Rule 3: Not Everything Is A Crisis. But When It Is, Don't Forget Solutions.

Not all messaging is created equal. It is highly contextual, dependent on audience, environment, medium, and messenger. For those trying to change the world – advocating for a cause greater than themselves and mobilizing others to move big ideas – these mission-driven organizers must follow a different set of rules. Each week, we will unveil our Nine Rules for Movement Messaging. We welcome you to share this with your colleagues and friends. By delivering one rule per week, it is our hope that as advocates and communicators, you can apply them to your own work one by one.

The problems you address with your advocacy are real. The seriousness of them cannot be understated. It is natural and justifiable to double down on the urgency of your issue when messaging for your organization. After all, there’s nothing like a good crisis to get people off the couch, right? What’s more, we watch our opposition use crisis framing to great effect every day. Those trying to tear down public institutions, privatize society, and rip apart social protections frame their issues as existential crises that can only be addressed with dramatic action.

Turns out there is a reason crisis framing works so well for the other side. When faced with a crisis in our culture, the intuitive response is to retreat. When the house is on fire, get out of the house. But what if we want our audiences to band together and develop strategies to prevent all house fires? If our desired audience action is not individual retreat, but instead systemic reform, we have to give them something more than just urgency. We have to give them solutions.

We can communicate the growing and urgent nature of the issues we work on while giving our audiences something to do with all that outrage. Heightening the urgency of an issue without balancing with efficacy invites people to be fatalistic about the problem: too big and complicated to solve. If, however, you focus too heavily on solutions and not enough on urgency, you are creating an apathetic audience, knowledgeable about prospective solutions for a problem they aren’t yet sold on. The perfect balance of urgency and efficacy is what can get people to the point of caring about an issue and seeing themselves in the solution, thus more likely to support systemic reform. As research indicates, efficacy combined with engagement is the antidote to apathy.

See how California Competes published data on the lack of qualified graduates to fill jobs alongside the organization’s policy priorities designed to address such urgency.