Strategic Communications

His Story: Shifting Narratives A Guide for Philanthropy

Executives’ Alliance for Boys and Men of Color and Perception Institute

Short term strategic communications → Long term narrative change 

Challenge: Create a new narrative to better represent boys and men of color. Currently, this population is seen largely through the lens of negative stereotypes supported by dominant narratives and the various mechanisms that ingrain these narratives in our brains and societal structures.

Our team developed a toolkit with strategies to create narrative change through research, message testing (empirically tested best practices in communications and relevant to target audiences) media monitoring and leveraging institutional influence, engaging influencers and celebrities, cultural strategy (integrating arts and culture into a comprehensive plan designed to shift public sentiment and forge a new collective consensus around a social problem or issue), content generation, dissemination, engagement with local networks and field, evaluation. We focused on two strategies to communicate shifts in narrative to spark long term change:

• Promoting Assets over Deficits: Framing narratives by recognizing the successes and potential of boys and men of color, rather than their challenges and limitations.

• Recognizing the Role of Individual Agency and Systemic Transformation: Presenting narratives that speak to both the role of individuals and the role of the systems around them (education, justice, health care, etc.) in driving positive outcomes.

Additional Skills:

• Narrative toolkit development

• Organizational climate surveys and evaluations

• Intervention design