At a Glance
Why You Need a Framework
If you’re a solo creator or small media startup working on stories that require data, you’ve probably felt overwhelmed trying to keep up. One day you’re scraping data, and the next, you’re designing visuals. By Friday, you’re posting content that may or may not convert. It can be exhausting.
And it’s not just the workload — it’s the skill ramp required to do all of it.
“When we started Data Punk Media, we tried to do everything — follow every expert, try every trend — and we burned out fast.”
Three years later, after a ton of projects and experiments, we’ve built something that's working for us: A repeatable, end-to-end framework that transforms an idea into a data-driven story that’s engaging, scalable, and monetizable.
We call it the Storytelling Framework, which you can see below, including sample tools to use at each step with example modalities.
Now you may not need all of these steps for your specific project, but each of these parts of the framework ladders into a system you can automate and manage to help build your own content business.
Want to learn how to analyze data and build amazing data stories? Join Data Punk Media today!
Breaking Down the Framework
You won’t need every step for every story. For example, if you're creating a simple Instagram post, then you'll likely only need just sourcing, analysis, and design.
But, a video documentary that involves some manner of forecasting? You’ll likely use the whole system.
Here's a bit more detail for each of the steps from the above diagram.
- Data Sourcing: Find data that fuels your narrative.
- Cleaning & Transformation: Turn messy inputs into usable insights.
- Analysis: Discover patterns and tension points in the data.
- Modeling: Forecast outcomes and future trends.
- Story Creation: Develop character, conflict, and insight.
- Design: Translate insights into visuals that move people.
- Content Publishing: Adapt your story for each platform to which you publish.
- Monetization: Turn stories into subscriptions, products, or consulting.
There's a lot here, so if you're new to creating data-driven content, then starting small will give you the opportunity to learn. And as you grow your projects and customers, you'll pick up more skills and learn
Check out our Luma Events page for regular community calls that explore this and other topics!
How It All Comes Together
Most of our stories start with data but end with emotion or the focus on a character. And for each project, we use the framework to guide how we work together.
For example, we'll first work as a team to define the core storyline, the goal of the story and an example analysis that might bring it to life. We'll then iterate between storyline and analysis to more tightly connect the two. After we have a good handle on the analysis and story, we'll move to design, where we implement a system – that asserts branding and has templates for common structure. And then we'll publish into different platforms, using a project-based strategy. And finally, we'll leverage the content towards our longer-term business model.
For us, the Storytelling Framework provides a process that’s both analytical and creative. When we use it, we spend less time chasing ideas and more time refining stories that have the potential to grow our audience and drive our strategy.
Check out our Stories page, where we publish sample stories with detail on how we created the stories and the different modalities we used.
Next Step
In our next newsletter, we’ll dive deeper into each step of the framework — exploring real-world examples where we source data, clean it, analyze it, use it to create a story, and publish content that engages and potentially monetizes your audience.
