Advanced Communications from new friends at Opportunity Agenda

Driving while black—instead of racial profiling. Working moms with no options--instead of home alone.

These are examples of reframing social issues that Alan Jenkins of Opportunity Agenda and Diana Ip of the SPIN Project presented to about 40 policy and communications staff at the Workshop yesterday—an advanced communications class that focused on a specific kind of frame Jenkins and his organization have researched, tested, and hope to apply to a range of social issues: opportunity.

“Opportunity is connected to deeply held beliefs about America,” Jenkins told the group. “Opportunity is a way to talk positively, it’s for all, [it] balances threat and promise.” His group’s research found Americans are both proud of the country’s core values and at the same time often disappointed in the lack of fulfillment of these high ideals.

Many in communications and policy have noticed the downside of our diverse nonprofits is the seeming inability of many of these groups to talk to each other, even or especially when it seems they should be on the same side of many issues. Opportunity Agenda proposes that using a common frame can help nonprofits get their messages across more clearly. But the group’s leaders also believe nonprofits everywhere can strengthen each other by speaking from a similar playbook, using this research-tested and writer-developed frame of opportunity.

Reframing racial profiling as driving while black gave the issue new traction, Jenkins told the group. It was done through a mixture of research demonstrating that African Americans were pulled over disproportionately on I-95 along the East Coast, for example and taking advantage of key moments, such as traffic stops of high-profile individuals who are black. the media and word of mouth carried the message across the country. Jenkins said the pre-9/11 campaign has not only helped reduce racial profiling—some—it also helped inform a general feeling that the country needs to show restrain on profiling Muslims and Arab-Americans since 9/11.

It was experiences such as this that prompted Jenkins, Phoebe Eng, and Brian Smedley to start The Opportunity Agenda. Jenkins was previously director of human rights at Ford Foundation, Eng directed The Social Change Communications Project, a foundation-sponsored research initiative exploring the role of strategic communications in social justice advocacy, and Smedley has been a Congressional Research Fellow and senior staffer at Institute of Medicine. The New York based group is a project of the Tides Center currently; they anticipate gaining their own 501c3. The presentation in Chicago was the fourth in a series of rollout events for the brand-new organization.

The Opportunity Agenda:

Mobility, Where you start should not influence where you can end up in life.
Equality, not everyone gets the same treatment but necessary accommodations are made to ensure everyone ‘starts at the same line.’
Voice, people have a say in the decisions that affect them—not just freedom from censorship or a vote but opportunities to be engaged in debate.
Redemption, people should have a chance to start over, even if they have made mistakes, that this is a ‘nation of second chances.’
Community, we’re all in this together--not enlightened self interest but that we are better together.
Security, people must require the ability to provide for their basic needs to take care of themselves.

What can Lewis Lapham say to a bunch of farmers (or vice versa)?

In theory, people who talk about George Orwell and quote from history books about the value of dissent in democracy ought to be close allies with people who put crooked payday lenders behind bars and protest against hog factory farms. In practice, we seldom see these folks in the same room together.

Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement broke that rule at their annual convention in Des Moines, which CMW staff visited over the July 14 weekend to do spokesperson and letter-to-the-editor workshops. Iowa CCI hired Lewis Lapham, Harper’s editor emeritus, as keynote speaker for the annual meeting, which drew more than 300 members from across the state.

“Democracy allies itself with change. It assumes a ceaseless making and remaking of laws and customs [not just] matinee idols,” Lapham told the audience. “Without dissent, you don’t have an argument. Without argument, you don’t have democracy.”

The appearance was by and large a success. Lapham’s audience, a mix of family farmers, working folks from around the state, and other members of the statewide organization, gave him a standing ovation. After the speech, a few kept him talking in the hotel smokers’ lounge until the dapper Lapham finally started to nod off after a long day of travel.

“Democracy is dissent,” the title for Lapham’s talk, reinforced the Iowa CCI message that protest is an all-American tradition.

Why is this showing up on our blog? For two reasons. First, advocacy communications, the kind we often work on, is almost always about the intersection between talking and acting. Second, Iowa CCI is putting into practice in a polished and effective way the kinds of methods people like George Lakoff have been talking about.

This group is very savvy about messaging and communications. Visit the Iowa CCI web site and the first thing you’ll see is that this organization has framing and branding down. It’s rooted in direct-action—it was started in 1975 by a former priest trained in Alinsky-style organizing by Chicagoan Shel Trapp of Chicago’s National Training and Information Center.

Iowa CCI promotes family over factory farms, leads the nation in the areas of urban and rural grassroots community development and bank reinvestment, supports immigrant rights by working on education, profiling, and jobs issues with the state's growing Latino population, and works on public election reform.

Their work is not unusual across the country, but the way Iowa CCI talks about it is. Their frame, laid out on the Web site, is “We Talk. We Act. We Get Things Done.”

It promotes action without sounding raucous. It’s so commonsensical -- so Iowa -- it’s hard to imagine who could be against it. On the branding side, Iowa CCI has splashed the tag line across their Web site, slick four-fold brochure featuring a posed photo of about a dozen members, new banner, and other materials including an annual report more polished than many another million-dollar-budget nonprofit. They even have their own “Get It Done” Fair Trade Coffee as a fundraiser.

The tag line and many of these materials resulted from an extended process of research and meetings involved staff and leaders that the group’s volunteer leadership and paid staff carried out with the help of a Des Moines area public relations consultant who donated her services.

“A lot of organizers think, ‘I don’t have time for that,’ CCI Executive Director Hugh Espey said. “They’re too focused on the here and now. That’s important but they need to be thinking strategically to stay around for the long haul in addition to the here and now.”

As observers of the whole show, CMW staff had to wonder who learned more from whom. As he heard stories about the organization’s recent victories such as getting local banks to invest in revitalizing urban areas and stopping police from racially profiling immigrants, Lapham seemed genuinely surprised by and interested in the work of Iowa CCI. Maybe we can try this kind of get-together again soon!

P.S. maybe it's the factory farm issue itself that is inspiring creativity. Check out the flash movie "The Meatrix" for a funny intro to the issue.