Building narrative power for health: Strategies and tools for this moment
Date: March 26, 2025 at 10:00 - March 26, 2025 at 11:00
In a rapidly changing public health landscape, advancing health and well-being for all — especially those most harmed by our current systems — requires strong narrative and communication strategies. While this work can feel daunting, practical tools and resources exist to help public health practitioners articulate why public health matters and how we can create thriving communities. In a recent webinar, Berkeley Media Studies Group (BMSG) shared strategies to strengthen narrative power, including how to assess power dynamics and craft compelling, values-driven messages that inspire action.
After viewing this webinar, participants will be able to:
- Identify key components of an effective message strategy that motivates action and emphasizes values.
- Describe public health in clear, accessible language.
- Explore how to conduct a power analysis to uncover unequal power relationships and identify effective pathways toward building narrative power.
Explain why an overall strategy is the foundation for all communication planning.
This Web Forum was sponsored by PHI Center for Health Leadership & Impact and produced by Dialogue4Health.
Resources:
Download slides
BMSG resources for public health practitioners
Webinar transcript:
Murlean Tucker: Welcome to Building Narrative Power for Health: Strategies and Tools For This Moment. My name is Murlean Tucker, and I’ll be running today’s web forum along with my colleague, Jeff Bornstein. Today’s web forum is sponsored by PHI Center for Health Leadership and Impact and produced by Dialogue for Health. Now let’s meet the moderator of today’s event. Dr. Carmen Nevarez. Carmen is a senior advisor at PHI Center for Health Leadership and Impact, founder of Dialogue for Health and Senior Vice President Emeritus of External Relations and Preventive Medicine at Public Health Institute. Welcome Carmen.
Carmen Nevarez: Good morning, everyone, and thanks for the introduction. I’m really excited about today’s webinar, and really, really happy to welcome all of you. We have over 900 people registered. So it’s tremendous interest in this topic. Before we get there, I want to just give you a little bit of background on who the Center for Health Leadership and Impact is and why we’re bringing you this really important, really critically timed webinar today. So CHLI is a public health ‘do tank’ that helps individuals and teams to transform their vision into data-driven strategies by cultivating leadership, catalyzing learning networks, and strengthening cross-sector partnerships. We help to create equitable lasting impact in communities.
Since 91, almost 8,000 leaders in 53 states and territories have applied our tools and processes to address a wide range of issues, including overdose prevention. Let’s have the next slide. CHLI works with individuals, with teams and with organizations across sectors to build healthy communities, including health departments, government agencies, education, academia, nonprofit organizations, healthcare systems and community-based organizations. Next slide.
Our learning objectives today. Let’s just go over really quickly. We’ve got an excellent presentation lined up for you today, entitled Building Narrative Power for Health: Strategies and Tools For This Moment. By the end of this webinar, participants will be able to: Identify key components of an effective message strategy that motivates action and emphasizes values; describe public health in clear, accessible language; explore how to conduct a power analysis, to uncover unequal power relationships and identify effective pathways toward building narrative power; and explain why an overall strategy is the foundation for all communication planning. So Kathi Schaff joined Berkeley Media Studies group to help build the organizational communications capacity of local health departments, government agencies and community-based organizations working to advance racial and health equity. Prior to joining the BMSG team, she spent 11 years at Alameda County Public Health Department, where she helped to foster racial and social and health equity throughout through policy change, community partnerships, and building institutional and staff capacity within the Health Department and the county. Before moving to the Bay Area, Kathi supported local health departments through her position at the National Association of County and City Health Officials in Washington, DC. She received her BA in sociology and international Studies from University of Denver and her Master’s of Public Health and Doctor of Public Health from University of California in Berkeley. Her doctoral research focused on how local health departments addressed and communicated about the foreclosure crisis as a driver of health inequities. So let me welcome Katherine Schaff to the podium.
00:09:26.500
Katherine Schaff: Hi, everyone. I’m very grateful to be here, and I just wanted to start in thinking about the narratives we tell ourselves in public health. As we’re thinking about what narratives we want to change, and I know I have been rushing from meeting to meeting. I have been awake at night thinking of my to do list and everything that is happening right now. And so I just wanna, I imagine people are coming to this with very busy, full plates trying to do many things. I just invite us all to take a breath. I know sometimes my mind and body are in separate places, but to really, you know, be in our bodies. And the way I want to talk about the public health narrative is just to note, like over almost a thousand people registered for this webinar. There’s Dialogue for Health webinars ongoing. I know that the last month Frameworks spoke, and there was about a thousand people registered for that, too. So we are powerful, and I hope that we can feel across the Zoom world of how many people are with us. And that even when we’re in this very challenging time, I feel very honored and grateful to be with people who are so dedicated, and are really trying in a hard moment to do everything they can for justice, for equity, and to ensure that people have the basics that they need just to live healthy lives. So I just want to honor the folks here. I know you’re busy. I’m going to try to give you really concrete tools that you can use right away. And I hope that in the Q&A, we find ways to make connections and really fill that sense of community that we’re in right now, and to disrupt that narrative, that public health is powerless, and to really honor the power that we do have. So again, my name is Katherine Schaff. I’m also joined by Diana Guardado. She will be in the chat providing some resources that we really encourage you to use.
And we’re coming from Berkeley Media Studies Group. We’ve been around for a little over 30 years. And we started because there was so much great public health work happening, but often public health people didn’t have the tools they needed to communicate about it effectively. And so what we do is we look at the news or testimonies or social media, and we research it to get a sense of whose voices are being heard. And how are we portraying the root causes of these health issues we see? And who are we talking about as being responsible? And what solutions are we bringing forward, and using that research to create recommendations? And then our training team provides a lot of training and technical assistance to really help people go that last mile of taking that narrative research and getting it into your social media post, into your Op-eds, into your web pages. And then the other part of what we do is if we’re equipping advocates to be better communicators, we also want to equip journalists to ask better questions. Those are 2 parts of the equation where we can really change the public debate about the public health issues we’re seeing. So we have many more resources on our website. We’re happy to point you to those. And we focus on a lot of different topics. Everything from gun violence to domestic violence, to climate change, to racism as a public health crisis. So we’d love to point you to various resources we have.
I do want to start out with. A lot of the folks I’ve been talking to, you know. This is such an intense moment, and we’re moving so fast that what I’m seeing is sometimes we’re forgetting some of the things that we actually know. I see people in the participant list who, I know have been in some of our trainings. But myself. Sometimes, when things move quickly, I even forget our own lessons. So I really want to remind us that we don’t have to start from scratch. And there are things we know in this moment. So what do we know right now? Medicaid is overwhelmingly popular. About 80% of the people in the United States view it favorably. And it’s sometimes a heavier lift to get a new program passed a budget for that passed. But people do not like to have something they already have taken away. Now, if you just looked at the news, you might not know this, because I really had to search for articles that talked about Medicaid being popular. These are 3 of them, but they were sort of in the minority of articles. And so one of the things we can do is try to get the word out there that these programs are popular, that your neighbor wants it. The people who watch your kids want it. It is a popular program. We don’t have to start our message apologizing. We can stay strong and name that this is something that an overwhelming percent of people in the country want.
We also know that people want to reduce social division. About 80% of people would be willing to play a part. And you know, polling has its challenges. And this doesn’t mean that people really would act, and it differs across the country in various geographies, but I do believe there’s something here we can work with. So again, we don’t have to start from scratch, and there’s more people with us than against us.
We also know that people support diversity, equity, and inclusion. And one tip I would just love to start out with is, I would love to see people moving from using the acronym DEI, because that’s pretty meaningless, and it’s been co-opted. But if we say diversity, equity, and inclusion. Then, if people are against that, we can say, Oh, really, what is it about inclusion that you don’t like? What is it about inclusion that makes you fearful? And if we don’t use these actual words, if we use the acronym, it’s harder to ask those questions. But we know that in a study and scientific reports. 82% of respondents supported pro diversity statements. But what I think is really important about this study is that of these same people, only 55% believed. Others held these same views. So there’s a 27% gap between expectation and reality. And I think that is where we can work. If we can get more people to realize that their neighbors are supportive of diversity, their neighbors are supportive of equity, that the people around them are really in the same mindset. We have a lot more we can do, but when people feel like they might be the only one having this sentiment, they’re going to be less likely to speak up. And that’s what I want to talk about next. There is a theory called the Spiral of Silence. And basically, it’s that silence spirals into more silence. If people think they’re the only one with this opinion, they’re going to be really reluctant to share it. When they don’t share, other people don’t hear it, and they’re going to be reluctant to share it. So when people speak up, other really, others realize they’re not alone, and they’re more willing to speak up. And so one of our goals is to break this spiral. When people, when public health and the community voices are louder and more visible. So right now we can say, a goal of all of us on the webinar is to break this spiral of silence. It may be testifying before the state legislature. It might just be texting someone when they’ve been vocal and saying, thank you. I support you. There are a myriad of ways that we can break the spiral of silence. So I encourage us all to think of the ways we’re already doing it, and see if there’s a little bit more we can do to break this spiral, and to adjust that 27% gap. So how do we make our voices heard, and how do we know what to say? How do we break through this spiral of silence, and what do we say when we do?
I’m going to go over 4 tips, and then we’re going to take some questions, and then I’m going to go over the last tip that really undergirds everything. And again, if you’ve ever been on our trainings, these are not new. But I want to remind folks because there’s tools and resources that you can use in your organizations and coalitions. And I think because we’re moving quickly. Sometimes these things fall out of our communication. So number one, we want to make the landscape visible. And what do we mean by this? So our brains are wired to love stories. If you look at a lot of research studies. They can show that people’s brains light up when there’s a story we identify with a protagonist when there’s conflict when there’s an arc.
But there’s a caveat with telling stories. A lot of them are at a portrait level or very episodic, and they tell us about the individual, but not much else. So here we see a kid. We can sort of assume he’s in school, and he looks very worried. Now, if I’m just filling in the blanks, I might say, oh he’s late, and it’s his fault. I might blame him. He’s worried. You know. That’s all I have from the what surrounds him to fill in those cues, and so, when we only tell portrait stories, what people fill in the blanks may be things that we don’t want them to fill in the blanks with. So our job is to expand to the landscape. Now we can see that this kid, maybe, is trying to make healthy choices, but is surrounded by advertisements for soda and junk food, and that these advertisements aren’t his choice. He didn’t choose for his school to have these advertisements. It might have been the school board or the principal, it might be because our schools are underfunded, and they’re trying to make revenue any way they can. And that highlights that there’s decision makers that are responsible in this landscape and that we can do something about it. So when we broaden the landscape, we show that there’s systems and structures around the person. There’s trends and themes. We show that these problems we’re facing are systemic and justify systemic solutions.
If we stay in the portrait to show that these problems we’re facing are systemic and and only show an individual. But then a systemic solution. There’s a disconnect. Why do we need a systemic solution when this kid should just try harder to show up on time. So we really have to show that landscape to help people understand the root causes of what we’re seeing today. And this is just another way to look at it. We use a lot of different tools and metaphors. Some resonate with us. So this is another way to say the same thing. A portrait story often highlights personal responsibility. You know. It could be someone overcoming the odds, tackling their diabetes, and they did it on their own. And a lot of our news stories and our popular culture are really in the personal responsibility realm. Some studies have shown about 80% of the news is personal responsibility. And again, that makes it very hard for us in public health. Because if that’s the only thing people are seeing in the news or popular culture. Then the answer is, you just need to try harder. Work more jobs to get your housing. You know. Get a better job with health insurance. Eat better, do better, and it doesn’t show that there are systemic barriers that people may not be able to get to grocery stores or things like that. So again, the landscape helps move us to a shared responsibility. And so we really want to be trying to. You know, it’s not that we don’t have responsibility for our own health, but because that’s so dominant. Anytime we can get that shared responsibility or landscape out there. It helps people make those connections.
I’m loving the little reactions. They’re very encouraging. So again, we can think about portraits are about personal responsibility. This is often you’re on. Your own people may have a duty or responsibility, but it’s to their a very narrow to their family, and when we talk about solutions it’s the free market will take care of everything. This is the dominant narrative in the United States. It cuts across every health issue. We’ve done everything from Tractor Rollovers to climate change and the the portrait, even in climate change. Sometimes the portrait story is recycle more. Instead of looking at some of the corporations that are driving climate change. So we really have to be intentional, and we have to repeat it a lot because the opposition is repeating what they’re saying. So we need to repeat our message a lot. Which is why I’m glad there’s so many people on this webinar, because if we’re all doing it, it starts to change the public debate. The landscape is talking about our shared responsibility. We’re in this together. There’s unity and connection, and we have a duty to the collective good, and our circle of human concern is broader than our family. Ideally, it’s the whole society. And instead of market justice, we’re looking at social justice. So we don’t have time to go into all of these today. But there are ways that we can make the landscape visible, and we always say at BMSG, you can’t be strategic and comprehensive at the same time. I’ll say that one again, because it’s really important. You can’t be strategic and comprehensive at the same time. A lot of us are trained in public health to write really dense, lengthy reports, and that is important for certain audiences. But when you’re talking to a legislator, a reporter. You’re going to have to make choices about what you put in that landscape. And that’s again why we need repetition, because one story might bring history forward. This is how we got here.
Another story might use authentic voices, and we talk about those as being the people who are most harmed by our system, or who have a personal connection. It could be a doctor seeing the impacts of people struggling to gain access to Medicaid, or it could be someone who has used Medicaid to really turn their life around and address some health issues. And now they’re thriving. You know, we could use compelling visuals. All of these things help bring the landscape into view, but we often have to choose one. We’re going to include some additional slides. That we send out that have more examples of these. So that is our 1st lesson is making the landscape visible.
The next lesson. And I know a lot of you are already doing. This is leading with values. Again, in public health. We want to be very data driven and evidence-based. It’s really important that we understand the full picture of what’s happening and leading with that is not the best way to reach people. Leading with the problem is also not the best way to reach people. When we lead with values, we open up people’s hearts so that their head can take in what we’re going to say next. And you know again, there’s a lot of studies about often, especially when we’re moving fast, we use a part of our brain that’s very reactive. But when we speak with values, we can move people over to their slower, cognitive brain, where they’re actually more open to being hearing new points of view or hearing some of the messages we have. And so values could be community interconnection. Liberty, unity can do. Spirit, I think, is a great one. Fairness, democracy. All of these can help really open people up to what we’re trying to say. You don’t have to necessarily use these words. Interconnection might be saying something like social fabric or can do spirit might be talking about. You know, we faced hard things before, and we’ve overcome them, and we can do it again. But really leading with these, these could be in the subject heading of your email instead of just, you know, a description of what you’re sending. Try to get a value in there, or if you have a report, your subheadings can have a value in it. During the last, in 2017 we were doing a lot of work on public charge, and some of the health departments we were working with, you know, said, you know, snapshot of immigration, and they would just have data. But we could say something like everyone in our community belongs a snapshot of immigration in this county. All of those things can help us really infuse our work with values.
And I want to give a little bit more background of some of the research of where this comes from. George Lakoff is a cognitive linguist, has studied this in depth. This is also another way to say just what I’ve said, but I find this to be a helpful rubric. When I’m working with folks that at the level one, we have foundational values like justice, unity, or interconnectedness. And that’s really what we want. The foundation of our message to be level 2. If you take an issue like recent wildfires, you might talk about it as air quality. You might talk it about it. As a, you know, emergency preparedness issue. There’s different topic areas. You could talk about it from housing could be an economic issue. But it can also be an issue of health. And so really making that decision and then level 3, we absolutely have to know. We often talk of this as the policy plumbing. These are the details, and we have to be prepared with those. But we don’t necessarily want to lead with those we want to lead with those level one values. So sometimes, this can be good shorthand when we’re working with people. And they say, Hey, can you review my presentation? We might say, Oh, I’m not. I’m not really hearing your level one values. Can you bring those forward more? And I wanted to give an example of this, and I did see in the participants. Alyssa, I think you’re still on from Central California Public Health Consortium. And I just want to lift up this example because I think you all did a wonderful job of really infusing your report on health equity with values. And this is a more rural part of the State of California, and often I see public health reports starting with the problem. But Alyssa and her team chose to start with the values that really undergird what people are feeling in their community talking about diversity, commitment, ingenuity, and resiliency. Those are really important ways to talk about how to how it’s a unique and valuable place to live for. Many, and also the hardship and adversity are ways to talk about equity without necessarily using that word. And to really use these values about coming together to overcome them. And so this is just one example of how you know, in many areas of public health, we can bring in our values. So making the landscape visible and leading with values.
The next lesson is, we really want to say what we want people to do. Especially in this moment. If we’re only sharing the problem, it can be really demoralizing. And if people don’t see a way to engage and be part of the solution. People are tuning out. I know a lot of people are not watching the news now, because they’re so overwhelmed. So if we can get stories about solutions or moving forward. If we can blog on that, if we can use it. In our social media, people are more likely to stay engaged and to be one of those people who moves from thinking about solutions to action. Clarifying our solution also really helps in a lot of our communication decisions. And so if we are unclear, what we want to do, it makes it harder to figure out what we want to say. So in the world of immigration. You know, we might be trying to target people who are need food but are afraid to access our services. And our solution is we want them to continue using WIC. In the same area, we might be looking at the board of supervisors and really encouraging them to make our county a sanctuary county, or we might be looking at the State legislators and really trying to enact protections for immigrants accessing health care. These are very different solutions and depending on what we’re doing. The message is going to be different. The messenger might be different. testifying all of these are going to be different. The mechanism, whether it’s on Tiktok or going to the Capitol and testifying all of these are going to be different. The way to build our communication capacity might be looking at the intersections. Maybe there are values that cut across these solutions. Maybe there are messengers that we can train to be both effective WIC spokespeople and testify to the State legislature. But you know, we really need to get clear. And then all of our other communication decisions are going to be easier to make when we know what our solution is.
And then, finally, we want to describe public health and concrete, jargon-free language that focuses on community members. And I know many of us are devastated to see attacks on the Cdc. Centers for Disease Control or National Institutes of Health on Medicaid. But when people are overwhelmed and just trying to make rent, trying to keep a roof over their head, trying to feed their families. Those institutions don’t necessarily resonate with them. So we need to talk about how they have an impact on people that if we lose all of our national institutes of health funding that might mean someone we love that’s in a cancer or trial loses their opportunity to actually live a long and healthy life. Things like that that bring it to people’s day to day rather than just focusing on the institutions. We have so much jargon and so many acronyms in public health. This is often helpful behind the scenes, but we really need to make sure when we’re talking outside of our bubble, and even in our bubble some people may not know all of these, so it’s just good practice to avoid jargon and acronyms, and really try to use clear language. One of the best resources, I think for this moment is one we produced a few years ago. Highly recommend that people use this. Diana will put the link in the chat. We worked with cognitive linguists to really look at the language public health was using to talk about our own work. And there’s some strengths. And then there’s also some things that we could do better. And so this gives a lot of practical examples like leading with strengths and achievements like. If we always talk about public health being broken and underfunded, then people are going to think you know well why fund a sector that’s broken. So leading with strengths and achievements. There’s going to be examples like this that you can use. This is something I wrote myself, and I thought I did a good job. I’ve been working at BMSG 8 years and really try hard and with editing. My colleagues were able to really put in more action verbs and even improve this. So we always can improve, even if we’ve been at this a long time, and this gives examples of how to do that. Another tip. And really, when we’re thinking about talking about equity in this moment is to show, not tell even before everything that’s happening right now. We gave the advice to show, not tell, because equity can be jargon. So what I mean by that is using your senses, seeing, hearing, sight, touch, to really bring to life what what our words mean. And so, instead of saying furniture, we could say chair.
That’s better. But I could say soft, comfortable purple chair in the sunlight where I read my book. Now you’re really getting a sense of what I’m talking about. And so we want to try to do that with all of our languages, social determinants of health with equity, all of these things, if we can show, not tell, so we might be able to say, our our county’s vision is a healthy, vibrant, and safe community. Yet some residents face barriers to this. Or even better, we might be to go deeper and concrete. It’s good jobs with dignity, quality schools and housing, reliable ways to get from place to place and clean air to breathe. And so we’re really painting a picture of what we’re aspiring to. And of course this gets a little bit longer. So there’s going to have to be back and forth. Maybe we need to edit it down a bit. But we really want to try to show, not tell as one way to address some of the challenges of this moment. So how do we determine what values and solutions to use and what to put into the landscape. We’re going to talk about that after the question break. But we are going to take a little bit of time right now to answer some of the questions in the Q&A. Carmen Nevarez: Wow! Well, you really have have laid out some very meaty, meaty thoughts for everyone, and I see from the audience reaction that they’re, you know, they’re taking it to heart. So there’s some really complex and critical concepts. Let’s try to break it down a little bit more with some help from from our audience. I kind of like there’s so many good questions, and thank you everybody for for making your comments. They’re they’re so helpful in helping us, helping us to know what to speak to and and really clarifying what’s going on out in your in your part of the world. Let’s talk for a moment about the issue of forbidden words. I mean, you talked about that earlier. I want you to go back to it for a minute and just talk. There’s so many places where specific words are being outlawed or forbidden or censored. So come back to that for a moment, Kathy, and tell us about how to how to maneuver in a situation where specific words are forbidden, and they may be the best words for describing a certain concept. Katherine Schaff (she/her): Yeah, one. Just want to appreciate people in that situation. And you know, I know many of you have been doing your jobs a long time, and it’s really heartbreaking not to be able to accurately talk about what we do. This, this I will preview what I’m about to talk about because I think this is part of the answer. But some of it goes back to having a strategy and thinking about the network of people who can be messengers.
So yes, some people are not allowed to use specific words right now, but there might be others in our network who can. And so a comprehensive communication plan is thinking about our network and working with Allies and thinking about who has less risk in saying things. And there might be retired health officers. There might be people who work for nonprofits that are able to say things who can raise some of these issues. And so we’ll talk about this next, but really getting clear on your strategy. It starts there and then. I think the show not tell is another way to really think about what we want to say. And so, you know, I saw. I briefly skimmed the questions, and I saw somebody said, Can we add accessibility to diversity, equity, and inclusion. And absolutely, I think, that is so important. But even accessibility can we show? Not tell? So I mean, you think there’s so many stories where we could show what accessibility or a lack of accessibility looks like. Many people might be familiar with the story about curb cuts. And that, you know, it started out with people in the disability rights movement, really trying to make sure our sidewalks had a cut in them that would allow wheelchairs or people with mobility issues to be able to have more freedoms and to be safer when they are maneuvering our cities and areas. And then these curb cuts helped other people people with strollers, people with luggage. You know, people who are running. And so we could use that story to really talk about why, accessibility? Helps us all, maybe with even out using that word accessibility. I know that we’re always hoping for a magic word or one size fits all approach. But it really is thinking about your context, which I’ll be talking about next, and what that means for your strategy. And then working through some of these things in partnership, so that you’re using, you know, evocative words that show, not tell and help get your message across, and utilizing diverse messengers.
Carmen Nevarez: Great. I want to go to something that’s going to maybe be a little bit longer of an answer. But I think it’s a really important question. Elizabeth Green raised this. The research from Jonathan Haidt. The values of care and duty to a larger community are much larger, much stronger for Liberals, while liberty and security and other values are stronger for Conservatives. How do we lead with shared values when sometimes we’re not sharing the values?
Katherine Schaff: Really good question, and I know my answers all sound similar, and it’s what I’ll talk about next. But it comes down to starting with our strategy. And you know, sometimes. I worked in a health department, and health departments are responsibility. I have a responsibility to protect the health of all people in the county, and so sometimes we feel like our messages must resonate with every single person in the county. That is a really tall order for one message, and so it’s hard to think about it in this way. Sometimes it’s a shift, but some of the tools I’ll talk about next. Help us think through targeting our audience a little bit more. If you know we’re probably not going to ever sway tobacco industry executives onto our side of public health. We’re probably not going to sway the people profiting off of misinformation into our area. But there might be others that that are in the middle that maybe hold both values. There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance for folks in the middle that they hold some progressive values and some conservative values, so that when we use our values, when we use solutions, when we use show, not tell, they are open to being persuaded. It takes a lot of repetition, because often those people in the middle sort of toggle back and forth between what they’ve heard last. And so that’s why we have to repeat our messages a lot. But the more specific we get on our solution. And if we’re trying to, you know, maybe get the city council to pass something, our messages might be actually more to our base to get them to show up and stay at that city council meeting till midnight, you know. And so we want values that resonate with our base. If people are involved in electoral politics where something’s on the ballot, and you need 51% of folks to vote, that’s very different. So then, you’re going to be really trying to do some message, testing or talk to people who really know the issue, to understand what values might appeal to the base and get them out there to vote, but also appeal to other folks who you’re trying to bring over to the issue. And it’s going to be specific to each sort of area, whatever you’re working on, and you know where where you’re working. So again, I wish there was, you know, a magic value that we could say appeals to all people. But yeah, I wish there was more a magic answer. But there’s really just working through the strategy and figuring out how that influences things.
Carmen Nevarez: That’s really helpful, Kathi. We want to make sure that you get a chance to to get into the rest of your presentation. And one thing I just want to bring up to you, and maybe you can get into it as you get into your presentation. The next part of your presentation is the whole idea about getting more voices out there and helping people muster the courage and you talked about this a couple of times, but to to really enlarge the group of people who are also speaking with the same voice, or a similar voice who could be brought into conversation. So you don’t have to answer that now you can. You can weave it into what you’re going to talk about next, if you like, but go ahead. You have the mic again.
Katherine Schaff: I think that again. Some of what I’ll share next about our strategy can help us think about who we want to bring in. But I think that we can all look at who are the people we touch. And I see this happening. You know, there’s new coalitions that are forming and new ways. People are trying to work together. I think we learned a lot during Covid. There were a lot of health department community-based partnerships where community groups were really influencing some of the health departments messaging, and I know when we’re crunched. Sometimes it can be hard to resurrect those relationships. But we really do need those types of bridges, so that we are building more alignment and and thinking about how we create a larger echo chamber of what we’re repeating. And so I mean, I think in moments like today, where we have so many people on the call is a place where we can be also thinking about this.
Carmen Nevarez: Okay, you can go ahead with the rest of your presentation. Thank you. Great answers.
Katherine Schaff: So. I think a lot of the questions led to this. How do we determine what values and solutions to use? So all of the other 4 tips really rest on this next tip, and even though at BMSGV we’re really into words and messages, we always say message is never first. It’s never the 1st thing that we want to think about. Before we know what we want to say. We have to know what we want to do so. This goes back to knowing our solution and using what we call an overall strategy to guide all of our communications. So Diana will put this in the chat. We have a 1 page handout. If you’ve ever done anything with us, you’ve most likely heard of our layers of strategy. It’s short and simple because we want it to be usable, and we want it to work. And I’ve seen even groups who work together for a very long time and think they’re all on the same page. When they start to go through this, they realize there’s nuances and and ways that people have different perspectives, and it can be very fruitful to discuss the these layers. So the overall strategy helps you make decisions about the media strategy, the message strategy and how you’re going to access the news media or break through the social media chatter. Whatever you’re trying to do, how you’re going to access folks. And you can’t have a media or message strategy without an overall strategy.
So what’s in the overall strategy? A lot of this we talked about is defining the problem you want to address, and we often spend the bulk of our time here. We have a lot of data. This is important, but it’s not the only thing we want in our message, and often it’s the bulk of our message. So we want to try to decrease that and focus a bit more on the solution. In our overall strategy. We want to also think about who are we trying to persuade? And you know, really identifying who might have the power to make the decisions about what we want. And what’s really critical is thinking about the Allies who can work with us, especially in this moment. That question about, you know forbidden words. Who are our allies, who also might be able to raise their voices and break through this spiral of silence? And then identifying what actions we can take. There’s a lot of creativity happening right now to really try to bring these issues into our public debate. And so this is our overall strategy. Again, it’s very simple. But this can create a lot of robust discussion. And so I wanted to give one example of what this looks like in reality. So during the initial part of the pandemic, there were evictions that were really harming people, especially people that we knew were already facing other health issues. So lower income people, people who are undocumented. And so there was an effort to pass equity focused county eviction protections across California, and we did a little bit of work with folks in Solano County, and I just want to name that if we want our communication to focus on equity, it has to be in the solution, and they really had a eviction protection package that centered equity which made it much easier to talk about. They knew a lot about their target, the Board of Supervisors. They’ve done a lot of research, and they had a broad base of allies, legal groups, faith groups housing, immigrant rights, public health organizations, and more. And so they could all stay in alignment on their message, but add a little bit of different perspective, and some had more freedom to speak about things than others. They knew that the board was generally supported, but they really pulled out all the stops. They did petitions, public comments, OP-eds, social media, really to make sure that they were getting keeping this issue in the public focus. And so that is, you know, if you went through the overall strategy, this is what it might look like.
So one of the things I’ve been working with people on to. Really, I’m visual. And to put the overall strategy into a visual and get specific about power. And this is where we really start to build our strategy where we can think about how we target different audiences, how we use our allies. Is what’s called power mapping or power analysis. I’m sure some folks on here have seen this. But it is coming from community organizing. I was trained by Scope LA for our issue and more power on the bottom. There’s a lot of support, but less On the y axis is how much power people have so higher up is more power and more and on the left hand side is more support. So we have more support for our issue, but less power. And then we have people who might oppose our solution, and we might have some powerful people up there, and we might have some people who have less power, but they’re still not supportive. So what this would look like in the Solano county example is that we have our solution. We want to pass an eviction moratorium. The opposition doesn’t want it to pass. They knew that their supervisors were generally supportive. They had done a lot of homework to find that out. They also knew that some of the, you know, they had some sense of who influences those supervisors. And so they in a power map. You literally put these people up and try to decide. You know. Well, this person’s got a lot of power, but they’re not that supportive. So maybe we work more with the person who has the. You know, the elected official who has less power, but is more supportive of our issue, and or maybe your communication is really aimed at the people who influence them.
There’s also allies that we can be working with. And I think this is really critical right now, this goes to the heart of the question about you know, how do we work in this time, and we may not be in situations where we can bring something directly to our board or the State legislature. But we may be able to communicate to a lot of our allies and use our values and talk about solutions. And when we’re talking about building narrative power, how can our communication, especially if we’re in a place of power, like, you know, government and public health has some formal power. How might we use our power to help these groups raise a power like immigrant rights groups or tenant justice groups. Maybe they need trainings, mini grants, meeting spaces. There’s examples of counties who funded youth. Many grants and the youth were the ones to really push for cities to become sanctuary cities. And so we can think about our narrative work, not just as the words we say, but as a way to help people build power. Maybe someone wants to be out front and be an OP-ed author, and we can help them write that. And so we’re thinking in this moment, if we can’t say things, how do we build the power of those who can and work in coalition.
We want to know what the opposition is doing, but in this case we weren’t going to change the landlord lobby, but we want to be aware of them. But there are people in the middle. There were healthcare workers who were not yet engaged in this fight. There were teachers, unions who are seeing the impact of evictions on students who could be really powerful speakers. And so sometimes, you know, our communication is targeted at these folks trying to get them to be in coalition with us. Rather than feeling like we have to speak up to everyone on this map, including the opposition, we can get more specific about who we’re trying to sway. So this is a very quick overview like, if you did a training with scope, it would take all day. But I think right now, we really need to be analyzing power and thinking what that means for our communication strategy. We could also think of key policy. Battles on the timeline that are good opportunities to raise this issue. So this just goes through what it looks like in a blank way. This will be in your slides so you can look at it. I know that’s a very quick overview. I wanna make a little bit of time for more questions. But just noting that once we decide on our overall strategy, and we have a sense of the power and who we’re trying to move. That’s when we can start to think of our messages.
BMSG will also put our message development worksheet in the chat. These are the components of the message. This should look familiar because we’ve been talking about it the whole webinar. We do want to talk about the problem, but try to contain it, and not necessarily lead with that all the time, because right now it can be really disengaging. We wanna absolutely include values and everything we do. And we want to do the talk about the solution. Who should do what by when? And I put a lot of examples in here because we are going to send the slides out. But this can look like here’s an example of health care for immigrants where we’re leading with values, and you can see that the values take up as much space as the problem, and the solution is very clear. There’s an example about paid sick leave. Again, it starts with values, and that takes up a lot of the message. There’s ones on eviction moratoriums. And another example. The 3 past examples are on policy change. But this is more about behavior change and getting vaccinated. And you can see that the solution is right up front. There’s values and really talking about intergenerational care as a value. So these will all be in the slides so that you can look at them. And I know when I worked at the Health Department and I went through Bmsg’s trainings I would take these things and really try to model my language after this, so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. This is another one talking about housing and reparations, and this person who really came went from public housing to being a Rhodes scholar, said, Don’t be happy for me that I overcame these barriers, be mad as hell, that they exist in the 1st place. And so, you know, this is a really powerful, authentic voice saying like, Let’s break down these barriers so that everyone again he took what could be a portrait story just about him, overcoming odds, and in one sentence, he moved it to a landscape that starts to bring in all the issues that we care about. So again, make the landscape visible, lead with values. Say what you want people to do, describe public health in concrete language, focus on community impact and really use your overall strategy to guide all of this. We have we’ll put our newsletter into the chat. We have a lot of resources online. I know I have a few other colleagues on here, pam and Heather, and I think they may have been answering questions, too. I it’s been a little hard for me to monitor the chat and QA. And speak so I’m not quite sure but I think that you know, feel free to reach out to any of us, and we’d be happy to talk more about our resources, and we have a few more minutes for questions.
Carmen Nevarez: Yeah, Katherine. Such a good presentation, really good audience response and some great questions. And I want to sort of pitch one back at you that I don’t think you touched on quite, quite enough for this audience. Let me get you to talk about misinformation and disinformation. How, what, in what ways can we manage where we’re really being hit with disinformation, or or even just like the edge of of misinformation? What what do you recommend?
Katherine Schaff: Well, one I did watch the dialogue for health last month, and I thought frameworks did an excellent job talking about that, so I’d recommend that as a resource if you missed it. You know again, we can think about it in the terms of the power map that there’s people who have a vested interest. They gain power or money from spreading misinformation, disinformation. And then there’s other people who might repeat it and not realize it’s misinformation. So what we can do a few things never repeat it. Don’t repute the opposition. We see so many public health people and Instagram things where people use the myth. Fact, you know, vaccines don’t make you magnetic myth. You’ve just reinforced that in people’s minds, or for people who never heard that misinformation. Now they may be thinking, oh, gosh! Do vaccines make me magnetic? You don’t have to say that you can just say vaccines are our best bet for having our children grow into healthy, strong adults. Don’t repeat the opposition.
If you’re in a situation where you feel like you absolutely have to name the misinformation. We recommend a truth sandwich so like, if you’re a health officer giving a presentation, and people are really asking about something, you start with the truth. What we know is that our Health Department is committed to ensuring health and wellness for all people, and we know that vaccines are a critical part of our toolkit for keeping people healthy. So that’s the truth. And then you put a little bit about the opposition. You don’t have to repeat it, you say, and yet we know that there’s some people profiting off of misinformation about vaccines. They actually gain money every time you buy their supplements, or go to their webpage. And so that you talk a tiny bit about the problem. But then you go back to the truth. And what we know is those things can actually harm our community. And that’s why we’re committed to your well-being and ensuring that people have access to the vaccines that make them healthy. ]It’s a little harder to do off the top of my head, but you know you’d obviously wordsmith that. But so don’t repeat the opposition. Use truth sandwiches, and then we do need repetition, and I think, sometimes the people spreading disinformation are relentless. We know sometimes they’re using AI, and they just churn it out. And it can be a really emotionally taxing if we’re the ones having to respond. So on social media, we recommend people have 2 to 3 set responses that espouse your values. We value the health and well-being of our community. That is why we lead with science, and you know we welcome all opinions. But our answer is blah blah, and having that. So the people who are manning your social or womaning to reinvent the answer every single time, because we know that can be manning your social media are, don’t have the cognitive toll of having to reinvent the answer every single time, because we know that can be really demoralizing.
Carmen Nevarez: Your last opportunity. Do you have a bunch of prewritten messages to share across social media platforms that can be customized, anything that help that helps to give people the tools to get their messages started and get them really grained in in something that’s powerful and and and effective?
Katherine Schaff: Yeah, we do again. It’s going to be based on issues. But I would say the championing public health report. It has a lot of sample messages, how we talk about public health as a field, how we talk about ourself, how we help people understand the vast amount of work we do in public health. There’s metaphors in there that are helpful, like public health can be obscure to people, but we might be able to compare ourselves to a fire department that helps people make it concrete. So there’s things in there like that that are adaptable. Of course, you know, it’s going to depend on your context whether you’re working on, you know, opioid abuse. And you’re trying to get vending machines with Narcan. That’s going to be very different than if you’re trying to get funding for youth, mental health services. So we also just really recommend people go back to the overall strategy, get clear on what they’re trying to do. And then there are a lot of resources. Pamela Mejia is on here from Berkeley Media Studies Group. She’s led the research of many, many things. We have guides from everything from early childhood development and aces to gun violence. So all of those are specific examples on our website. But it has to be tailored.
Carmen Nevarez: Yeah, it really does. We have a lot of work to do on the receiving end. But I really want to thank you for the excellent, excellent presentation. I want to encourage everybody to come back. We’re going to do a lot more work on this. We know that this is a critical time, a really good opportunity for all of us to get really clear, to bring that public health message to the audience, to help people to connect with the ideas to bring them to their heart, to make it their to make it part of their belief system to just. We haven’t done that as well as we could. Let’s keep moving on. This public health is very powerful and very important to so many people. So just a really important thank you. To Berkeley Media Studies group. Let’s get the slide up. That shows the connections to their website and their newsletter.Everybody please sign up for their newsletter. There’s so much stuff that is contained in it.There you go. Make sure that you. You get on their website, and then let me just thank you all for being a part of today. Take a minute to complete the short evaluation form. Want to make sure that you. You get to that and tell us what you need to see next. And you can contact us if you have any additional questions or any additional follow up thoughts you have about this webinar and other webinars we might be presenting in the future. So thank you so much to the audience. Thank you so much to Dr. Schaff. I think you’ve done a fabulous job, and we will definitely keep coming back to this topic. Thank you for being for being part of our audience, and thank you for doing the work you do.
Katherine Schaff: Thank you, everyone. And I do hope people remember that we have a lot of power, and we can break through the spiral of silence. I feel very honored to be with all of you today. I know you’re doing hard work and just appreciate you making the time to come together, and to think about how we do this work together.