Framing is vital to ensuring that public health messaging is effective and reaches the right audience, Elizabeth Green, communications director at the Big Cities Health Coalition, said during a recent Society for Health Communication webinar.
Green said that “if we want to talk about racial inequity in health in particular, we get more traction if we frame health disparities as a human-made problem that we can fix.”
Research from the coalition found that a successful message acknowledges that the issue at hand is a crisis without overly emphasizing the problem, includes the short- and long-term benefits of addressing it, focuses on shared values, and shows evidence that a change would work, Green said. She noted that this approach could help sway people in the “moveable middle” – those who have the potential to be persuaded by the right message – unlike people whose opinions are fixed.
Destigmatizing and plain language play a role in public health messages and can help residents understand the issues, although person-first language might not be the best choice in every case. Green advised being thoughtful when choosing other wording and only using it when it makes sense.
Before the message
Before any messaging is released, there must be a strategy behind it that considers wider goals, audience, narrative and equity, Katherine Schaff of Berkeley Media Studies Group told an American Public Health Association webinar. “Before you know what you want to say, you have to know what you want to do,” she said.
This allows public health professionals to clarify problems, solutions, who can help tell the story and actions to take, and ensure that equity is a focus when analyzing the problem and potential solutions. Without weaving equity into the strategy stage, it’s difficult to embed it later when developing the message, she said.
Strategy must also take into account the mental pathways that people use to understand the world around them. “Our job as advocates, as public health practitioners is to give people cues that help them get to the solutions that achieve equity, that achieve public health,” Schaff said.
One way to do that is to broaden the stories an organization wants to tell to show context, including through history and root causes of an issue, social factors affecting people individually and in communities, and facts to support the story.
Building the message
Frameworks are the basis for creating strong public health messaging through storytelling that can help public health professionals and advocates “move people,” or make an impression on their audience, Kim Nguyen of Statler Nagle said in the APHA webinar.
One model is the public narrative framework, which offers three elements to help shape the message, create a strong story and underscore the urgency of the issue: the story of self, the story of us and the story of now. Nguyen explained that the story of self helps to show motivation and demonstrate credibility, the story of us helps identify shared values and communicates shared experiences of a community, and the story of now highlights urgent challenges, explores how the future could look if action isn’t taken and what the future could be if we act together.
Another tool, the 27-9-3 framework, helps make messaging concise and creates a hook or elevator pitch to tell a story quickly, since advocates may need to present information with limited time. It can be used alongside the public health framework to get the message across. The idea is to drill down the message to 27 words that can be told in nine seconds with three points of information.
Choosing the right messenger
Effective messaging goes beyond framing and language and must be delivered by organizations that residents trust. “We all know that public health has a PR problem right now,” Green said.
As a result, local health agencies might not be the right messenger. Community organizations, for example, could be the strongest voice for the message to help public health leaders advocate for specific policies.
Nguyen also touched on that. “Sometimes you may not be the right messenger for the audience. There’s more to advocacy and community than just sharing your own story, Nguyen said. “Maybe that’s an opportunity for you to bolster the story of someone else, to encourage another person to tell their story or to find a way to share your story in a way that will fit better for the audience that you’re in.”
Regardless of the messenger, the story needs to be repeated. Nguyen encouraged advocates to think about how to keep putting the same message out there “because that’s what people believe -– what they hear over and over again.”
Op-eds, social media or letters to the editor are a few ways to keep the message active and reach people, Schaff noted, and those methods could help to move those people in the middle.
“Repetition is not only important because we want to elevate voice and experience but it’s really good for getting your point across and for getting messaging across,” Nguyen added.
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