# From **research** to real-world **action**

## We partner with cultural strategists and creative practitioners, advocates, artists, media brands, and institutional funders, on issues of existential importance, like climate, denuclearization, racial justice, gun safety, artificial intelligence, and more.


One-of-a-kind data infrastructure that empowers partners to find, reach, and resonate with the right audience in today’s media minefield. Delivering audience-based insights, narrative and network analysis, and empirical validation of cultural strategy and content—all derived from the actual behavior of real people and true audiences, not survey results, or inauthentic online activity.

The Narrative Observatory

Supercharging Narrative Strategy

Muted_Orange

Light_Pink

Light_Blue

Bright_Green

Deep_Purple

Harmony_Orange

Muted_Blue

Muted_Green

Light_Yellow

Light_Purple

Bright_Yellow

Deep_Salmon

Deep_Rose

Harmony_Dark_Grey

Mapping public attitudes about the humanities in media culture

Humanities Unbound

Democracy 2076 and Harmony Labs teamed up to understand how entertainment media might be shaping people’s understanding of government. 

The Power of Story to Grow Democracy

Findings from a research partnership between Define American and Harmony Labs to understand the media patterns of people who are moderate and open to change on issues concerning immigrants and immigration policy.

Move Them or Lose Them

In this research, Murmuration teamed up with Harmony Labs to explore the audience-narrative landscape for education in the U.S. to establish a narrative foundation that can build support for a public school system that makes it possible for every child to thrive.

Towards Transformation in Education

Mapping the Latino digital landscape to build a culture of civic engagement online

Capturable Curiosity for Civic Engagement

Using media behavior to learn how to reach and move people toward a narrative for all major household appliances and vehicles that is pro-electric

Audiences for Electrics

Exploring one narrative associated with political violence in the United States, its audiences, and resilience building opportunities among young men

Ultranationalism

In this research, Harmony Labs collaborated with Equis to identify the key stories and main characters in media who embody and connect with the many identities of Latinos.


Main Character Energy: key stories & heroes for Latino audiences

8 profiles to inform audience-first approaches to  reaching people where they are in media culture

Audiences for Climate Comms

A culture-first approach for the next era of climate storytelling



How to Reach New Climate Audiences

Mapping the diverse storyscapes in media to inspire the creative development of new characters, worlds, and stories for game experiences that can resonate with users’ values.

A Home for Every Hero

As part of a larger research project intended to build an audience-narrative architecture for developing content that can change the narrative on health equity, we built and tested hundreds of new storytelling approaches.

Health Equity Narratives: Strategy Validation

In 2021, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation enlisted the support of Harmony Labs in building an audience-narrative architecture that could help RWJF and its partners develop content and storytelling strategies focused on improving healthcare and public health.

In Search of Healthy Narratives

The fragmentation of media systems has left many wondering: how do people in the U.S. get information in what many perceive to be local media deserts? We explored civic information ecosystems online to answer this question and identify the “op-ed” of the 21st century. 


Beyond If You Write It, They Will Come

First-of-its-kind research looking at the online narrative landscape that exists around guns and firearms in America—with the goal of uncovering Americans’ narratives around not just guns themselves, but also firearm injury and violence.


Guns: An All American Story

To help artists and advocates retell the story on nukes, this research identified persuadable audiences for denuclearization in the U.S. and created a set of audience-specific cultural briefs for a cohort of media makers.

Rewriting the Nuclear Story

We partnered with United We Dream, the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the U.S., to answer a key question: how are young Latinx people encountering stories about immigration in U.S. media?  The research goal: help inform communication strategies for pro-immigration advocacy.

Latinx Encounters with Immigration Stories in U.S. Media

The intersection of art, advocacy, and data science creates an opportunity for the work of social change to be both creative and informed by research. Over the last four years, we’ve been privileged to work alongside the Mozilla Foundation’s Creative Media Award program awardees in building projects that live within this intersectional space.

AI Advocacy, Impact Design, & Racial Justice

This new research expands upon work from the 2020 partnership between Harmony Labs and Equis Research to provide a view of Latinx engagement on YouTube. After analyzing over 250,000 days of consumption, what emerged were four distinct content ecosystems, each with very different engagement opportunities. 

El Nuevo Noticiero 

Step inside a “day in the media life” of our 4 values-distinct audiences. These are real-life media artifacts collected from 50,000+ people in the U.S. between January 2020 and May 2021. 

A Day In the Life: Poverty & Economic Narratives In the Feed

After analyzing over 500,000 online news stories, 1,000,000 tweets, and 600,000 TV airings, between January 2020 and May 2021, eight distinct narratives for poverty and economic mobility emerged. Explore these narratives and how they’ve trended over time in this interactive report. 

Poverty Narratives: Trends Over Time

We worked with Race Forward’s Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategy to evaluate dozens of new media interventions to help inform a new storytelling strategy that might reach and resonate with unlikely audiences.


Art for Pro-Immigration Narratives

Caring Across Generations is working to create power around communities of care. To answer their questions about how to tell this story and where, they enlisted Harmony Labs to explore how audiences, defined by their core values, experience narratives about aging and eldercare in the media they consume.

Care & Aging in Culture

We worked with Fandom Forward (formerly The Harry Potter Alliance) to map aligned fandoms and identify possible fan activism opportunities. 


Finding the Fandoms

This research focuses on the narratives of poverty and economic mobility in the U.S media. This work was the foundation for the Narrative Observatory prototype and was used by dozens of storytellers and advocates working to shift the cultural narratives that condition public understanding on poverty. 

Audiences for Poverty Narratives in the U.S. Media

This research focuses on the current narratives of Artificial Intelligence in media as a baseline for artists in the Mozilla Foundation’s Creative Media Awards program creating media advocating for a healthier AI future. 

A Healthy Narrative for Artificial Intelligence

We teamed up with Win/Black Pa’lante and A–B Partners to produce a report that deepens understanding of distinct audience segments for Black Americans, and how they might differ from other segments of the population, as well as surface insights that can sharpen the stories we are telling.

Beyond Demography: Black Audiences Online

Understanding people’s media habits gives us a deeper view into who they are, the values they hold, and how we might best engage them. Here, we set out to better understand Latinx Americans as media consumers in order to support outreach efforts and, ultimately, build civic participation. 


What Media Matters for Latinx Americans?

Meme Factory seeks to compress the research skills of a polling and analytics firm and the creative acumen of an agency into a single lean team with a low-cost, repeatable process to produce high-engagement content that’s shareable, persuasive, and activating for specific, high-value audiences. 

Meme Factory

In this project, we set out to map the narratives of climate skepticism, using Twitter and Reddit data, for filmmakers interested in using long-form narrative media to move beyond the political partisanship. 

Project Ariel

VR Action Lab explored how virtual reality might activate young people as upstanders and address the precipitous drop in efficacy of middle school anti-bullying efforts. It produced three VR experiences embedded in this pilot-tested six-lesson curriculum, along with other resources for VR media makers and mission-driven organizations.

VR Action Lab: Curriculum Guide

VR Action Lab explored how virtual reality might activate young people as upstanders and address the precipitous drop in efficacy of middle school anti-bullying efforts. It produced three VR experiences embedded in a pilot-tested six-lesson curriculum, along with other resources, like this issue briefing book for VR media makers and mission-driven organizations.

VR Action Lab: Briefing Book

VR Action Lab explored how virtual reality might activate young people as upstanders and address the precipitous drop in efficacy of middle school anti-bullying efforts. It produced three VR experiences embedded in a pilot-tested six-lesson curriculum, along with other resources, like this impact design toolkit for VR media makers and mission-driven organizations.

VR Action Lab: Impact Design Toolkit

VR Action Lab explored how virtual reality might activate young people as upstanders and address the precipitous drop in efficacy of middle school anti-bullying efforts, uniting award-winning media makers with young people, university researchers, experts, and middle-school practitioners across four states. 

VR Action Lab: Video Trailer

Mozilla’s advocacy team came to us with an online campaign to influence copyright reform in the EU. We audited their campaign strategy and organizational capacity and developed a custom analytic plan and impact evaluation of their campaign. 

Change Copyright

To what extent do neural responses to political media correlate with behavioral outcomes, like fundraising or voting? This was the question we sought to answer with a study of live coverage of the 2016 Democratic party primary debates, gathering data with electroencephalogram (EEG) and quick-response surveys and performing a moment-by-moment analysis of the debate footage, coding for production elements and debate content. 

Debate Brain

When Inequality Media approached us to track and evaluate the social impact of their film, Inequality for All, they were on a mission to increase public understanding of income inequality. We designed and implemented a customized collection and analysis plan that looked at change over time across public opinion, social media, mainstream media and legislative proceedings. 

Inequality for All

The 2010 documentary Gasland appeared to have a significant effect on US mobilization against fracking. To test this notion, we collected data from online searches, social media, mainstream media, and local screening and mobilization events, developing a method that examined both conversation volume and content, using computational text analysis, such as topic modeling. 

Gasland

Social media activity is often used as a proxy for engagement with live media content. We put this notion to the test using the premiere episode of the popular TV show The Walking Dead to design a study to track and compare, in real time, the neural response of individual viewers, using electroencephalogram (EEG), with aggregated Twitter activity. 

Zombies, Brains and Tweets

New forms of media are emerging that offer previously passive viewers a more embodied, participatory experience. The question is: do these new forms actually result in increased empathetic response? We sought to answer this question using the immersive mixed media piece My Sky Is Falling, designing a study to include real-time data collection via wearable biosensors and quick-response surveys. 

My Sky Is Falling

# The **Latest** from the Lab
    
## Get the updates on new research, upcoming events, Harmony in the news, and other interesting stuff we’re into.

WORK

The Narrative Observatory

Supercharging Narrative Strategy

Projects

Humanities Unbound

The Power of Story to Grow Democracy

Move Them or Lose Them

Towards Transformation in Education

Capturable Curiosity for Civic Engagement

Audiences for Electrics

About

01

02

03

04

Approach

01

02

03

04

Work

01

02

News

01

02

03

Other

01

02

03

04

Email us at hello@harmonylabs.org

©2025 HARMONYLABS