This article is the sixth of a series called “Looking Ahead: the Future of Communications for Good,” produced in collaboration with the Communications Network. Look for additional pieces every other Wednesday, and add your thoughts in the comments section. Read the other articles in the series.
As the Communications Network celebrates its 40th anniversary, it is collaborating with the Chronicle to figure out what’s coming next.
The way stories are told affects how people see the world and act in it. Sometimes the way stories are told leads people to question science, facts, even the nature of truth. The way we position our messages can determine the effects that our ideas achieve — or that they fail to achieve.
But how do we know which ways of presenting information will give our ideas the best chance of having an impact? Research is the answer.
Twelve years ago, when I started doing communications research, “communications” and “research” were disconnected ideas. Only a handful of individuals and organizations were doing this work outside of the academy, and even fewer were funding it. For most people, “communications research” meant a few focus groups or a couple of leading questions on an omnibus survey. It’s no wonder people didn’t think much of communications research or realize its potential to supercharge our communications.
Questions about how to present information — which values to use, which messengers are most effective, how to present solutions, how to craft engaging calls to action — have long been the stuff of mystics or “Mad Men.” But those working to advance social causes are coming to realize that there are tools to answer these questions, and they don’t look like crystal balls. We can use social science.
We can debate which part of a message is the most important, what methods are best suited to measure the effects that our ideas and messages have on people’s thinking and behavior, what outcomes are the most meaningful, or how best to measure them. I love these discussions. But one thing that is beyond debate is that research improves the effectiveness of our communications. It improves our ability to cut through. And it improves the effects when we do.
Gut Instinct Is Often Wrong
One way of thinking about the importance of communications research is to look at what can happen when we don’t do it. There are two likely results when we base our communications on what we think will work. First, nothing. Even on issues on in which we have deep expertise, the messages we think will work, don’t. They don’t land or resonate. This is what has happened to the majority of the communication ideas — values, messengers, metaphors, solutions, and other hypotheses — that my organization has tested over the past 20 years. Most of our “good” ideas don’t move people or summon their support.
The other way that untested messages go is even more unfortunate. Those that we think will send people tripping over themselves to support the actions that we advocate instead send them running in the opposite direction. We have found plenty of seemingly reasonable ideas backfire on issues such as addiction, affordable housing, children’s mental health, and criminal justice.
Careful and costly work studying the effect of a specific intervention or the power of a piece of policy is wasted without equally careful research on how best to communicate it. Going with untested messages is risky. Will the communication fall flat and waste the resources you’re spending? Will you use your communications resources in ways that actually work against your goals and do damage to your cause?
Communicating about important issues or solutions without research is like rolling the dice. And when it comes to the social issues we face today, we can’t afford to gamble. Instead we should be investing in the type of research that gives our ideas the best chance of having the effects we need them to have.
What Research Can Do
Descriptive communications research gives us a better sense of the situation we’re in — it “describes” the current context. It shows us the communications opportunities that exist as well as the stories and understandings that are holding us back. It answers questions like:
- How do people understand the social implications of artificial intelligence?
- How are the media framing mental-health issues?
- What narratives are advocates advancing about school discipline?
Knowing how people make sense of an issue allows communicators to make good decisions, tap into productive patterns of thinking, and steer clear of understandings that make it hard for people to hear new ideas or get behind solutions.
For example, knowing the ways that people make sense of addiction — while believing in individual responsibility, they also recognize how people are influenced by their surroundings — helps communicators decide how to present information. In this case, message cues that activate the individualistic way of thinking decrease support for strengthening human services like mental-health programs, affordable housing policies, or employment support that are a vital part of addressing our current addiction epidemic.
Descriptive research that gives us this kind of information is vital to our communications work, but we don’t do enough of it. And when we do, we don’t always do the right kind of it.
For example, polls provide a valuable snapshot of opinion — how people answer a question at a particular moment in time — but they do not provide the kind of deep perspective on public thinking that effective communication requires. Understanding how people think, rather than what they know or how they answer questions, allows us to make better decisions about how we position our messages so that they get through and have the desired effect.
Descriptive research also helps us generate ideas that we think will work, which we can then test.
Measuring Changes in Attitudes
This testing is the second kind of communications research — prescriptive research. It is concerned with how a communications strategy will perform, what it will do, and for whom. In the wide range of ways of doing this work, the key components are designing messages that vary in some meaningful way (the values evoked or the messenger, for example); testing them with a meaningful population (the groups you wish to engage); and measuring meaningful results (changes in attitudes, policy support, or engagement).
This is the kind of work that can be used to make decisions about the right overarching communications strategy. For example, as part of efforts to combat poverty in Britain, my organization used a series of experimental surveys and qualitative studies to find a set of values, metaphors, messengers, examples, and solutions that consistently increase public support for anti-poverty policies and move people from bootstrap thinking to recognizing the systemic — and thus policy-relevant — causes of poverty.
Knowing the assumptions and understandings that you’re communicating into and the best decisions to make when you wade in is what strategic communications is all about.
What’s Next
If we expect more social change, we need more nonprofits to use the power of communications research. This requires that advocates and organizers appreciate the value that communications research can offer to their work. It also requires that more of them see communications questions as empirical rather than best answered through creativity, common sense, or gut instinct.
Nonprofits also need to better understand that communications research is an essential part of everyday operations. Too often communications research is seen as a one-off — a set of focus groups, an experimental survey, a set of interviews with key players. A better way of thinking about it is as a capacity that we use iteratively over the course of a social-change effort, in which researchers field questions from communicators, take them into the “lab,” generate answers, and deliver them back to the field for use.
But nonprofits won’t do this unless communications researchers get better at their work. They need to get better at:
Understanding the questions that advocates and organizers need answered. We especially need to make sure that researchers realize the importance of their work being relevant and usable in the real world. This is one that I’m working hard on.
Presenting research in a way that’s accessible to advocates. The people using applied research aren’t researchers. They need to understand not only the results but also the research process and methods, and in their language, not that of the social scientist. That’s hard for researchers.
Continuously innovating. The messages that we test and how we test them need to more accurately approximate the situations in which people in the real world are exposed to communications. This is known as ecological validity, and it’s at the heart of good applied research. We also need to get better at testing messages against meaningful outcomes — things that communicators are actually trying to do with their messages. Whether it’s better measures of engagement or civic behavior, we need to work on what we’re measuring.
Good communications research is one of the skills that social-change makers need to make a difference. But it’s not a magic solution. It’s a tool that adds value and can help increase the pace and power of change. Let’s do it better and make better use of it.
Nat Kendall-Taylor is an anthropologist and chief executive of the FrameWorks Institute, a communications think tank in Washington.
