How to Keep Messaging on Track When Every Day Is a Crisis

Since last January, a rolling boil of political action and rhetoric has profoundly affected nonprofits’ communications efforts. Philanthropies and their grantees have been in firefighting mode, facing erratic and unpredictable attacks on funding, tax structures, and even staff.

This creates a clear dilemma: how to navigate urgent communications challenges without neglecting — or even undermining — the commitment to long-term narrative change and cultural transformation.

The stakes are incredibly high. Focusing exclusively on short-term issues could lead to reactive decisions or wins that are just temporary. But emphasizing just long-term narrative and culture change risks ignoring the obvious conflagrations in front of us.

The short-term work is imperative since so much is in jeopardy — from climate resilience to public health to democracy. But these efforts can either open paths for long-term change or close them.

3 Key Steps

Fortunately, there are concrete ways for sector leaders to keep their eyes on the ball and their heads up toward the horizon. A quarter century of research on moving cultural mindsets points to three key communications steps foundations and nonprofits can take to meet this moment — align, focus, and coordinate.

Align: Fight for short-term wins using long-term framing. Coordinating short- and long-term strategies requires a clear understanding of how people might think about a particular issue — or their cultural mindsets. Do narratives and messages shift thinking and build support for long-term goals such as fairness and justice, or inadvertently activate ways of thinking that get in the way of those goals? Answering these questions helps organizations pursue strategies now that advance the changes they seek for the future.

Conversely, when short-term wins are sought without attention to long-term shifts, two things can happen. First, wins can be fleeting. Second, the blind pursuit of those wins can hamper long-term efforts to change mindsets.

Immigration provides a vivid example. Advocates are urgently working to communicate amid unlawful deportations, threats to birthright citizenship, and a flood of dehumanizing rhetoric. When people portray immigrants as dangerous criminals, the instinct may be to share stories of heroic contributions — immigrants who, against all odds, build businesses and embody the American dream.

These stories can generate support, but they also carry risks by reinforcing public perceptions about who does and does not deserve rights. They mask the larger problem of systemic injustice and implicitly bolster the idea that only some immigrants — those deemed sufficiently productive or virtuous — deserve dignity and fair treatment. This is a fragile foundation on which to build lasting change.

Immigration advocates will likely have greater success by emphasizing principles such as constitutional guarantees, fairness, and due process. For instance, pointing out that all immigrants are entitled to a fair hearing, regardless of individual circumstances, helps normalize the idea that rights aren’t conditional. Similarly, stories that highlight systemic failures, such as unjust laws and discriminatory enforcement, shift attention from individual worthiness to the systems that need reform.

Focus: Stay on your narrative ground. When outlandish accusations are levied against federal workers, election officials, and academic theories or programs, such as critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion, the inclination is to directly respond and set the record straight. This approach, however, not only expends time and resources, but it also keeps organizations trapped in the opposition’s messaging framework, upending carefully laid strategy and leaving little room to advance their own ideas.

Even in a reactive communications climate, nonprofits need to hold — and strengthen — their narrative ground. This involves identifying the most effective story and then sticking to it.

Research conducted by my organization, the FrameWorks Institute, showed how this approach could be deployed to change perceptions about those facing poverty in the United Kingdom. The strategy combined short-term communications efforts with the longer term goal of expanding understanding of how societal structures lock people into poverty. In the process, it prevented advocates from being drawn into debates about which individuals and groups were the worthiest and remain focused on building public support for policies to reform the economic system.

Coordinate: Work together to amplify ideas and change thinking. Long-term change happens when movements coordinate around a shared narrative and stay committed over time. The alternative — siloed, reactive communications — can splinter coalitions, fracture carefully coordinated messaging and unravel into chaos.

The early childhood development field offers a good example of how coordinated narrative work can shift mindsets and achieve policy goals. In the past, the field relied on emotionally evocative, individual stories. But for more than two decades, my colleagues and I have worked with early childhood advocates, brain scientists, and others in the field to tell a more meaningful story of child development. That story has focused on how early childhood experiences shape development; how adversity can derail the process, and how strong relationships can get things back on track. By staying on-message, including by using consistent metaphors such as “brain architecture” and “toxic stress,” the movement was able to shift fundamental understanding of positive early childhood development and secure the policy wins needed to nourish it.

It’s tempting at a moment like this to believe the choice is between defending the present or building the future. But meaningful and durable progress depends on doing both in ways that reinforce each other. Yes, fight for short-term wins but use messaging strategies that strengthen long-term goals and keep organizations rooted in their own narratives — not those of their opponents. The path forward is clear but difficult: secure important wins today in ways that prepare for tomorrow. This is how to ensure that victories are not only hard-won but long-lasting.