The Last Messaging Framework You’ll Ever Need

If you’ve ever felt like your messaging isn’t quite landing — like people don’t get it or aren’t inspired to take action — you’re not alone. We hear it all the time: “We’re struggling to tell our story.”

But here’s the thing: your story isn’t the story that matters most. The real question is: How do you craft messaging that actually moves people?

In this episode of Designing Tomorrow, we’re breaking down the last messaging framework you’ll ever need.

We cover:

• The biggest messaging mistake most nonprofits and social enterprises make
• Why clarity beats complexity—and how to simplify without losing depth
• How to reframe your messaging to make your audience the hero
• The five key pillars of messaging that inspires action
• A real-time messaging workshop where we apply this framework live

By the end of this episode, you’ll have a clear, practical framework to refine your messaging, cut through the noise, and drive real impact.

Episode Highlights:

• [00:00] Introduction – The No. 1 messaging struggle we hear from social impact leaders.
• [02:26] The coherence problem – Why your messaging feels all over the place.
• [02:45] Stop being vague – How unclear, academic language turns people away.
• [03:36] Shift the narrative – Why your organization’s story isn’t the most important one.
• [05:04] What does success look like? – The messaging shift that changes everything.
• [06:18] Articulating the problem – Making your cause relevant and urgent.
• [08:10] Know your audience – How to align your message with what people care about.
• [10:19] Paint a vivid vision – Why great messaging starts with a powerful, clear vision.
• [11:56] The power of a point of view – Why your philosophy shapes your messaging.
• [13:14] Voice, tone, and personality – The secret to making your messaging feel human.
• [19:48] Live messaging workshop – Real-time messaging strategy in action.

Notable Quotes:

• “Your story is not really the story you want to be telling. The story you want to be telling or planting seeds around is how can you get involved in helping us move our mission forward?” – Eric Ressler [03:36]
• “I think also another thing that can happen is that we try to capture too many ideas or too many perspectives or too many audiences all 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.” – Jonathan Hicken [02:26]
• “The hardest thing to do, and I've tried, is to get AI to capture your voice. That is really hard.” – Eric Ressler [13:14]
• “I mean, the seminal example of a vision statement is Dr. Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.” – Jonathan Hicken [10:19]
• “Can you imagine a world where young children are not scared of climate change but motivated to actually participate in the solution?” – Eric Ressler [29:38]
• “You 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 I think you got to go into those conversations trying to more deeply understand the holistic nature of someone's problem.” – Jonathan Hicken [08:10]

Transcript:
 

Eric Ressler [00:00]:

Probably the most common thing I hear when social impact clients are approaching me is we're having trouble telling our story.

Jonathan Hicken [00:06]:

We try to capture too many ideas or too many perspectives or too many audiences all 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.

Eric Ressler [00:24]:

Your story is not really the story you want to be telling. The story you want to be telling or planting seeds around is how can you get involved in helping us move our mission forward?

Jonathan Hicken [00:34]:

I mean, the seminal example of a vision statement is Dr. Martin Luther King's, I Have a Dream speech.

Eric Ressler [00:39]:

What is that unique vantage point that you have that allows you to approach the work in terms of your methodology or your programs that will be different than other people that will be more human?

Jonathan, probably the most common thing I hear when social Impact clients are approaching me is we're having trouble telling our story. And there's a couple different reasons why people say that, and I think 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 they just dunno how to tell their story. And what, to me, 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?

[01:38]:

And so today I want to go deep on messaging and I 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. This sounds incredibly valuable. Let's get into it. Let's talk about some of the common issues with messaging. I think 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, right? Because you have an executive writing some of it, you have another staff person writing some of it and intern writing some of it, and everyone's kind of just doing their best job at trying to tell the story. But if they don't have a clear guideline or framework or vision that they're working against, then the messaging can start to get just kind of hodgepodge.

Jonathan Hicken [02:26]:

Yeah, I think also another thing that can happen is that we try to capture too many ideas or too many perspectives or too many audiences all 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.

Eric Ressler [02:45]:

Exactly. So that's actually the next one, which is messaging that's vague, unclear, or sometimes even just overly what I'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, I 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. So clarity and messaging is something that we spend a lot of time working on. People say that, but I think it's like, what does that actually mean to be clear in your messaging. So hopefully by the end of this episode we'll be more clear about what that means. 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.

[03:36]:

Even that initial framing that I brought up, oh, we're having trouble telling our story. And I think 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. The story you want to be telling or planting seeds around is how can you get involved in helping us move our mission forward, whether you're a donor or not, whether you're a volunteer or not, if you care about this cause, where can you fit in to help us move our mission forward? So that reframe around, oh, we don't need to talk about our history and the background of our organization and our team and our programs. And yeah, 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.

Jonathan Hicken [04:23]:

When I was in customer success in the SaaS industry, we talked a lot about measuring customer value, and the idea was we show up and we don't want to talk to them about how many people are logging into the platform or how many people are using on their team are using this tool, but rather have this conversation with our 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? I think what you're describing is the same idea. 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 and speak that language?

Eric Ressler [05:04]:

Yeah, I think definitely that's head on because I think it's like what can you do with us along as the guide, as the facilitator of impact? I think that's kind of the way to think about it. So let's get into some key pillars of this last messaging framework that you'll ever need and then maybe we can workshop some ideas after that. So one key pillar of effective messaging is being really clear about articulating the problem. I think this is something that people skip frankly a lot of the time, right? It is because 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 getting really clear about what is the problem, why does the problem matter today? How is it relevant to, and how does it stack up against all the other problems? 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.

Jonathan Hicken [06:18]:

Sometimes we have, as executive directors or CEOs, we 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.

Eric Ressler [06:54]:

A perfect segue into the next point, which is to understand your audience because what you're describing to me is framing and messaging the problem or just messaging at large for your colleagues instead of your supporters. And 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 I see is messaging framed that way for the wrong audience. So understanding 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? And then how can you speak and message in a way that is going to actually resonate with them? And oftentimes this really comes down to just 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.

Jonathan Hicken [08:10]:

Yeah, I would say you 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 I think you 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. And then the other thing you need to do is listen to how your audience talk to each other. If you listen to that, you're going to hear the words that they're using, you're going to hear the language that they're using, and you got to be a parrot. You got to reflect that language.

Eric Ressler [08:44]:

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. The next big pillar is painting 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 I think it goes much further than those statements. And I 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. I think we've experienced this before all of us 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. And so I think 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, I think is just really important for messaging.

Jonathan Hicken [10:19]:

And this is a dangerous one too, because you might seek a vision statement and fall into the trap of some of the pillars that you've already brought up around using jargon around using academic language. I mean, the seminal example of a vision statement is Dr. Martin Luther, I have a Dream speech, I have a dream that one day. And he laid out his vision for race relations in America in that speech, and that was setting the vision. And none of us will ever be the order or the vision maker that Dr. King was, but I think we can look to that at least in terms of the structure of how we're presenting our vision.

Eric Ressler [10:58]:

I think we got to dig into that a little bit more because that is such a great example of 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. And I'll actually segue nicely into the next point too. 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. And so I think that that speech could be a masterclass in vision crafting.

Jonathan Hicken [11:49]:

60 years later, we're still talking about it

Eric Ressler [11:52]:

And we probably will be 60 years from now. God willing.

[11:56]:

The next point on this is having a clear point of view or philosophy as a leader or as an organization. The way I 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 compliment and maybe even have a huge impact on your mission and your vision. But how do you think about the work? What is your philosophy? What is your perspective? What does 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 I think 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 I think 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.

[13:14]:

The next one, and this to me kind of starts to trickle down into a more, I don't want to say tactical, but a more practical element is your voice, your tone, your personality, and this is less about what you are saying and more about how are you saying it. So we've touched a little bit on being overly academic not being effective. We've touched on using buzzwords not being effective, but I think 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. And I think 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. And I'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 or whatever, and all of a sudden it feels like you just walked into a lawyer's office.

[14:25]:

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, and so you have to watch out for that. With that said, I don't think people spend enough time thinking about their voice and their tone. And this is, frankly, we do a lot of writing work for clients. This is the part that's the hardest for us to do is 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.

Jonathan Hicken [15:30]:

When I'm hiring people from my team, writing skills are one of the first things I look at no matter what the role is, partly because I want to build a team of people who are reflecting a particular way of communicating, in our case, communicating science. And I think you're right when it comes to setting voice and tone, I believe that it should be on the spectrum of grounded in what is actually happening to just a reach of a dream. I think 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 could happen, that can be a dissonance sort of experience. So I'm with you. I think that nailing your voice and tone is a super powerful tool that can be applied to pretty much all forms of work, not just marketing and branding and strategy we talk about in the podcast.

Eric Ressler [16:33]:

Yeah, I think the interesting and 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 I've tried, is to get AI to capture your voice. That is really hard. And I've experimented with it because I'm a tinkerer and I've been able to train AI LLMs on, I've published a bunch of content. So 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 me have figured this out. I don't know. The point though is that how you say what you say is almost more important than what you're even saying in certain cases. And effective communication is an art, right? It is about metaphor and word choice and terminology and having a human voice behind what you're saying. And I think that it's becoming more and more important as people are becoming kind of disenchanted with organizational speak in general and overly academic speak. And so developing a clear point of view and voice for an organization, I think is a huge superpower if you can nail it.

Jonathan Hicken [17:52]:

All right. I want to get a little vulnerable with you, and I'm thinking maybe we workshop something that I'm working on right now, actually. Okay. So refresher, I work at the Seymour Marine Discovery Center in Santa Cruz. It's a small science center aquarium. And when I get in front of these audience and talk about our work and our impact, I found myself coming back to this one story, this one story of this particular person who went through our summer camp like 20 years ago, and last year she made the New York Times and BBC and all of these national international news outlets for her scientific paper. And I kept telling that story because there was this, and we have this photo of her actually touching a dolphin as part of her summer camp experience. And I kept looking at that picture and being like, 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.

[18:55]:

And so I've been playing with some new language. I was recognizing that I kept telling that story. So I'm hoping maybe we can apply this new language to your pillars, and I kind of want you to maybe poke holes in the way I've been thinking about it. So ultimately, going back to the story of this young woman in that moment, I think she became a scientist, or we had a role in creating a new scientist that day during that summer camp. And so I've 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, so let's apply. And I mean creating scientists, that's the buzzword or that's the language I've been using.

Eric Ressler [19:40]:

That's the message.

Jonathan Hicken [19:41]:

That's the message we create scientists. So let's run through your pillars and see if we can poke holes in this.

Eric Ressler [19:48]:

So let's do it. So before we get to the pillars, one thing I think is worth mentioning is that, and I'm picking up on this in your example, 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 I think it's worth mentioning that that's a really good strategy in my opinion, and not just my opinion, there's science that backs up that we are wired to understand and perceive the world through story, through narrative. And if you are able to communicate through a story, people are, I believe it's 20 times 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 that example that you gave. So I like how you're opening up there, but let's dive a little bit deeper. So Pillar was articulate the problem. We could maybe infer the problem from that story, but I know that you go deeper than that in understanding what your problem that you're solving is. But let's just go there. What is the problem that you're trying to solve?

Jonathan Hicken [20:59]:

So in California, public schools in particular, science education is getting defunded and is 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 some amazing science educators, don't get me wrong. Nevertheless, there's a gap of good science education, particularly good, the process of science education in our community. And we are associated with the University of California Santa Cruz, and we have this ability to plug into labs, and we have some amazing scientists in their own right on our team. So really what this comes down to, the problem is that the lack of good science, hands-on science education opportunities in our community.

Eric Ressler [21:57]:

Got it. Okay. So in my opinion, that's a pretty clear, valid problem. I think you're articulating it well. Let's go to pillar two, which is understanding your audience. So at a high level, give me your audiences,

Jonathan Hicken [22:11]:

Parents of children in public schools or grandparents of children in public schools in our region. And so in talking about creating scientists, I'm kind of trying to talk to a parent, being like, 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.

Eric Ressler [22:32]:

So it sounds to me like you consider parents or caretakers to be your primary audience, but I have to imagine you have other audiences too that you're trying to reach.

Jonathan Hicken [22:39]:

And I'm right in the middle of end of year fundraising, so I'm thinking about fundraising a lot, and it's the parents and the grandparents who are making the donations. So right now, that's the audience I have in mind.

Eric Ressler [22:49]:

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

Jonathan Hicken [22:53]:

Their experience is once they're onsite, right, is once they're in the building and we are greeting them. And in fact, our education team, when a bus of children pulls up, greets the children with welcome scientists. So we're talking to them as if they are scientists the moment they arrive on our doorstep. But really we think about the child audience as one to speak to and serve once they're in the building.

Eric Ressler [23:22]:

Yeah, I think that makes sense. And obviously you have other audiences as well, prospective donors who may also be in this first audience, partner organizations, the university. So would you talk to them in the same way? Actually, this is a genuine question. Do you share that same story with all of your audiences right now?

Jonathan Hicken [23:39]:

Great question. Yes, though I spin it differently depending on who I'm talking to.

Eric Ressler [23:47]:

You could use personalized. It's a less charged word than space.

Jonathan Hicken [23:50]:

All right. I'm personalizing it to the audience. So for example, we are part of the UC Santa Cruz system, and so I need to be demonstrating value to the university, partly for funding and for other reasons. But when I talk to the university, the university cares about high impact science. They want their science and their faculty, their grad students to be delivering impact to the community in which the university is situated. So when I'm talking to the university, I'm 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.

Eric Ressler [24:47]:

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

Jonathan Hicken [24:55]:

So the vision that I am speaking about right now is coastal communities around the world are being impacted disproportionately by climate

Eric Ressler [25:06]:

Change,

Jonathan Hicken [25:08]:

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 I envision Santa Cruz or the Monterey Bay region being the epicenter of launching those solutions oriented scientists.

Eric Ressler [25:44]:

So far vision in my, I'm putting you totally on the spot here.

Jonathan Hicken [25:47]:

Let's go. 

Eric Ressler [25:47]:

So bear with me.

Jonathan Hicken [25:48]:

Let's go.

Eric Ressler [25:48]:

I think that's your weakest answer so far.

Jonathan Hicken [25:50]:

Okay. All right.

Eric Ressler [25:51]:

And maybe we could workshop it.

Jonathan Hicken [25:52]:

Let's do it.

Eric Ressler [25:53]:

And by the way, weakest among good answers. So we're putting the bar at Martin Luther King Junior's speech here. What's your MLK junior speech for your vision for this new epicenter of coastal scientists in the Monterey Bay in Santa Cruz area? So personal, so personal, emotional, human. I am not expecting you to be able to solve it right now, but maybe we can workshop it real quick.

Jonathan Hicken [26:18]:

Yeah, let's workshop it.

Eric Ressler [26:19]:

So what does it look like when that's happened, right? That's the way I like to think about it. What would that be like if your vision were to come true?

Jonathan Hicken [26:28]:

I'm thinking about this live. I appreciate this. So I'm getting vulnerable. I might be blushing a little on camera here. Look, I think that gathering spaces like the Seymour Center are important for community action in whatever regard.

Eric Ressler [26:47]:

Sure.

Jonathan Hicken [26:48]:

And so part of my vision is actually, if we're successful in creating the space where we are launching scientists out into the world who understand the nuances of problems of our coastal community, I also think what are 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? They like Santa Cruz, have unique challenges and situations and circumstances and economics and even geographic and physical realities that need specialized solutions. So I think about, hey, if we're 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 solving their own problems for themselves, I guess. So it's almost like a model, a model that could spread to other communities.

Eric Ressler [27:57]:

Okay. So we're probably not going to write your new vision story live on this podcast, but I think you've got some really good raw ingredients to work there. Let me attempt a couple, let's go of potential, probably really bad, but rough ideas around how we might articulate that. So a couple things come to mind for me. One is, could you imagine a world where young children are not scared of climate change but motivated to actually participate in the solution?

[28:26]:

Could you imagine a world where we create a model in Santa Cruz that could be replicated across the globe to help advance? So these kind of, could you imagine framings can be really helpful? Could you imagine a world where children are off of their screens and engaged in the real world? Again, I think there's a lot to work with all of that. So in my opinion, those kind of really emotional personal stories, and especially if we talk about the audience to being parents and caretakers, we might even frame that more. Could you imagine if your kid, and maybe you're doing this in your messaging right now, but I think, and we'll work on this offline too, but I think we've got some good stuff going on. The vision, and I think actually so far that's the part that needs the most work and still needs some work to get that story really dialed in.

Jonathan Hicken [29:16]:

Yeah, I really appreciate this. And actually the one that resonated with me immediately is can you imagine a world in which kids aren't scared of climate change but feel empowered to solve it? Honestly, I might use that because it's yours. Thank you. There is a lot of climate anxiety and parents are seeing their kids freaked out about it, so…

Eric Ressler [29:38]:

Rightfully so.

Jonathan Hicken [29:38]:

At least in California. So it might be different in other parts of the country, but certainly that happens here.

Eric Ressler [29:44]:

I think it's national for sure. I think maybe more so in California we're seeing so many impacts of climate change in our local community. But let's keep going through the pillar. So next one point of view or philosophy. I'm curious to hear your, I 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?

Jonathan Hicken [30:10]:

Yeah, I believe that a physical gathering place matters for this work to be successful. I think that people, kids, families need to come together and bond and create community and celebrate wins and celebrate opportunities. I think physical gathering spaces matter.

Eric Ressler [30:29]:

Okay.

Jonathan Hicken [30:29]:

So that's the point of view.

Eric Ressler [30:30]:

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a good one, and I think it aligns well with your unique advantages, an organization having that space, and I think you can make a good argument for it. Okay. Let's talk about voice and tone and personality. How do you think about that? Right now at the Seymour Center,

Jonathan Hicken [30:47]:

I try to practice, this is probably going to be more difficult to workshop live here, but I do try to practice speaking in the way that I hear my friends who are parents of kids in public schools. I try to speak the way that we're speaking about our kids and the way, sometimes the way that donors are speaking about science education or STEM education, the state of STEM education right now, I actually, 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. This one's going to be hard to dissect online, but you can always go to our website and read some of my personal letters and whatnot to see how we're talking about it.

Eric Ressler [31:40]:

Yeah, great. And we'll link those in the show notes. So that was a cool little fun live workshopping. Maybe we'll do some more of that. Thank you. That was good. Solve some of your messaging issues on the podcast here. Thank you. Appreciate that. Let's wrap it up. 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 them directly. Painting a vivid emotional version of your vision, having some kind of clear point of view or philosophy, and then 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, and I'm sure we will continue to cover it on the pod. 

Jonathan Hicken

Thank you, Eric. That was fun. 

Eric Ressler

Yeah, thanks, Jonathan.