Narrative Resilience Program
Our communications work is deeply rooted in strategic foresight: an intentional practice of anticipating emerging trends, challenges, and opportunities before they fully unfold.
Narrative Resilience
Our ability to analyze past and present conditions helps clients make better communications decisions in a complex world. One key conclusion we have drawn from recent observation is that in today’s climate of misinformation, disinformation, and polarization, narrative will play a more critical role in how organizations engage audiences, build trust, and advance mission-driven causes. As we scan communications patterns—how information is shared, trends in targeted backlash, and the speed at which fake news enters the phase of plausibility—we believe that nonprofits and other social change organizations must practice what we are calling narrative resilience: the ability to withstand, adapt, and respond to harmful narratives and dynamics while continuing to promote values, truth, and frames that align with their mission. We’ve developed this term to offer language to the sector, defining how organizations need to position themselves in society today.
The issues you champion are constantly reframed by politics, media cycles, and cultural shifts. Without the ability to adapt, narratives can lose relevance, or worse, be co-opted or distorted. Being able to pivot as needed is essential for the survival of social change organizations. Oftentimes, long-term organizational communications do not evolve at the same pace as the strategy and action necessary in moments of rapid change or crisis. This can mean that the foundational area of narrative work—which guides an organization—is largely untouched, especially during periods of rapid unpredictability or crisis.
What if nonprofits could assess narrative strength and adjust accordingly to the multifaceted challenges they face today?
The Narrative Resilience Program, led by our communications experts, gives your organization the opportunity to stress-test narratives, anticipate how they might shift, and build the infrastructure to evolve in real time as conditions change. Rather than reacting to disruption, we enable you to prepare for it, to safeguard your mission, and maintain credibility.
The Program
The Narrative Resilience Program can provide a range of asset-building interventions for social change organizations, such as:
- Assessment of the status of narratives influencing the perceptions of the organization’s principal audiences.
- Identification of key areas of vulnerability and opportunity for narrative leverage to influence change.
- Preparation of an organization to sustain a new cadence of awareness and long-term horizon scanning, for more robust narrative agendas built for change and challenge.
- Opportunities to practice hands-on narrative adaptation through guided workshops and with the support of tools created to meet the unique needs of each organization.
The Narrative Resilience Program is relevant for:
- Individual nonprofits seeking to assess their level of narrative resilience and future-proof their communications strategies with key techniques, whether funded through capacity-building grants or other foundation support, or on their own.
- Cohorts of nonprofits, either in the same sector, or across different fields, that gain narrative learnings and collaborative infrastructure building for more robust long-term outcomes.
- Foundations seeking to gather field intelligence about the state of narrative for specific issue areas in their portfolios.
For more information, reach out to [email protected] for a confidential consultation.
Contact us to assess the narrative strength of your organization to safeguard your mission and maintain credibility in a changing communications landscape.