It’s clear that 2026 will continue the trend of social, political, and economic upheaval that characterized 2025. Below, we share our thinking to help organizations anticipate communications challenges and best prepare for the coming year:
- Organizations must identify how to position their narratives for the next normal. Misinformation and disinformation are now constant, as are efforts to simply confuse audiences into thinking they cannot understand what is actually going on regarding issues they care about. How is your organization going to proactively shift its communications practices to address this? We recommend taking time to analyze the biggest weaknesses, or areas of risk, associated with your sector’s current narratives and those being advanced by regressive forces.
For example, ask yourself these questions:- What misconceptions do audiences newly introduced to your issue area often have about your work/cause, or the problem you are working to solve?
- Among organizations, influencers, or entities working against your cause (or at counter purposes to it), what emotional claims are being made to gain attention from your would-be audiences?
- How can your organization create a new frame for would-be audiences to see your issue in a way that takes the air out of these destructive and regressive messages?
Once you’ve got a handle on the themes that emerge, make a plan for how your organization can proactively address those themes through messaging, to shore up your narrative resilience.
- Vanity metrics are no longer serving you. Your organization needs to identify a pathway to shift toward emotional resonance and behavioral signals as indicators of effective communications. In order to do this, some testing of your messaging is needed among your desired audiences. This can take a variety of forms, depending on what is most in line with your organization’s current capabilities and its approach to measurement.
For example, this feedback can be gathered through interviews, surveys, or observations of previous communications campaigns and efforts. If you have the ability to split your messaging up among portions of your audience, you can even test A/B messages to see which gets the best response. Although organizations that have been relying exclusively on measures such as impressions, follower counts, or media mentions may not have the ability to do significant testing right away, you can start gradually and work up to progressively increase your feedback data in 2026. This way, you are learning what generates resonance among your audiences over time. This approach gives you more reliable data on your audiences’ reception of your communications, which is increasingly essential as audiences are having to make sense of disinformation and misinformation. Without this data, your measurements for impact may not be directly linked to actual audience response and are therefore unreliable as an indicator of capacity to change thinking and behavior.
- How are you going to tackle believability for audience engagement? In a world of deep fakes and misinformation, the element of believability becomes even more pronounced than the facts. Audiences are not just asking whether something is true, but whether it feels credible based on the source, consistency, and lived experience it reflects. Understanding your audience, their beliefs, and cultural frames will help you design narratives that are believable.
For example, voter fraud in elections in the United States. Voter fraud in the U.S. is extremely rare, at less than 1%. Despite empirical evidence to support this fact, the counter-narrative is simple, consistently repeated, and highly emotionally charged. On the flip side, the truth about voter fraud has layers of complexity and is process-driven, making it more challenging to communicate with pure facts. To address this tension, organizations must craft narratives and messaging that create a connection to the human element in the organization’s communication. For example, share specific stories that can help people understand the process that demonstrates your point. This will more effectively communicate the facts in a way that aligns with their lived experience as they relate to the protagonist of the story.
Believability is the first step to ensuring you have the opportunity to share your organization’s narratives with new audience members, by increasing the likelihood that they will find your framing compelling.
- The 2026 election season has already started, so your organization must determine how you can use what you know about election dynamics relevant for your cause to strengthen your messaging and to gain potential supporters. Given what we know audiences are facing today, a key goal should be to reduce fear and disempower disinformation, while educating audiences so they can better make sense of unfolding events connected to your issue area. You can start by asking these questions:
- Are any issues connected to your work on the ballot in the upcoming election (local, state, or federal)? How might you communicate about those topics to ensure more audience members understand how your organization approaches or understands the issue, and the solutions that you know are the best for your community?
- Are there underlying narratives that influence your work that could help or hurt your cause? If so, consider how you can address these head-on. For example, the issues of reclassifying marijuana, or how to effectively address the homelessness crisis, can bring up narratives around drug use or deservingness that often demonize Black and brown, low-income communities, and other historically excluded groups. Use your communications to foster greater awareness around these dynamics and to help shape the way voters will think about the issues at hand. This not only increases awareness of your work, but also primes your audiences to understand the policy options that will benefit your organization’s mission.
- Finally, consider whether there are ways that your organization’s communications can help foster access to voting, or the ability of your audience members to get to polling stations. The nonprofit sector is known to be one of the most highly trusted sectors, so social change organizations have an opportunity to serve as credible messengers that encourage participation in elections, and thereby strengthen our democratic process.
The rest of the year is likely to bring many unexpected events. Integrating the approaches above early on can ensure that your organization starts on solid strategic footing.