How can framing inform your strategy?

Farra Trompeter: Welcome to the Smart Communications podcast. This is Farra Trompeter, co-director and worker-owner at Big Duck. Today we’re gonna ask the question, how can framing inform your strategy? And I am delighted to be joined by two folks from FrameWorks Institute. First, we have Dr. Nat Kendall-Taylor, who uses he/him pronouns. Nat is a psychological anthropologist and the CEO of the FrameWorks Institute, where he oversees the organization’s use of methods from the social and behavioral sciences to measure how people think about sociopolitical issues and empirically test ways of reframing them to help build understanding and motivate action. Nat has spent two decades helping nonprofits more effectively communicate about a range of issues from climate change to education to criminal legal reform. Nat, welcome to the show.

Dr. Nat Kendall-Taylor: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Farra Trompeter: We’re also delighted to be joined by Carinne Wheedan, she/her. Carinne is the director of communications at FrameWorks where she oversees the organization’s efforts to make FrameWorks’ research as accessible, relevant, and usable as possible. A relationship builder at heart, Carinne has spent 15 years in the nonprofit sector working within and outside communications roles to help make research more useful to advocates and to ensure advocacy efforts are informing and shaping research. She’s deeply passionate about words and how we use them to better understand each other within and outside of work. Carinne, welcome to the show.

Carinne Wheedan: Thanks for having me. Farra,

Farra Trompeter: Before we dive into today’s topic, I actually wanna ask you a question, Nat. Now, as somebody who studied psychology undergrad, I feel like I should know this answer, but I don’t: what is a psychological anthropologist? Tell us what that is and who you are.

Dr. Nat Kendall-Taylor: I’m a psychological anthropologist. There is also a thing called a cultural psychologist, and so don’t ask me to tell you what the difference between those two are, but I can tell you what a psychological anthropologist is. As a sub-discipline of cultural anthropology, psychological anthropologists are interested kind of in understanding the intersection between society and culture on the one hand and our mental and cognitive processes on the other. So psychological anthropologists study a really wide range of things. Everything from how people think about empathy and how that figures into our social lives, how people use humor, how people remember, how people have emotions. For our call today, importantly, the study of narrative kind of lives within a part of psychological anthropology. But the kind of psychological anthropology that I do is a particular theory called Cultural Models theory. So this is the study of how culture influences the way that we think. Kind of how culture exists in our external social worlds and lives, but also how it exists internally in the form of what we at FrameWorks call cultural mindsets, these kinds of packages of assumptions and understandings that we use to make sense of information. So that’s my corner of a corner of anthropology is really the study of how culture influences the way that we think. Important for our conversation today, the way that we process information, and really important the way that we formulate and make decisions.

Farra Trompeter: Great. Well, we will be sure not to put you in a corner of a corner, but we are excited to learn more about this in today’s conversation. So we’re recording today’s conversation in July 2024, and the upcoming election here in the US is on the minds of many. A few months ago, FrameWorks Institute published guidance on how organizations should communicate about social issues this election season via The Communications Network. It’s called Beyond soundbites: Issue framing in election season. We’ll be sure to link to this helpful article at bigduck.com/insights where the transcript of this conversation will be. And I would love to just start there. This content feels both timely and also like a great introduction to your work and to FrameWorks. So Carinne, can you share what led you to write this article? And then perhaps Nat, can you offer any takeaways or tips for communicators trying to get attention for their issues and cut through the clutter as we near election day?

Carinne Wheedan: As you said, Farra, this is something that everyone is talking and thinking about. It’s currently July, and I’ll speak for myself: I feel like I’m physically feeling the election every day. This article came as a response to questions that we had been getting in conversations we’ve been having with our partners and friends who work in nonprofits or advocacy or youth-supporting spaces saying things like, “Okay, I understand strategic framing. I have been incorporating this, this, and this idea into my work for years. It’s helped in this, this, and this way. Right now it feels like all of that’s called into question. How do I talk about this issue whenever the candidates and the campaigns are just so dominant in the headlines?” I think any election infuses different dynamics into the conversation. But this particular election, because of what feels like high stakes and tension and fear, people had been coming to us and saying like, “How do I cut through the noise, one? And two, what should I be keeping in mind as I continue to try to talk about the issues I work on so that I can be responsive to what’s happening and like campaign election discourse, but also not totally reactive to it?”

Carinne Wheedan: And so we wrote this piece for The Communications Network and we also recently released a short video series on YouTube where we answered some more specific questions that we had gotten from some of our audience members and Nat will share some of the takeaways. But overall, our goal was to help people take control of their own narratives and not let the election frame the issue, but the experts and people with lived experience and advocates continue their movement toward long-term narrative change work and policy change work that really transcends the four-year presidential election cycle. And I do think it’s an important asterisk to say that the election is, obviously, super important. So the takeaway wasn’t like, “Don’t pay attention to the election, just keep on keeping on.” But really like how can we both stay within the conversation of the electoral politics but also transcend it and keep towards this long-term work that we’re still gonna be engaged in?

Farra Trompeter: That’s great advice. Hopefully, everyone will read this article and watch the videos. We’ll be sure to link to those as well. But for people out there, what are some advice that they can hold in mind as they’re thinking about, especially Carinne, I love your last note, like hold onto the election, but also think about this work in the long term.

Dr. Nat Kendall-Taylor: The first thing to start with is that we as an organization are really interested in framing social issues, much less interested or not really involved in framing in terms of electoral politics and outcome. So our partners and our work is always about how you get issues to kind of shine through when, as Carinne said, so much of the attention is trained elsewhere. And so there’s a set of framing strategies that we think aren’t, you know, the magical mystery answer to all of our electoral chaos and confusion, but rather are a set of things that we think if partners, if people working on communicating about social issues can, kind of, have in their back pocket and include in their set of tools that they’re using during this really, as Carinne said, really difficult and contested time that we think may be able to be helpful.

Dr. Nat Kendall-Taylor: So the first one’s the hardest one, which is: Don’t take the bait. There’s a lot of rousing ridiculousness that is going on and is introduced into the discourse sometimes with the express goal of having people take the bait and kind of go off course from their narrative and the discipline around that narrative. And this really stems from the single best predictor of what people believe is hint, hint: it’s not how true something is, it’s how many times they’ve heard it. So how can you take that basic core cognitive principle and incorporate it and use it strategically in your communications? And so what that tells us is we wanna avoid repeating the things that we are refuting and instead repeating and advancing those ideas that we want to get through and have cut through and stick and land. I’ll say that people may be nodding their heads as they’re listening to that: “Oh, that sounds totally right and great” and then in the moment I just wanna acknowledge that that is a ridiculously high bar and difficult practice to stick and adhere to.

Dr. Nat Kendall-Taylor: The second one is really around another practice that we see emerge extra-poignantly and robustly during election times, which is the focus on problems and crisis. So everything is a crisis we experience during this time in particular what gets called crisis-fatigue or emergency inflation whereby everything is seen as a crisis. And what we can do as communicators is try to push back and avoid falling into the trap of everything being dire and on fire and instead really trying to, where we can, advance solutions, communicate in a way that inspires and communicates a sense of efficacy, that there are solutions that are there that we can get behind and that will make a difference. In a lot of our work. We try to work with partners to kind of recalibrate that balance between crisis urgency and problem on the one hand, and then solutions, aspirations, and efficacy on the other. And I think that that balance really gets out of whack in times like we are in right now. And so a great practice for communicators to think about and try to build into their practice is: how can I go heavier on solutions? How can I counterbalance that discourse with things that work, that directions that we want to go rather than problems that we are mired and stuck in?

Dr. Nat Kendall-Taylor: And then the other one also really difficult one in the period of electoral politics that’s dominated by individual candidates is that there are lots of heroes and villains right now. There are not a lot of systems and context right now. And so another move that we really try to help people make is not clearly all of our stories need to have people in them, but we also need to think about making it really clear through the way that we frame and set up our stories, that what surrounds us, shapes us, that the context, the systems, the policies, the institutions, the resources, the communities, the relationships, the neighborhoods that individual characters are in have a significant influence on the outcomes that we’re interested in. So how can we, again, counterbalance the discussion and discourse so that it’s not just about heroes and villains, but that those individuals, that it’s very clear that they live in places and are constrained by larger forces that shape behaviors and have a strong effect on outcomes.

Farra Trompeter: So many great ideas there that I think can be used for this moment, but also year-round as you said. And I wanna just zoom all the way out and talk about framing in general. So k has studied how people think and talk about many social issues and how communications can spark change for 25 years. As you define on your website, framing is the choice we make in what we say and how we say it, what we emphasize, how and what we explain, and what we leave unsaid. For those newer to the world of framing, how do you make the case for why framing matters? Nat, you have a thought on this one?

Dr. Nat Kendall-Taylor: Yeah, I mean it’s one of these things I feel like every time I talk about framing, I’m just reminding people of what they already know, especially people who think about communications. We all know that we can say things in one way and have a certain effect, and if we change even something subtle as seemingly insignificant as a verb, we can have a very different effect. The work that Carinne and I do is really about taking that commonsensical practice and first of all, devoting some research sensibility to that that we can know before we go when it comes to these framing decisions. And then really kind of elevating the importance of those decisions to make them very conscious and intentional rather than kind of passive and unintentional. The examples of where framing has mattered and does matter kind of abound.

Dr. Nat Kendall-Taylor: As a researcher, I tend to look at research on framing as the nicest neatest examples and maybe Carinne can talk about some more real-world examples. But there’s great work that’s been done for example, around what happens when you prime or when you frame an issue in terms of choice and choices that individuals make. A great study where participants are asked to read a story about an individual who is making choices and how those choices influence outcomes. And those individuals who read that story versus those individuals who don’t, are dramatically less supportive of policies designed to address inequality, are dramatically more likely to blame victims for the result of social issues, and are less likely to ascribe any importance to social values. And so that’s just reading a story about an individual making a choice leading to these outcomes that I imagine a number of people who are listening to this podcast wanna move in the other direction, right?

Dr. Nat Kendall-Taylor: We’re trying to increase people’s support for policies designed to address injustice and inequality. And so those choices big and small have effects on, I would say three things that everybody listening to this I think cares about in their work, which is: how people think about social issues, how people understand the issues that we are trying to communicate and advance, how people feel about those issues. The role of emotion I feel like gets left out a lot of this discussion, but framing affects whether people kind of lean in and engage with what we have to say, whether people are kind of motivated to learn more, or whether they tune out, turn off, and disengage. And then I think the thing that we care about the most, which is action, the choices that we make and how we say what we have to say can determine whether someone makes a decision to support a solution or makes a very different decision to either step out or to support a decision which is kind of at odds with the messages and the ideas that we’re trying to advance.

Farra Trompeter: I think you’re talking about knowledge, attitudes, and behavior, which we got into a few months ago with Derrick Feldmann from The Ad Council Research Institute And we’ll be sure to link to that podcast conversation, how can you raise awareness and build trust? As you’re out there? If you’re learning about these concepts or you’re looking for a refresher, that’s a great one to listen to as well. Now Carinne, let’s take it one level deeper and get into the heart of today’s conversation. How can framing inform a nonprofit’s communications strategy? What are some ways you’ve seen organizations effectively apply framing to their work or campaigns? I know Nat mentioned you might have some examples at the ready, so I’d love it if you can kind of apply some insights to this question.

Carinne Wheedan: This question’s so good and so hard because I’m the communications director at an organization that researches how to communicate effectively. So as you can imagine, I feel like I have seven different answers to this question, but I’m gonna try to focus on two different things because my mind is sort of pulled in two different ways here. One is the actual messages we’re sending and language we use, copy we write in our daily work at nonprofits. So this is everything from what we put on our website, how we send our email messages, social media, how a funder might frame an issue in an RFP. These are language decisions we’re making every day. If we’re at a public health institution, the metaphors we use, are we describing vaccines as a shield, a way to protect yourself, or are we describing them as a way to train and prepare your body for illness or for whatever? And I’m obviously not an expert in that issue, but I am a receiver of FrameWorks’ evidence-based advice on how to talk about those types of things. And those choices make a difference. Are we saying people who are priced out of stable housing, are we using language that, like Nat said, brings systems into the equation? So those language choices that we make every day make a really big difference. And your listeners sort of know their own communities and issues best. So being able to take what research can give and incorporate it in your own way, in the way that works for you is usually best. And for a lot of folks, even just having evidence that supports instincts they’ve had about how we should be communicating about these issues for a long time is really helpful. And I’m actually a testament to that. Before working at FrameWorks, I worked at a national nonprofit working on youth justice issues and I encountered FrameWorks, research on adolescent development, and how to talk about adolescents. And I was like, “Oh my God, I had been feeling like we’re just sort of othering young people when we talk about especially older young people, opportunity youth.” And so having research to inform the language that we used in our organization was super important. But it also eventually became an explicit goal in our strategic plan for the division I led, which was focused on Opportunity Youth to help reframe that conversation and move from a place of sort of like charity and helping young people to a place of solidarity. So just having that evidence was really helpful and gave some credibility in a way.

Carinne Wheedan: And then the other direction that I think of when I think about framing and our communication strategies is the bigger, more strategic work that’s less about the actual copy that we’re writing in our own individual nonprofit comms. But our work is a field to change narratives. And lots of nonprofits, lots of fields are involved in campaigns, whether it’s awareness building like you just mentioned, Farra, or advocacy campaigns. We have a specific goal in mind: fund early childhood education, broaden access to mental health support, end human trafficking. Whatever it is, we are making strategic choices about the values that we’re emphasizing, the metaphors we use, how we’re telling the stories we are telling.

Carinne Wheedan: And so as a quick example, we did some work with partners in California with the goal of eliminating tobacco-related health disparities through policy change. And so we wanted to help people move from thinking about tobacco as a niche public health issue to a systemic justice issue. And to do that we needed to shift the narrative and sort of the way people were thinking about tobacco away from this idea that tobacco use is an individual vice, which was super dominant at the time to something that was more focused on systems in the the industry. And so we conducted with our partners extensive research on mindsets about tobacco and on framing, over the course of a couple years and found that the most effective way to shift our collective conception of tobacco was to frame commercial tobacco as a predatory industry specifically that’s targeting communities of color, young communities, poor communities, which was a true thing that just sort of wasn’t being talked about in the national conversation. So the thing there that I think is applicable to so many issues and a big part of how framing can inform communications work is that when we talk about our issues or the populations we care about, the framing that we use can make people the problem or it can make systems the problem. And I think that in itself, going back to what Nat shared, that’s a big piece of a communication strategy, the core key messages you’re trying to get out into the world, and that can show up in small places or seemingly small places like our emails and social media posts, or it can show up in really big and strategic places like how we frame our advocacy efforts.

Farra Trompeter: I appreciate that, especially that last piece. There’s so much that people want to just hone in and tell that one individual story and about that one person, and it’s so much more than that. And sometimes in telling that story, people wind up or organizations wind up exploiting that person and painting a story in a deficit way. And there’s so much in what you’re saying that I hope people take from this. And just to kind of bring that home even more, I know a lot of our listeners work in nonprofits or philanthropy and they’re questioning or wondering how they can frame their issues in effective ways. Are there any other general or overarching tips that you have for folks in the mission-driven sector that they can use no matter what the issue they’re working on? Maybe, Nat, you can start us off.

Dr. Nat Kendall-Taylor: Yeah, I mean I feel like there’s a lot of these. I’ll maybe go through a couple and then maybe turn things over to Carinne who can add a couple more to the mix. And I think that two that I want to cover, again probably fall into the category of, we know this somewhere in the middle or back of our brains, yet when it comes to making decisions about how we do what we do, they may get overshadowed or crowded out of our practice. So the first one is about whether and how we use data. “The evidence speaks for itself.” You probably heard that before, right? We’ve got a lot of evidence and there’s probably now about 40, 50 years of evidence in the social and behavioral sciences, which clearly thwarts that as a fact. Data and evidence do not speak for themselves. And so it’s really important that when we think about our data, that we are using them in a way that supports our message and our ideas rather than thinking that the data are the message or ideas. We need to kind of always come at evidence and data from the perspective of framing them, of making really clear what those data and that evidence means, of using the idea of curation of less being more. While people who work with data may be convinced, the more you layer on for most people, most of the time that layering practice does not work. It actually invites people to either disengage or fall back on their existing beliefs. So, we really advise people to think about data as being part of but not the frame. And we’ve got a lot of evidence, recent work on immigration and poverty that shows that you take a somewhat effective narrative and you test it and you find that when you add data to that narrative in this supporting role, it actually makes that narrative more effective. So this is not me sitting here saying that data don’t have a place in your communications, but rather we need to think about them as in a supporting role rather than as the idea or message that we are advancing.

Dr. Nat Kendall-Taylor: So the second recommendation is something that we get called to do all the time, which is how we correct misinformation, the way in which we engage or don’t when we see misunderstandings swirling around about our issues. And I think the strong tendency that we have is to take that misinformation on to state very clearly that it is not true to repeat it in so doing and then to come behind that with our evidence, our data, and our argumentation. And that is not how cognition works. We cannot remind people of the thing that they believe and think most strongly and then assume that the strength of our evidence will be enough to move that belief to the side. And so this is really a recommendation about ordering and the recommendation is to always start and try to repeat as much as you can the idea that you are trying to advance and that sometimes advancing your own idea can be the best way of correcting this information. And so the admonition is to never repeat what we want people to forget.

Carinne Wheedan: I just wanna add maybe a little more nuance to the piece that Nat shared earlier about crisis framing. Coming up through the world of nonprofits myself, it was drilled into me from first jobs in nonprofits to graduate school to every job I’ve had since. Start with the problem. To help people understand the issue, start with the problem and then tell them what you’re gonna do about it. And one of the things that has been really helpful to me as a communicator that I’ve learned through working at FrameWorks, but also just learning more about strategic and evidence-based framing is that it’s better to start with the solution. Starting with the problem or starting with the crisis idea leads people to disengage. And so to Nat’s data point, we might have this temptation to start our messages with jarring statistics to show sort of the severity of the problem or use literal words like “crisis” or “catastrophe” or “this is an emergency” to get people’s attention. And of course, often we are talking about things that I, and probably everyone on this call would consider to be emergencies or crises. But decades of research shows that this type of framing, maybe counterintuitively, doesn’t work because it puts people into a fatalistic place and it zaps our energy, our enthusiasm, our collective will for change because it makes us feel like, “Oh my God, this problem is way too big to solve” or “It’s inevitable.” The climate is just gonna change. Inequality is always gonna happen. Kids are always going to get sick. Trauma is just a part of life. And it doesn’t mean we need to stop talking about social problems or do the like toxic positivity thing and make it seem like it’s actually fine. But when we do talk about really big issues, can we start with the solutions? So instead of saying 70% of kids have experienced a traumatic event, can we say trauma-informed approaches can equip us, can equip our institutions to play a part in preventing adversity trauma and restore children’s wellbeing? And doing this helps people want to approach the issue rather than avoid the issue.

Carinne Wheedan: The last one is kind of short and simple, and it goes back to one of the things I was talking about about the Opportunity Youth thing is like, can we use we pronouns as opposed to they and them? So we often unintentionally other communities, whether it be young people, whether it be older people, whether it be any sort of populations that we work with. Using, we, just the simple act of, “The things we all need as we age”, or “The support we all experience as we’re growing up” can help create more of a sense of togetherness and solidarity as opposed to helping those kids over there or those people and them and theirs. Even just those small simple choices I think can make a difference in terms of where our brains go.

Farra Trompeter: Well this is great and there’s so much to even talk about beyond this. So if you are out there and you’re new to framing or you’ve been doing it for years, if you haven’t been by the FrameWorks website in a minute, I encourage you to go there. There is a tremendous amount of resources, publications, and tools at frameworksinstitute.org. You can also sign up for general or issue-specific updates by email and follow their work on Instagram and LinkedIn. We’ll link to all of that in the show notes. And finally, you can connect with Nat and Carinne on LinkedIn too. We’ll make sure you can access those and get a transcript of this conversation at bigduck.com/insights. Now, Nat and Carinne, before we go, you’ve had so many pearls of wisdom. I want one more. I’m just curious if you have any parting thoughts or ideas, and as you think about that, I’d like to quote one of your recent #OnFrameFriday tips that I just love and that was, “You are not your audience. It’s easy to fall into the trap of overestimating how much other people think like we do. So it’s important that we do the explanatory work to help people understand what we mean and why it matters.” So again, you have so many great tips on the #OnFrameFridays and throughout all of your communications, but let’s see if you’ve got one more each for our audience. So would you like to start us off here?

Carinne Wheedan: Yeah, I mean, even just hearing that OnFrameFriday, I am like, “God, it’s such a good reminder for me as the comms person of FrameWorks.’ Like, you just forget these things that feel like not said, they’re in our minds, but like, “Oh God, I need to explain what I mean by cultural mindsets. I need to say what I mean by framing, even audience.” Things like that. So, this isn’t a tip, but just to say that it’s obviously not as simple as we’re making it seem in these tidbits, but we actually got a question from someone on Twitter saying like, How do I start framing? And I think I know what the person meant, but it that sort of the tip or the tidbit is like you’re already framing and we’re all already making choices all the time about how we position our issues, how we position our organizations, which I would love to talk about that another time. But it’s not really a matter of, “Should we frame our communications?” It’s the way you go about it and what is informing the choices you’re making about how you’re presenting those issues to your audiences that can really make a difference. So I don’t know that that’s wisdom, but it’s something that came to mind throughout this conversation that hopefully can be a reminder to folks about the small and big choices we’re making every day.

Dr. Nat Kendall-Taylor: My final thought is about the importance of framing in the moment, but the importance of framing over time. So we know the way that we make the choices that we do and how we say we have to say can have a difference in terms of when someone is reading or engaging with our stuff. It can make people more open or closed to an idea. It can increase, you know, willingness to engage and become involved with an issue or depress it. But there’s also this way that framing over time can start to change some of these deep underlying mindsets that we have that inform our work. So I think it’s always important as someone who’s involved in this work that we are simultaneously having this in the moment, right? I’m framing for right now, but I’m also thinking about how the choices that I make and how I say what I have to say potentially has these longer-term effects. And not to be dramatic, but in shifting and changing culture over some period of time. So there’s that long-term perspective that I think is really important and the best way to do that long-term work. The only way to do that long-term work is together. Sharing frames, doing some of the repositioning that Carinne has talked about is powerful and can be helpful as an individual communicator or organization. But the real power, the transformational power, comes from when we share and tell those stories over time as a group of communicators.

Farra Trompeter: I love that. I don’t know how to end better than in the spirit of solidarity. So thank you both for being here today and everyone out there: get to framing. Have a great day.