COMMENTARY
How DNA—Data, Narrative, Action—Can Build Community Power
By Karthick Ramakrishnan
January 14, 2026
For over a decade, AAPI Data has been a leading organization on applied research for Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. Data has been foundational to the success of our work, and we are grateful for the many ways that our research improves public understanding and increases investments in our communities.
At the same time, data alone is not enough to develop effective strategies and produce meaningful results for our communities. This is something that I discovered in 2017, as I parlayed my work from AAPI Data to start a Center for Social Innovation at the University of California, Riverside. I was contemplating ways to strengthen the public impact of small nonprofits in Southern California, and decided to pull together three strands of expertise—in demographic research, research on public opinion and framing, and insights on civic engagement and policy change.
Putting our framing expertise to good use, we developed a simple and catchy way for nonprofits to upgrade their capacity for strategic action. We developed the DNA: Data, Narrative, Action framework and created a summer nonprofit training program that delved deeper into each of these areas. This training proved very effective in building the strategic capacity of our nonprofit partners, who used it to develop stronger grant applications, improve their program evaluations, and generate better news coverage for their work and their cause.
Since 2018, AAPI Data has incorporated the framework as part of its own “operating system.” The integration of all three elements is perhaps most evident in our survey work, including those conducted in partnership with the Associated Press (which helps ensure accurate, evidence-based news coverage of our communities), with APIA Vote (which helps inform civic engagement strategies among nonprofit partners across the country), and with the National Council of Asian Pacific Americans (which helps inform policy engagement by the coalition of over 40 partners).
Several of our partners have also found the DNA Framework to be useful in their own work. This includes community partners such as the National Council of Asian Pacific Americans, philanthropic partners such as Asian Pacific Fund and Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy, and academic partners such as the Asian American Initiative at Columbia University, have found the DNA framework to be useful in their own efforts to achieve public impact.
Digging Deeper Into the DNA Framework
The DNA: Data, Narrative, Action framework relies on three fundamental insights that help to maximize public impact: an organization’s work needs to be data-driven in order to be credible, it needs to be skilled in narrative work to be meaningful and memorable, and it needs to be action-oriented in order to be impactful.
Data is essential for community recognition and visibility. Without accurate and representative data, whole communities can be rendered statistically invisible and left out of conversations around policy change and resource allocation. For example, when I served on the State of California’s Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs, we supported a bill on data disaggregation authored by then-Assemblymember Rob Bonta (AB1726). During one of our community engagement sessions, we were approached by a member of the Mien community, who told us that the Mien have never been recognized in any federal or state data. Because of this data oversight, their community has been drastically under-resourced. Thanks to the organizing efforts of Mien and other Southeast Asian leaders, the group was recognized and counted for the first time in the 2020 Census. This simple act of being counted by the U.S. government was an essential first step toward political recognition and community power. In addition to demographic data, the survey data we collect provides institutional credibility and political standing for our communities, signaling to everyone that AAPI viewpoints matter and need to be taken seriously.
The DNA: Data, Narrative, Action framework relies on three fundamental insights that help to maximize public impact: an organization’s work needs to be data-driven in order to be credible, it needs to be skilled in narrative work to be meaningful and memorable, and it needs to be action-oriented in order to be impactful.
But it’s not enough to just gather data. To ensure that our communities are not just another number that can be overlooked or misunderstood, it’s vital that we translate data into narratives that are attuned to the complex histories of our specific communities and that advance community priorities. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, Indian Americans are consistently the highest-earning group in the nation. Taken out of context, this data point could reinforce the narrative that Indian Americans are inherently more capable of educational and economic success than other minority groups. However, when data about Indian-American income is considered in the historical context of the 1965 Immigration Act, which prioritized skilled labor and family reunification, the narrative shifts from a focus on group differences based on culture or other deep-grained differences to more accurate explanations that center on the hyper-selectivity of U.S. migration policy, as noted by sociologists Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou in their 2015 book Asian American Achievement Paradox.
Narratives about data need to go beyond a surface-level analysis. That’s why it’s so important to craft narratives that lend accurate interpretation of data points. By grounding our work in the power of community partnerships and in decades of academic scholarship, we can take responsibility and care in how data and research are interpreted and utilized.
Narrative can also drive essential action on the main issues affecting our communities. At AAPI Data, we’ve embraced the action part of the DNA framework by using data to guide how we strategize and collaborate with community partners. For example, in January 2025, our data showed that immigration was the issue that was top of mind for AAPIs. By summer 2025, our survey data showed that the economy and healthcare were now the main priorities for AAPIs. Based on this data, we’ve been partnering with the National Coalition for Asian Pacific Americans (NCAPA) to create messaging and drive action around the topic of affordability. Importantly, our survey data also showed a shift in community opinion on mass deportations, from being split on the issue before Trump’s inauguration to opposing it by September 2025 after well-publicized instances of heavy-handed immigration enforcement in Los Angeles and elsewhere.
On Wednesday, January 28, we’re hosting our first Voices of AAPI Communities webinar of the year, focused on data around affordability, specifically healthcare and cost of living. Additionally, our data on healthcare affordability has been cited in factsheets created by the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus in the wake of the 2025 government shutdown. To us, informed action is rooted in intentional collaboration with community partners, those who are best positioned to translate insights into meaningful and effective action.
Recommendations for Research, Policy, Journalism, and Philanthropy
So how can you use the DNA Framework in your own work? We believe that the framework has valuable implications for groups such as researchers, community organizations, government agencies, journalists, and funders.
For researchers who are well-versed in the power of data and evidence, but might be hesitant to introduce community work into their research, we encourage you to lean into the Narrative aspect of the DNA framework to ensure that your questions are meaningful and relate to the lived experiences of community partners. We also encourage you to think about the Action part of the DNA framework, as a way to ensure that your work has meaningful social impact or policy impact. This past fall, as part of our first-ever Bolder Futures Fellowship program, we mentored 15 fellows as they worked on community impact projects that partnered with a specific community organization. This experience reinforced our belief that meaningful relationship with community organizations enriches research and is well worth the effort.
For those working in policy and government, we encourage you to explore our wealth of data on AAPIs, specifically in our AP-NORC surveys and our By the Numbers guides. The disaggregated data in these resources provide deeper insights on our community than can be found in general population polls. We also believe it’s important for policy advocates and government agencies to maintain open lines of communication with researchers and community organizations who are experts in data as well as narrative.
Funders are in a similar position to decisionmakers in policy. They have the ability to deploy private resources that can produce social impact. While funders have strong relationships with their community partners, they often don’t have meaningful relationships with applied researchers who work well with media, community partners, and policy agencies. Many foundations interested in narrative change would also do well to understand the role that earned media can play in producing mindset shifts among policy decision makers. With so many outlets competing for attention, it can be difficult to find narratives that reach audiences. Our partnership with the Associated Press means that the AP regularly publishes stories that highlight We hope this provides a model of narrative power that can be replicated across different organizations to pierce through the noise and uplift AAPI narratives.
Lastly, we believe that data provides much-needed context for journalists working on stories about Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. As part of the DNA Framework and as part of our commitment to producing accessible data for all, we’ve created the Community Data Explorer. This tool allows anyone to easily access disaggregated data about local communities based on indicators such as education, language, citizenship, and more. As such, it’s proven to be a valuable tool for journalists working on stories about specific populations.
However you decide to utilize the DNA Framework, we hope that it can serve as a starting point to consider data as community recognition, narrative as community power, and action as increased collaboration with community partners.
At AAPI Data, we believe in the power of the DNA framework to bring researchers, journalists, policymakers, and communities together to create lasting change. However you decide to utilize the DNA Framework, we hope that it can serve as a starting point to consider data as community recognition, narrative as community power, and action as increased collaboration with community partners.
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Karthick Ramakrishnan is the founder and executive director of AAPI Data.