigns that didn't land — that's not a marketing problem. It's a story problem. We start underneath it.
We are especially at home with mission-driven organizations focused on social good. These are contexts where story carries weight that goes beyond marketing.
What guides us
Faith-Rooted Imagination
How we think
Clarity Without Reduction
What we build
Strategy With Soul
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, we build the language that carries it. A story framework your team can speak from without us in the room. Messaging that holds together across every channel and context because it all originates from the same place.
Expression
We produce films, campaigns, and content built on what we've uncovered together. The difference is that ours originates from what is distinctly yours. Our network of documentary filmmakers, content strategists, writers, and creatives translate your story into content that reaches your audience.
Valerie McGowan is a Sundance award-winning executive producer whose work spans Emmy-nominated and Oscar-shortlisted films for Netflix, Fox Searchlight, Lionsgate, and major studios. She spent over a decade inside two worlds that rarely speak to each other: the highest levels of film and story, and the ground-level work of mission-driven organizations. In that world, 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 her film career, she served in AmeriCorps and 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.
To learn more about Valerie, visit valeriemcgowan.com
A curated network of award-winning documentary filmmakers, content strategists, writers, and creatives. People who listen well, work at a high level, and bring the craft that mission-driven work deserves.