Knowledge Is Power: Language Use as Strategy
Methods of civic engagement are highly varied and can relate in multiple ways to your clients, communities, and funders. Understanding how people value and relate to civic engagement offers new ways to describe your mission. It’s time to ignite and harness the power of your stakeholders’ passion for civic engagement to improve their connection to your work and desire to help you achieve your goals.
Table of Contents
Overview
Knowledge Is Power: Language Use as Strategy
What’s Next
Resources to Fill Your Toolbox
Key Takeaways
The CBO audience thinks practically about civic engagement in terms of “getting involved”, “helping”, and “service”
Using everyday language helps connect the dots between personal involvement, the CBO’s mission, and broader institutional change
CBO’s have power to define problems and goals but will be ineffective without the community’s named understandings that resource and give relevance to CBO activities
Overview of the Mission of Civic Participation
We have been exploring how civic participation is a fundamental part of any community benefit mission. To embrace your own mission of world, community, or government change, you must first understand how your stakeholders view how that change happens both individually and collectively. There is data to suggest that there is a critical link missing between stakeholder understanding of collective change and the reality of community benefit organization (CBO) activity and strategies to achieve that change. By aligning the stakeholder vision to a clearer more relevant CBO mission, CBOs are better positioned to successfully engage stakeholders as key resources to accomplishing their social change missions.
Now we discuss the “how”. Understanding how and what information and language resonates with CBO communities and audiences is key to community engagement turning away from another chance to talk at people and turning into an opportunity to empower your supporters to join you and your mission to effect local and world change.
Knowledge Is Power: Language Use as Strategy
As bridge builders, and agents of community change and improvement, CBOs are clearly in a position of power. The ability to lead, inspire, and shape the narrative around how people as individual members of a collective community AND nation is the power to create a shared vision for our communities, country, and world. This vision cannot be accomplished without those same community members.
The language of the CBO's mission, therefore, must be language of, for, and by the people. After all, community and world level change is effective only when it is relevant and useful to those whom are to benefit.
As you may recall from Part 1, most respondents were inclined to think about the personal connections within broader institutional concepts of government and common good, but struggled to think about and relate to institutional concepts in personal ways.[1] Everyday language is key! Our neighbors and community members, ideal donors and volunteers, think about civic engagement in terms of “getting involved”, “helping”, and “service”. Consider how your mission and community participation is being defined in your materials, outreach, collaborations, and planning.
CBOs should aim to connect personal behaviors and activities that are representative of and impactful to civic engagement and healthy democracy. This requires using everyday language understood by community members, which emphasizes how people understand concepts of civic engagement.
Strategies to build the narrative can include
Framing: take the conversation from micro (what individuals can do) to macro (what individual support does in partnership with the CBO to affect big picture change)
Collaborative impact statements and goals: work with your clients and target audience to ask them the big picture goals they hope their work with you can achieve and in what ways they understand your work creating system change
Problem solve with specificity: Communicate your mission and work around solving specific community issues that are impacted by specific local systems and the larger democracy
All community benefit entities like nonprofits, governments, and social systems can be their own best advocates by clearly aligning their missions to community goals and understandings of civic practices. The "how" just requires some intentional consideration and planning to create an effective engagement strategy.
Let’s be honest, this discussion makes it clear how powerful CBOs really are. Building narratives requires examination of our positioning. Power to define circumstances, problems, and goals cannot be siloed within organizations or systems. Building a successful narrative must include not just the language, but the people for whom the language will be used to communicate and serve.
After all, isn’t the primary feature of civic participation an engaged community? This acknowledgement of collective community action for us, with us, and by us is how we take the mystical bureaucracy out of the equation and create common goals that we all understand and want to support.
Endnotes [1] PACE Civic Language Perceptions Project Focus Group Research Memo, page 2, available at https://app.box.com/s/p2vogfl5d3lhtyqqk5krvr10rk64kool.
What’s Next
Engage
What are other ways we can leverage the mission of civic participation to encourage or teach the community to engage with CBOs for the purpose of making their individual acts of service the big community change they want? How do they see your mission’s relationship to improving our democracy?
Leave me a message or talk to your community!
Follow along with the PACE Civic Language Perceptions Project to get more info on the civic language that resonates with people.
Test & Refine
The language we use must feel relevant and meaningful to your stakeholders in ways that inspire your stakeholders to take action.
Use your engagements to find and use specific language in your internal and external communications that resonates with their frame of mind, goals, and problems.
Don’t be afraid to use civic language in your messaging. This means digging into your own data to identify which types of messages (and civic actions or language) used in the past resonates with your audience.
Empower your audience to change their world by linking their individual acts of service to the world and community change your organization creates through its service.
Stay Tuned
Watch this space for more information on community engagement strategies and updates to this content.
Resources to Fill Your Toolbox
Putting it all together to create your approach
Measuring the impact of your civic engagement (and other social impact) work
Evidence of Change: Exploring Civic Engagement Evaluation, The Building Movement Project, available here.
This post is part of the series “Embrace the Mission of Civic Participation”. The series was made possible through a mini-grant from PACE. Many thanks to PACE for its support with this project! For more information about the project see the links above or visit the PACE Civic Language Perceptions Project here.
Need help thinking through this idea or bringing social change strategies into your organization? Reach out! I'm happy to explore options with you.
Comments