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.