Change the Story Together
We partner with mission-driven storytellers, advocates, researchers, and coalitions—primarily in the nonprofit and public sector—who are working to change dominant narratives and public mindsets on social issues.
What Partnership Can Look Like
Over the past quarter-century, we’ve helped major foundations advance new framing strategies; advised paradigm-shifting scientists and groundbreaking documentary filmmakers; equipped state-level agencies and advocates to build public understanding of social issues; and supported and infused more effective framing into cultural spaces like museums, aquariums, and even playgrounds.
Our Services
Helping You Tackle Communication Challenges
We don’t offer a standard, off-the-shelf product or service, because we know that each niche in a social change ecosystem has specific strengths, challenges, and needs. We do listen to potential partners’ needs and draw from our experience to craft a strategy that fits. Here are some examples of the challenges partners bring to us and how our support and expertise could help.
Your Need: Your partners or grantees want to elevate a new perspective on a long-standing issue, but dominant, or even toxic, narratives are getting in the way.
Our Approach: We’d help your group get more precise about the narratives that need to be displaced and explain what research has found about a counternarrative. Depending on your reach and resources, we might train your group to deploy a counternarrative—or we might advise and co-construct an ambitious strategy to achieve 360-degree narrative presence.
Your Need: Your coalition has hit a plateau in terms of collaboration or impact. You’re looking for provocative new ideas to restart your momentum.
Our Approach: We’d help you spot strategic opportunities to launch a shared conversation about rethinking old habits. We might offer a keynote presentation that will get your convening talking, or explain the power of reframing in the right closed door meeting .
Your Need: You’ve identified a world-class group of changemakers—maybe you call them fellows, alliance members, ambassadors, or champions—who you want to ensure are confident and fluent in framing their issues for the public and through media.
Our Approach: Our training team—which includes experts in framing as well as experienced advocates—would develop a customized curriculum to equip your changemakers to shift the conversation at a fundamental level. (We don’t offer standard media training that focuses on personal presentation, like verbal fluency or how to look good on camera.)
Your Need: You’ve been leading a productive public conversation on your issue, relying on framing research to good effect. Now, a new challenge has emerged in public discourse, and you want solid research to guide your response—and quickly.
Our Approach: First, we’d see if our existing, unparalleled research base offered immediate insight, and share what we know. If your issue relates to a topic where we’ve already done the necessary foundational work, we’d design and conduct a small study to get answers to your pressing question. Because our approach takes at least a few months to complete, we might also offer to advise another research organization who can move more quickly.
Your Need: Your colleagues or network are talking about your issue in ways that—from research or experience—you know are falling flat or even doing more harm than good.
Our Approach: We’ll work with you to figure out who needs to know how to reframe the issue, then develop and drive a plan for exceptional training, technical assistance, and change management. We have a diverse range of experience to draw from, having crafted framing lessons for everything from small groups of high-wattage spokespeople to national networks of tens of thousands of communicators.
Your Need: You’re just getting started—on a new issue, a new initiative, or a new organization—and you want to nail the framing narrative right from the beginning.
Our Approach: If we haven’t studied your issue before, we might advise you to invest in a foundational, comprehensive research project. But odds are, we have existing resources you can draw from. We’d work with you to decide on the right mix and timing of briefings, trainings, written or digital resources, content reviews, and strategic consultation.
Advisory Boards
Our Advisors
Our work is guided by advisory boards made up of the nation’s leading issue advocates, scholars, organizers, and lived experience experts. Our advisors help ground our research in what’s most needed and important in practice, and equip us to better mobilize the findings and recommendations that emerge from our work.