I just went to the Spin Project and Opportunity Agenda strategic
communications workshop at the
“Opportunity Framework” model. The following are some thoughts I wrote down for
myself, but upon reflection think might be of some use to others in the media
reform and media justice advocacy fields.
I have been through a few of these strategic
communications-type workshops, and I have to say this was the best one I’ve
seen. Usually you get a fed a bunch of marketing data drawn from focus groups
done at the Mall of the Americas where you learn that the
word “freedom” resonates better than the word
“taxes.”
In terms of the content, I think the Opportunity
Framework is a good tool for organizations to examine their own messenging and
how they might tailor it to better appeal to a larger constituency. The
facilitators challenged participants to move beyond traditional progressive /
leftist language toward terms that resonate with a broader public. This was met
with resistance by some participants, particularly when we talked about some of
the Framework principles like “redemption” and “mobility.”
Saskia Fischer from the Media Empowerment Project was also at the workshop. She
and I sat together and talked about the Opportunity Framework’s application to
the media justice and media reform work. We agreed that much more work and
internal deliberation needed to be done to refine the messenging of the
media-related movements to reach beyond the already invested but small number of
actors. While we might mobilize the geek-erati of the blogosphere to pay
attention to Net Neutrality, our traction within larger progressive, civil
rights, and social justice spheres is less firm. And beyond that, we might
consider how to tell our story more compellingly to a broader American public,
that draws upon shared values and principles that cross political parties and
red/blue divisions.
The best part was at the end when a staffer from the
Drug Policy Alliance spoke about how they had changed their messenging to be
more story-oriented — focusing on compelling personal chronicles about tragedy
and forgiveness and community, rather than about criminal justice or draconian
drug laws in the abstract. This led to better coverage in the press and some
prisoners being released early. At the same time, the small successes they have
achieved are not the strongest endorsement for the Opportunity
Framework.
I’m still not sure how this Framework maps onto the work
we at the SSRC are engaged in. But clearly we need to find ways to tell our
story better and frame it in ways that appeal to a wider audience. A more
structured approach like the Opportunity Framework can only
help.