745. 3 Case Studies on Using Data + Storytelling to Grow Your Org's Impact — Urina Harrell, Vox Pop Branding
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Possible in Practice, a limited series of case studies from the We Are For Good community: the ask they sent, the risk they took, and what happened next. Eight incredible changemakers share what becomes possible when you stop waiting. Dropping Wednesdays starting this week.
About This Episode
A pandemic relief territory that grew 39% while every area around it went red. A fund that deployed capital fast and couldn't prove what it did. A 55-year-old nonprofit still running on paper.
Urina Harrell, founder of Vox Pop Branding, walks through all three — what was broken, what she built, and what happened next. 🩵
In this Possible in Practice episode, you'll hear:
Case study 1 — Long Beach: Why workshops and education stopped moving the needle, and how rolling up sleeves alongside founders produced the only green zone on the map
Case study 2 — JLH Fund: How to build impact measurement backward, after the money's already out the door, using grantee interviews that double as marketing
Case study 3 — Pools of Hope: The digital numbers the grant report never asked for — email list, reach, clicks — that turned into renewal after renewal
The two lessons that show up in all three: start from a baseline you already collect, and let a third party ask the questions your grantees won't answer honestly
The lowest-lift first step if you have no data at all — QR code stickers, not a new CRM
Three different orgs, one repeatable playbook for connecting data to story to funding. 🩵
Episode Highlights:
(3:18) From nosy kid to Vox Pop: curiosity as a career strategy
(5:33) Case study 1: Long Beach, when workshops stopped working
(9:21) The two lessons: baselines and third-party reporting
(12:25) Case study 2: JLH Fund, measuring impact after the fact
(15:47) Case study 3: Pools of Hope, digital numbers as grant currency
(18:30) Where to start if you have no data story yet
(20:08) A quilt with her name on it
(22:03) Stay curious: the one good thing
Meet Urina: The Marketer Turning Community Data Into Funding Proof
Urina Harrell is the founder and CEO of Vox Pop Branding, a social impact marketing agency in Long Beach she started in 2013 as a Duke sophomore — walking into half-empty restaurants and offering three months of free marketing. She studied psychology and neuroscience at Duke and earned her master's in marketing from Loughborough University in the UK, and that science brain shows up in every engagement: baselines, tracking, closed feedback loops.
Vox Pop is short for Vox Populi — voice of the people — and Urina's conviction is that marketing isn't a luxury for small organizations, it's an economic access tool.
Powerful Quotes
"We were the only spot on this map. Not only were we not red, we were green." — Urina
"Workshops and education doesn't work. There needs to be something added that moves the needle." — Urina
"A lot of nonprofits have a baseline because they usually do some type of intake. They just don't leverage it the right way." — Urina
"They will tell you things that they will not tell the person who's running the program." — Urina
"Sometimes that impact isn't immediate. Sometimes the waterfall is much later." — Urina
"That was the big gap for them — they weren't including their digital numbers on anything. Their email list, their social, their website hits." — Urina
"That was a turning tide for them. The report didn't ask for these numbers, but they gave them." — Urina
"You have to have data in order to start telling a data story." — Urina
"Gone are the days where you can just do a poster about your thing and people care about it. People want to see people now." — Urina
"Stay curious and keep asking questions." — Urina
Resources Mentioned
Vox Pop Branding: Urina's social impact marketing agency, based in Long Beach — voxpopbranding.com
Long Beach Center for Economic Inclusion (LBCEI): case study 1 partner; pandemic small business support and the later accelerator marketplace
OmniWorks: co-partner on the first services marketplace for business owners
Long Beach Economic Forum: where the independent third-party study on territory business growth was released
JLH Fund: case study 2; moved from rapid capital deployment to structured measurement and grantee-led storytelling
Pools of Hope: case study 3; Long Beach nonprofit where the digital tracking and grant reporting overhaul happened
Mallory Erickson's asset mapping exercise: referenced by Jon from an earlier We Are For Good season
Connect with Urina — hello@urinaharel.com and on LinkedIn
Come join us in the We Are For Good Community!
Join fellow changemakers, share takeaways from this episode, and keep collaborating in a space built for connection, inspiration, and real impact: www.weareforgoodcommunity.com
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