The Last Messaging Framework You’ll Ever Need

This article is a summary of Episode 36 of our Designing Tomorrow podcast. Each episode is a conversation between Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and Cosmic’s Creative Director, Eric Ressler. 

Probably the most common thing we hear when social impact clients approach us is:

And there's a couple different reasons why people say that, and it's not always because they're actually having trouble with the storytelling part of it. Sometimes it's deeper than that. We've talked about this before with regards to niche and differentiation, but sometimes it really is that they just don't know how to tell their story. And what that really comes down to is messaging. 

How do you message your work as a social impact organization to the people that you care about trying to activate?

Today we want to go deep on messaging and we want to talk about the last messaging framework you'll ever need and how to craft messaging as a social impact organization that moves people.

Common Issues with Messaging

The biggest and the first common issue that we see a lot is just a lack of coherence in messaging. It's just kind of all over the place. Because you have an executive writing some of it. You have another staff person writing some of it. An intern writing some of it. And everyone's doing their best job at trying to tell the story.

Too Many Ideas at Once

Another thing that can happen is that we try to capture too many ideas or too many perspectives or too many audiences and try to just get it all into one thing. And then what we end up with is a word or a phrase that doesn't actually really mean anything. It's too vague.

Next, let’s talk about messaging that's vague, unclear, or sometimes even just overly what we'll call academic. So you see this a lot in the social impact space where messaging uses these impressive sounding words. It feels kind of like it's meant for a college-educated audience. Or, you read it and then you read it again, and then you read it again. You're like, still don't really know what this actually means. And so then you maybe hop over to about page or dig deeper to try and get clear about it.

Clarity in messaging is something that we spend a lot of time working on. People say that, but what does that actually mean to be clear in your messaging? We’ll look at more of this later.

Tell the Right Story

The next big messaging mistake that we see a lot, and this is a very common one, is you think about having to tell your story. Even that initial framing we brought up: We're having trouble telling our story. And that's actually a big problem because especially in your marketing and your messaging to your audience, your story is not really the story you want to be telling.

Reframe the need to talk about your history and the background of our organization and our team and our programs. There's room for that in your messaging and on your website, but messaging should be more active and more activating and more focused around how you can actually move people.

Think about measuring customer value. In the tech industry, one idea of customer success is to have a conversation with customers to ask them: What does success look like to you and how can we reflect your success back to you and help drive your own definition of success?

So in social impact work, what does success look like to a participant or to a donor or to someone whose involvement you want to activate? What does success look like or what does value look like to that person? Speak that language.

What can you do as the facilitator of impact? That's a way to think about it.

Key Pillars of Effective Messaging

So let's get into some key pillars of this last messaging framework that you'll ever need. And then we’ll workshop some ideas.

Pillar 1: Articulate the Problem

So one key pillar of effective messaging is being really clear about articulating the problem. This is something that people skip frankly a lot of the time. They understand the problem so deeply and they might intuitively understand it, but they don't do a very good job educating their supporters about why this is a problem in the first place — whatever it is.

So get really clear about what the problem is. Why does the problem matter today? How is it relevant to, and how does it stack up against all the other problems? There’s no shortage of problems in our world right now. And we need some clarity here around how you can actually fuel this mission and tap into urgency without fake urgency around this problem. So articulating the problem and figuring out how to make the problem relevant to modern culture.

Sometimes executive directors or CEOs have the tendency to go look at our sector, the industry, other organizations who are working on this stuff. Maybe we'll go to professional conferences or we'll read thought leadership. And often in those spaces we're getting really nuanced information and we're dissecting the problem with stats and figures and data, and it's easy for us to start defining the problem that we're trying to solve in the terms that are coming from our colleagues in the sector rather than from the people who are experienced the problem directly.

Pillar 2: Frame the Message for Your Audience

Don’t frame the problem or focus your messaging at large for your colleagues instead of your supporters. Sometimes that is a really important segment. If you're doing a lot of partnership work or you're trying to activate other peers in your space, you might need some messaging that is framed that way. But oftentimes what we see is messaging framed that way for the wrong audience.

Understand your audience and your audience segments. 

• Who are they? 
• What do they care about? 
• What is their connection to the mission? 
• How can you align your mission, your vision, your values with the things that they care about, the values that they have, the impact and the mission that they want to see moved forward? 
• How can you speak and message in a way that is going to actually resonate with them?

Oftentimes this really comes down to getting really clear and really simple about the mission, about the desired future state, about the impact and saying that and messaging that in a way that feels a little bit more human. A little bit more conversational. Can we cut buzzwords? Can we cut nuance at a high level and save that for deeper articles and just really distill it down and be consistent.

Listen to How Your Audience Talks to Each Other

You’ve got to be careful going into a conversation with someone in your audience because you're going to be looking for what problem they're experiencing as it relates directly to your organization. And you’ve got to go into those conversations trying to more deeply understand the holistic nature of someone's problem — whether or not it actually has anything to do with your organization.

We've talked before about how important it is to have conversations with your community. This is just one more reason why that's so important. So you can hear how they're processing the words that they're using, the language they're using, the mental model that they're using.

Pillar 3: Paint a Vivid Vision

We talk a lot in this space about mission and vision and values and mission statements and vision statements, and that's part of this, but it goes much further than those statements. And we actually think those statements get outsized attention compared to the rest of these pillars that are important for messaging.

With that said, having a vivid inspirational vision for a better future is absolutely an important part of messaging. And if you can articulate that vision — in a way that is inspiring, in a way that is novel, in a way that is activating — having that vision in place should be the north star of the rest of your messaging and how you articulate your impact and the mission that you're trying to have with your community.

We've experienced this before in one way or another. When we hear someone who's really inspirational around a vision for how they're going to solve a problem or just a vision in general for a better future, that can be so magnetic. So spending a lot of time on not just having a vision statement, but having an actual clear vision, a magnetic vision that you can rally people around, is really important for messaging.

Don't Fall Into the Jargon Trap

You might seek a vision statement and fall into the trap of some of the pillars that we've already brought up around using jargon around using academic language. The seminal example of a vision statement is Dr. Martin Luther King, I Have a Dream speech. He laid out his vision for race relations in America in that speech, and that was setting the vision. None of us will ever be the order or the vision maker that Dr. King was, but we can look to that —at least in terms of the structure — of how we're presenting our vision.

We’ve got to dig into that a little bit more because that is such a great example. He would never have called that a vision statement. It was a speech. It was a vision that he had articulated in a speech. But let's break down why that was so effective or at least some of the reasons why it was so effective. 

He made that speech and that vision personal. He made it about how his vision would affect his life and by extension how other people's lives who were similar to him would also be affected and positively changed. So he didn't use buzzwords. He didn't use jargon. It wasn't overly academic. It wasn't vague. It was consistent. It was compelling. It was personal. It was human. It was emotional. That speech could be a masterclass in vision crafting.

Sixty years later, we're still talking about it. And we probably will be 60 years from now.

Pillar 4: Have a Clear Point of View or Philosophy

The way we think about point of view is: Based on your lived experiences as a leader, as an organization doing the work that you do, what is the unique vantage point that you have that is different from anyone else doing the work? And this is something that can complement and even have a huge impact on your mission and your vision.

• How do you think about the work? 
• What is your philosophy? 
• What is your perspective? 
• What is that unique vantage point that you have that allows you to approach the work in terms of your methodology or your programs — or even your philosophical approach — that will be different than other people, that will be more human?

And talking about the Martin Luther King Jr speech, he had that clear point of view, that distinct point of view, that philosophy. That was a fresh, unique, distinct take on the issues of race relations. And a big part of why he was such a magnetic figure is because he was really good at taking that point of view and that philosophy and articulating it in a vision that was distinct.

Pillar 5: Voice, Tone, and Personality

This pillar starts to trickle down into a more practical element is your voice, your tone, your personality. This is less about what you are saying and more about how you are saying it. We've touched a little bit on being overly academic as not being effective. We've touched on using buzzwords not being effective. But how you actually speak and write as an organization in certain ways can be one of the most important elements around whether or not the messaging feels right or wrong.

There's some things to be careful about here. You don't want to develop a voice and a tone for your writing and your messaging that is dissonant or not aligned with how you actually show up in the real world. We've seen this happen where someone realizes, Hey, we could develop a tone and a voice that's more playful, more youthful, more human. And they do that. And maybe they're even successful at that. But then you actually meet with them or you read copy on their website instead of their social media, and all of a sudden it feels like you just walked into a lawyer's office.

Voice Must Be Consistent and Authentic

So if you are going to go that direction with your voice, the voice needs to be connected to the mission, to the vision, to your personality as an organization and as people. And it needs to be something that ties into your brand in a way that is authentic, that's consistent. You have to watch out for that.

With that said, we don't think people spend enough time thinking about their voice and their tone. We do a lot of writing work for clients. This is the part that's the hardest for us to do — to translate the voice of an organization or a very strong leader and to recreate that. And it takes time, frankly, for us to do this. Our first draft a lot of times is not right, and it takes us reading and listening and having conversations to really understand: How do you say the things that you say as a leader, as a staff person at an organization, and then to codify that so that any person on the team can learn to write and develop a voice for the brand and the organization that is consistent — regardless of who's writing it.

When hiring people for teams, writing skills are one of the first things to look at no matter what the role is. You want to build a team of people who are reflecting a particular way of communicating. And when it comes to setting voice and tone, we believe that it should be grounded on a spectrum of what is actually happening to reach a dream.

It should be slightly on the side of aspirational, but not so far to where it actually can ultimately come off as inauthentic or unrelatable. If it's too playful or too joyful, and the people you're speaking with are actually dealing with something challenging, that can be a dissonant experience. 

AI Can't Capture Your Voice

A relevant and timely irony here is that more and more people are phoning in content to ChatGPT and AI right now. And the hardest thing to do, and we've tried, is to get AI to capture your voice. That is really hard. And we've experimented with it because we're tinkerers and because we've published a bunch of content, we've been able to train AI LLMs on. There's a huge dataset for it to work with. But it never quite gets it right. It never quite gets it. Maybe other people who are smarter than us have figured this out. 

Effective communication is an art. It is about metaphor and word choice and terminology and having a human voice behind what you're saying. And it's becoming more and more important — as people are becoming kind of disenchanted with organizational speak in general and overly academic speak — to develop a clear point of view and voice for an organization. It’s a huge superpower if you can nail it.

Workshopping the Framework

All right. We want to get a little vulnerable with you. We’re going to workshop something that the Seymour Center is working on right now. 

As a refresher, the Seymour Marine Discovery Center in Santa Cruz is a small science center aquarium. And when Executive Director Jonathan Hicken gets in front of audiences to talk about their work and impact, he finds himself coming back to this one story of this particular person who went through their summer camp around 20 years ago. Last year she made the New York Times and BBC and all of these national international news outlets for her scientific paper.

And he kept telling that story. They have this photo of her touching a dolphin as part of her summer camp experience. And Jonanthan kept looking at that picture and seeing that something happened in that moment that set her on her journey, and she would actually agree or she would reinforce that that experience set her on or her path.

And so Jonathan’s been playing with some new language —recognizing that he kept telling that story. So let’s apply these language pillars, and see if we can poke holes in the way we've been thinking about it. 

Going back to the story of this young woman. In that moment, we had a role in creating a new scientist during that summer camp.

And so he’s been playing with this language of ‘creating scientists.’ When you come to the Seymour Center, you or your child is going to become a scientist. 

‘Creating scientists’, that's the buzzword or that's the language we've been using: We create scientists.

Before we push this through our pillars, one thing worth mentioning is that — and this is in the example — is that you're leading with a story. You're not leading with a mission statement, you're not leading with your vision statement. Those things can be kind of inferred from this story. But it's worth mentioning that that's a really good strategy. And that’s not just our opinion. There's science that backs up that we are wired to understand and perceive the world through story, through narrative.

If you are able to communicate through a story, people are, we believe, 20X more likely to remember something than if you just disseminate the information in a more fact-based way. So storytelling is such a buzzword. What does it even mean anymore? At the end of the day, it really is about telling stories like the example we’re working with. Now, let's dive a little bit deeper.

Articulating the Problem

Pillar one was: Articulate the Problem. We could maybe infer the problem from that story, but what’s the problem that Jonathan’s trying to solve?

In California, public schools in particular, science education is getting defunded and it’s increasingly harder to find good science education in our community, in the public school system. And that's no knock on the teachers in our community, because they're phenomenal teachers doing the best they can. And there’s some amazing science educators, don't get us wrong.

Nevertheless, there's a gap of good science education. And the Seymour Center is associated with the University of California Santa Cruz, and has an ability to plug into labs. And the Seymour Center has some amazing scientists in their own right on their team. So the problem is the lack of good, hands-on science education opportunities in the community.

That's a clear, valid problem. It’s articulated well. 

Understanding the Audience

Let's go to pillar two, which is understanding your audience. Let’s look at the Seymour Center’s audiences.

Jonathan describes them as: 

Parents or grandparents of children in public schools in the Santa Cruz region. In talking about creating scientists, they’re trying to talk to a parent, saying: We can create a scientist out of your child. If this is something that you want or if they want, we can help make that happen.

It sounds to us like Jonathan considers parents or caretakers to be his primary audience, but we have to imagine he has other audiences too that the Seymour Center is trying to reach. And from a fundraising perspective, it's the parents and the grandparents who are making the donations. So that's the primary audience they have in mind.

How do they think about the kids from an audience perspective?

When a bus of children pulls up, their education team greets the children with, “Welcome scientists!” So they're talking to them as if they are scientists the moment they arrive at their doorstep. They think about the child audience as one to speak to and serve once they're in the building.

Obviously, they have other audiences as well, prospective donors who may also be in this first audience, partner organizations, the University. So do they talk to them in the same way? Do they share that same young scientist story with all of their audiences?

The answer is that they do, but they personalize it, depending on who they're talking to. For example, they are part of the UC Santa Cruz system, and so Jonathan needs to be demonstrating value to the University, partly for funding and for other reasons. But when he talks to the University, the University cares about high impact science. They want their science, their faculty, and their grad students to be delivering impact to the community in which the University is situated.

So when he’s talking to the University, he's saying, your science is having impact by creating young scientists, creating a pipeline of students into the university system, and also by disseminating solutions and knowledge to the community that's going to help advance our work here.

We could go deeper on this, but so far so good. Let's get to the third pillar, painting a vivid vision.

Painting a Vivid Vision

The vision that Jonathan’s speaking about right now is that coastal communities around the world are being impacted disproportionately by climate change, and we need to be launching a generation of solutions-oriented scientists in the lab, in the classroom, in the courtroom, in the council chambers, in the media room. We need to be launching a whole squadron of children out into the world who are going to be the solution makers of tomorrow to create more resilient coastal communities. And he envisions Santa Cruz or the Monterey Bay region being the epicenter of launching those solutions-oriented scientists.

An Analysis + Workshopping the Messaging

So far, the vision is the weakest answer. Let’s workshop it.

By the way, the vision is the weakest among good answers. 

We're putting the bar at Martin Luther King Junior's speech here. So the question is, What's the MLK Jr. speech for the vision for this new epicenter of coastal scientists in the Monterey Bay in Santa Cruz area? Make it personal, emotional, human. We are not expecting to solve it here, but to workshop it.

Making the Vision Personal and Emotional

What does it look like when that's happened? That's the way we like to think about it. What would that be like if the vision were to come true?

Jonathan’s first thought is that gathering spaces like the Seymour Center are important for community action in whatever regard.

So part of the vision is that if the Seymour Center is successful in creating the space where they are launching scientists out into the world who understand the nuances of problems of our coastal community, the organizations is also thinking of all the other communities in the state and in the country who are dealing with the impacts of climate change and who are trying to advance solutions for their own communities themselves.

These communities, like Santa Cruz, have unique challenges and situations and circumstances and economics and even geographic and physical realities that need specialized solutions. So Jonathan thinks about, if the Seymour Center is able to launch a group of students out into the world — into the education, into the workforce — who deeply understand our particular problems and solutions, why couldn't other communities be teaching their children about their own problems and launch their own children to be solving their own problems for themselves. So it's almost like a model that could spread to other communities.

Questions to Ask  

We're not going to write the Seymour Center’s new vision story here, but there are some really good raw ingredients to work with. 

Let’s attempt a couple of rough ideas around how we might articulate their vision. Some questions that come to mind include: 

• Could you imagine a world where young children are not scared of climate change but motivated to actually participate in the solution?
• Could you imagine a world where we create a model in Santa Cruz that could be replicated across the globe to help advance? 
• Could you imagine a world where children are off of their screens and engaged in the real world again?

These ‘imagine’ framings can be really helpful. There's a lot to work with all of that.

With those really emotional personal stories — and especially if we talk about the audience being parents and caretakers — we might even frame those questions more strongly. “Could you imagine if your kid…”. And maybe the Seymour Center is doing this in their messaging already. But we've got some good stuff going on the vision at this point. So far that's the part that needs the most work, and still needs some work, to get that story really dialed in.

So next one point of view or philosophy. We're curious to hear your, we think some of this has started to come in some of the earlier pillars, but do you have from your organization or from your own vantage point, a distinct point of view or philosophy on how this work should be done?

Point of View

We asked Jonathan to answer the question, Do you have from your organization or from your own vantage point, a distinct point of view or philosophy on how this work should be done?

Jonathan didn’t pause, “We believe that a physical gathering place matters for this work to be successful. People, kids, families need to come together and bond and create community and celebrate wins and celebrate opportunities. Physical gathering spaces matter. That's the point of view.

In our experience, that aligns well with their unique advantages as an organization — having that space — and they can make a good argument for it. 

Voice and Tone

We asked Jonathan how they think of tone and voice right now at the Seymour Center.

Jonathan, “We try to practice speaking in the way that we hear our friends who are parents of kids in public schools speak. We try to speak the way that we're speaking about our kids and the way that donors are speaking about science education or the state of STEM education right now.

I don't come from a scientific background, so I actually think I have a bit of a unique advantage in this because I don't have the language to speak scientifically about this. So I have to speak in a way that makes sense to me. So I think that's the way that we're approaching it. 

The High Points

Let's wrap it up by reviewing some of these key pillars of good messaging and messaging that moves people: 

• Having a clear articulation of the problem
• Understanding your audience and speaking to them directly
• Painting a vivid emotional version of your vision
• Having some kind of clear point of view or philosophy
• Having a way of developing a voice and tone and personality for your organization

Certainly you can go much deeper on messaging. It's a lifelong pursuit to do this well, but hopefully these pillars get people started in the right direction.

Check out the full conversation on our Designing Tomorrow podcast.