How are farm and tractor safety portrayed in the news? Do solutions appear? Who has a voice in coverage? These are some of the questions that BMSG researchers examined in this study, published in BMC Public Health. The study also provides suggestions for occupational health and safety practitioners who hope to improve their use of media to advance farm safety agendas.
In the summer of 2020, global social movements in response to the police murders of George Floyd Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and countless others brought renewed public attention to racial injustice and health inequities. Against this backdrop, several jurisdictions formally declared racism to be a public health crisis. In this study, we explored narratives surrounding those declarations to see how they were framed in news coverage. The article includes implications for advocates and others working to advance health equity.
No matter who we are or where we live, we all want to reduce the public health problem of injury and death from firearms — and everyone can play a role in keeping people safe. But the promise of prevention is often missing from narratives about gun violence. To help advocates shift the narrative, BMSG partnered with the Hope and Heal Fund to create a new guide that advocates can use to reframe how we talk about the most common forms of gun violence, which are also the least likely to grab headlines: domestic or intimate personal violence, suicide, and community violence.
What is the dominant narrative about parks and green space? And how different is that dominant narrative from the narrative we want to see? As communities across the country are working to ensure that parks and green space are accessible to everyone, this messaging guide can equip advocates and organizers with the communication tools they need to make an effective case to decision-makers and center those with the most at stake.
This guide provides recommendations and resources for local leaders and advocates developing strategies to communicate about overdose prevention with a range of audiences. It includes examples that focus on key issue areas that emerged from our conversations with experts: stigma against people who use substances, pushback against policies like harm-reduction efforts and substance use treatment, and unique considerations for rural communities.
Public health advocates working to support taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages may have inadvertently promoted SSBs, reinforced opposition to SSB taxes, and normalized SSBs, found a social media analysis from BMSG, published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health. In future SSB tax campaigns, advocates should ensure that the images they use on social media reflect the solutions they seek, not just the problem they are trying to combat.
Domestic violence and homelessness are deeply intertwined, but does news coverage make that connection? If so, whose perspectives are included and whose are left out? How, if at all, are solutions presented? New BMSG research explores these and other questions in an analysis of California-based news and offers recommendations for advocates to help expand the narrative amid today’s already saturated media environment.
A resource to help advocates practice developing core components of a message and combining them into a cohesive statement.
Before trying to get media attention for the issue you are working on — or determining what your message is going to be — you and your coalition need to have clarity in your overall advocacy goals, as well as the steps you will take to achieve them. Answering the questions in this worksheet will help you identify what information you need to move forward and what immediate steps you need to take.
This document outlines BMSG’s four-stage approach to media advocacy planning, a process we call the layers of strategy. It follows the idea that message should never be first or foremost. Rather, the first and most important stage involves developing an overall strategy tied to an advocacy campaign’s specific policy goal. Media, message and media access strategies follow.
