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public issues

Feb 02

Framing public issues

By Feature, Leadership

By staff, FrameWorks Institute |

The FrameWorks Institute works with nonprofit groups and philanthropic foundations to document how the American public understands various social issues and how nonprofit communicators can frame the public discourse on those issues to advance policy outcomes.

To do this, it has developed an approach called strategic frame analysis (SFA), a new way of thinking about communications that FrameWorks believes is especially relevant to the types of social issues addressed by workshop participants. These tools are designed to inspire new thinking and new techniques among

policy experts and advocates who seek to resolve social problems – whether for children and families in a particular state or for the global environment.

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Feb 02

Reframing issues in the digital age

By Feature, Leadership

By Julie Sweetland and Rob Shore, FrameWork Institute, Nonprofit Quarterly |

One of a social advocate’s most critical acts is to frame an issue. In framing, a communicator uses language, metaphor, and other means to bring the community into the issue in a particular way.

So, for instance, tobacco control advocates reframed tobacco from a “personal vice” narrative, in which the public discourse centered around individual choice and behavior, to a “defective product” narrative, in which the role of corporate malfeasance and the need for protective regulations became clear.

Reframing an issue is hard work, as frames are socially shared and persist over time; but it is worth it, because public opinion and policy preferences are frame dependent. The stories nonprofit communicators tell have the power to make the public more or less supportive of positive changes — for instance, in the way we support human health and well-being, distribute society’s resources, and redress long-standing injustices.

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