Going into the second month of one of the longest known government shutdowns, many nonprofits are having to counter misleading media narratives that are driving the likely lapse of SNAP benefits nationwide for almost 42 million Americans—12% of the US population. The situation is dire, but it is also an opportunity for nonprofits to engage more potential allies on an issue that impacts people across geography and beliefs. It has never felt more important for an organization to have the ability to communicate with agility, in ways that capture the attention of key audiences, and that prompt people to take action.
As observers of the social change sector over the past two decades, we know that the number one skill needed among nonprofits today to meet these challenges is narrative resilience. Narrative resilience is the ability to withstand, adapt, and respond to harmful narratives and dynamics while continuing to promote values, truth, and frames that align with your organization’s mission. It recognizes that dynamics have changed to such an extent that organizations must do strategic communications differently. Narrative progression has always been necessary, but the rules that nonprofits must play by have shifted.
But what does this look like in practice?
Slow-Moving Evolution
In the first half of this decade, the nonprofit sector witnessed what may feel today like the sauntering evolution of language, specifically concerning how we communicate about social justice and systems change.
For example, before the widespread adoption of language broadly associated with DEI, messaging on these themes tended to reference equality, cultural sensitivity, and to frame the problems being identified as impacting “underserved”, “vulnerable”, and “marginalized” communities. The challenges that emerged around audience reception of these messages prompted shifts over time, including:
- The recognition that equality is not sufficient to address disparities in resources prompted a shift toward equity framing.
- The sector learned the lessons that culturally sensitive language was vulnerable to attacks by regressive actors that flipped the script, demanding cultural sensitivity toward dominant cultural groups.
- Overreliance on terms such as underserved, vulnerable, and marginalized within the nonprofit and social change sector highlighted deficit-based framings, inadvertently reinforcing the very stereotypes movements have been working to counter. This led to increased use of asset-based language.
Narrative Contestation and Constant Readiness
Today, the need to stay agile to respond to challenges to current organizational narratives has been exponentially expanded. This doesn’t simply mean organizations need to respond faster. Rather, new skill sets and practices are necessary for organizations to keep up with the variety and number of narrative challenges. This is a major shift from participation in an organic process to what organizations need to do today: intentionally conduct and manage the rapid and iterative life cycle from insights to action.
One example showing just how much the dynamics organizations are confronting have changed in the last decade can be seen in the challenges facing organizations working on public mental health impacts of AI technology. For example:
- From the time AI was introduced globally, there has been a tendency to adopt language that humanizes the outputs of AI-based products:
- We speak about whether or not AI-based tools are telling the truth, inventing information, or hallucinating.
- We discuss their learning, training, and even when they are being disingenuous.
- But using human-based descriptions to talk about technology—no matter how human-like it appears—can lead to serious misunderstanding and misinformation about the nature of the information produced by those tools, which can have weighty implications for decision-making and public awareness on essential issues.
For organizations working on adjacent issues, the narrative must shift to take into account technological advancements, dominant messaging of product creators, market pressures, and human engagement with the technology that pushes the boundaries of its social impacts.
Furthermore, this example shows how changes in the political, social, environmental, economic, and technological systems that inform the nonprofit landscape today are simultaneous and interrelated. In that context, establishing and maintaining narrative resilience requires foresight and strategic systems thinking to anticipate impending changes that will impact your organization’s issue area.
How to leverage narrative resilience to build communications that persist despite counter-narratives
The challenge today is to reorient the way nonprofits do communications, to incorporate that habitual scanning and to adopt testing of narratives on a more regular basis, to adjust in a more agile manner. Based on our observations of what it takes to navigate these challenges facing nonprofits today, we have identified four key elements that are needed to achieve narrative resilience in a hostile narrative environment:
- First, organizations need new tools and metrics to assess the status of narratives influencing the perceptions of their principal audiences. This will help them interpret the interactions between the range of narratives that audiences are encountering.
- Second, they need processes to flag and monitor key areas of vulnerability and opportunity for narrative leverage to influence change in ways that will advance their mission.
- Third, organizations need to adjust to a new cadence of long-term horizon scanning for more robust narrative agendas that take into account ongoing change and challenge.
- Finally, staff need opportunities to practice hands-on narrative adaptation, to get real-time feedback, and to identify and create the internal infrastructure unique to their organizations, which is necessary to orient to communications under these new circumstances.
These key elements are the foundational pillars of our Narrative Resilience Program. Through a staged, interactive, and research-based process for nonprofits, we equip communications teams with the tools, strategies, and shared infrastructure to withstand narrative threats and magnify their organization’s impact in the midst of the ongoing challenges. For example, through narrative landscape assessments, scorecards, ongoing monitoring, and hands-on workshops.
The program is conceived for individual nonprofits or cohorts of organizations working with funding from foundations. It provides a 3-6 month structured process to build out the necessary components that ensure an organization can effectively use communications to catalyze change within today’s rapidly evolving environment.
With ongoing and impending economic challenges and attacks faced by so many of the communities that nonprofits serve today, it may feel like focusing on the immediate needs is the only way to ensure your organization’s ability to make a difference. But building narrative resilience among nonprofits is a timely investment for advancing social issues.
If your organization is experiencing the compounding challenges of this new communications landscape, reach out for a confidential consultation to learn more about how the Narrative Resilience Program can provide practical solutions.