Don’t Go It Alone: Revisiting the Implementation Guide
October 17, 2019As newsletter readers may recall, the National Reframing Initiative in February released its online Implementation Guide, a consolidated resource to help the National Reframing Network effectively reframe communications with the Building Well-Being Narrative and other strategies.
Since most of the questions we receive from the Network relate to applying the frame to organization communications, we thought it would be helpful to provide a refresher on Module 2: Implementing the Frame. It contains the best guidance from our Newsletters and foundational content such as FrameWorks Institute’s Building a New Narrative on Human Services: A Communications Toolkit around key implementation concerns and questions so you have a centralized resource to consult as you begin or continue your reframing practice.
Once your organization is on board with reframing, Implementing the Frame teaches you — through practical strategies, examples and tools — how to incorporate FrameWorks’ Building Well-Being Narrative recommendations into your messaging. In the following three subsections, Module 2 explains how to do a thorough review and revision of materials, including your core organizational, advocacy and media/social media communications:
- Reframing Organizational Communications shows you how to apply the value of human potential, construction metaphor and life cycle examples to the foundational content of your organization’s external communications, such as Mission and About Us statements.
- Reframing Advocacy Communications demonstrates how to use the Building Well-Being Narrative to help provide a clear understanding of the societal value and collective benefits of the full range of human service programs and policies through reframing communications including policy platforms, agendas, talking points and position statements.
- Reframing Media and Social Media instructs you on how to intentionally and consistently reframe messaging through these channels to communicate with and educate your constituencies, build networks and engage in policy advocacy.
Each of the three subsections’ concluding Tools and Resources sections are continuously updated to point to relevant Newsletter articles. For instance, you will find a number of recent posts deconstructing Network member communications and sharing relevant examples of reframing by following the three subsections’ links under National Assembly Reframing Blog Posts (e.g., Additional Organization Messaging Resources & Examples). You can also access reframing fundraising examples that are included with Organizational Communications Tools and Resources. Additionally, you can view all articles on framing strategies, data and storytelling.
SPOTLIGHT: FrameWorks Institute Podcast Explores the “Power of How”
In celebration of its 20th Anniversary, FrameWorks Institute launched a limited podcast series, Frame[s] of Mind, with staff and academic experts discussing “social science and social issues as we pursue a deeper dive into the ‘power of how.’” Listen to episodes 1 and 2 on iTunes, SoundCloud and Spotify:
- Episode 1, “How Does Social Science Explain Our Thinking on Social Problems?,” covers unproductive and productive cultural models or shared patterns of “deeply held cognitive shortcuts used to make sense of new information” — and the theory behind them — that inform public thinking on social issues and how communicators can avoid or activate them.
- Episode 2, “How Does Language Help Us Understand and Move Us to Care?,” reviews the roles of metaphors, explanatory examples, issue frames, language, messengers and cognition in how communicators explain, and the public structures and understands, complex social issues.
Watch for the other episodes on affordable housing and brain development in the coming weeks.