Giving Compass' Take:

• Framing is a tactic to strategically choose words in order to affect public perception of an issue in a specific way. Framing can help social change initiatives grow by getting people to care about certain causes.

• What can framing do for us now? What problem would you frame in your own way to get people to support you?

•  Look at other examples of framing and see how it works across industries. 

During the Prop 8 campaign, marriage equality advocates spent sizable sums of money encouraging voters to choose equality and fairness, to ensure that gay and lesbian couples could enjoy the same rights and benefits straight couples receive when they marry. But their “rights and benefits” frame didn’t work.

In the wake of a stinging defeat, some advocates urged organizations devoted to marriage equality to do more of the same, only louder. But a small minority suspected that perhaps the problem was not the idea of marriage equality, but how advocates presented it—how they framed it.

They found the answer hiding in plain sight: traditional marriage vows, and their emphasis on love and commitment. While the “rights and benefits” frame was persuasive for about 39 percent of the voting population, it unintentionally emphasized what was different about gay and lesbian couples, and suggested an effort was underway to upset the institution of marriage and American families. The “love and commitment” framework, on the other hand, was familiar and compelling to many people in the moderate middle of America’s political spectrum.

To effect broad and transformational change, we believe that social change leaders of all stripes must develop a deep understanding of how frames work. Framing concerns the choices we make when presenting information and how those choices affect people’s attitudes, understandings, and actions.

raming is what we choose to say and how we choose to say it. But it’s also what we leave unsaid. It’s the values we use to build support for our cause.

Through “reframing”—the process of changing the thoughts and actions triggered by messaging cues, as we described with marriage equality above—we can shift how people understand and respond to the issues we care about.

Read the full article about the framing of social change by Nat Kendall-Taylor & Sean Gibbons at Stanford Social Innovation Review