What is strategic communications?

 

This Strategic Communications Incubator resource defines ICPA's approach to strategic communications approach as a theory of change, outlining the steps involved in implementing narrative change at scale. Explore the three guiding principles that underlie the theory of change.

 

Strategic communications is the long-term process of transforming the public narratives and norms that shape the boundaries of public and political acceptability to ultimately, deliver policy and legal change. To sustainably shift these norms towards a progressive agenda, advocates need to:
  •  build consistent visibility of their narratives in media spaces to become influential in the public discourse (achieve presence) and;
  •  design and implement engaging interventions to more deeply socialise narratives in everyday thinking, interactions and practice to change the unwritten rules of culture (achieve immersion).
  •  work to catalyse a shift in existing norms and build the political will to deliver change to the written rules of policy/law (achieve narrative power)1 .

 

 

1st level target – Presence

This first level in the theory of change is presence. Presence is achieved using continuous and focused social and traditional media work and campaigns to get new narratives known. The target is to make your narrative one of the dominant stories around a particular issue. To achieve this, advocates need to create surround sound, volume, velocity and visibility in the public debate that reaches and resonates with a broad set of target audiences. Presence is built to create the public support and political space for progressive policy change, i.e. presence is a means not an end.

 

Case study of narrative presence: Overturning the “Muslim Ban”
A coalition of advocates led by Rethink Media won the narrative space around Trump’s 2017 Executive Order (banning foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries) by maintaining his original framing of the order as a “Muslim Ban”, which he attempted to reframe as a "travel ban". After advocates persistently and proactively built and maintained presence of the Muslim ban narrative around this issue over four years (2017 to 2021), President Biden overturned this executive order on his first day in office in January 2021.
Building presence in this case wasn’t about individual or ad hoc interventions; it was a deliberate strategy that aimed to connect narrative change to sustainable shifts in rules. Presence was achieved by activating a broad coalition of allies, training spokespeople, streamlining their messaging, building a narrative and having the public hear it many times and in many different ways. Continuing to dominate the narrative space in the media kept pressure on the opposition, and set the table for the next political leader to overturn the ban.
Read more about this case study of presence: “Winning the narrative space around the Muslim Ban: lessons on how to achieve “presence” in the public debate".

 

 

2nd level target – Immersion

The second target for strategic communications is immersion. The ultimate aim of immersion is changing the unwritten rules of culture. Narratives must be brought to life in people’s everyday lives, not just circulating in the media they consume. They need to be anchored in the broader culture in a way that shifts norms, behaviour and the boundaries of cultural acceptability, e.g. the recent impact of the #MeToo movement.

Immersion interventions – that aim for new narratives to be socialised and internalised through deeper experiences and interactions – include2 :

  1. taking tried and tested narratives (from presence campaigns) to social cohesion work, community engagement or service provision;
  2. developing events or experiences in which people from different backgrounds come into contact with one another3  for meaningful exchanges;
  3. and going as far as feeding these new narratives into existing cultural content, for example, in TV and film (often known as cultural placement or cultural strategy4 ).

These examples illustrate that these participatory – often offline – narrative change interventions move from getting the narrative known to getting the narrative owned. They create the conditions for discovery5 of a new narrative: giving people experiential ways to encounter the narratives for themselves, find their own entry points, and build ownership.

In the following table, these points are summarised and contrasted to the key points about Presence:

PRESENCE IMMERSION
From getting the narrative known... ...to getting the narrative owned
From getting the message out... ...to getting the message in
From dissemination... ...to creating the conditions for discovery

 

 

Immersion case study: Remember Together Campaign
This project, run by British Future, recognises the contribution made by Black and Asian service men and women from across the Commonwealth to British world war history. It aims to bring people from different backgrounds together (online and offline) to embed a more diverse and inclusive Remembrance narrative in the community. Around the recurring “Remembrance Day” each November, school and community events take place in person, consisting of communal activities such as poppy-wreath or sweet making as experiential, fun ways, with a “show not tell” quality, to connect people from different backgrounds. The campaign took on a life of its own, expanding its scale, reach, uptake and sustainability: schools have started to run their own events independently and have begun projecting the narratives into the community to expand their audiences; and campaign partners have recently embedded the new narratives in the national curriculum.
Read more about this case study of immersion: Embedding a narrative change strategy into community work: lessons on how “immersion” can shift norms.

 

 

3rd level target – Narrative Power

The third target is power, i.e. changing the written rules of policy/law. If advocates succeed in building the widespread presence of narratives and embed them deeply in the cultural expectations of a broad spectrum of the community, this in turn will create the public support and political backing that creates the conditions and opportunity for progressive and sustainable policy change. Hence, co-ordinating public narrative change work with more traditional policy or legal advocacy is key to delivering the target change. After all, what is the point of narrative change if it doesn’t translate into more sustainable structural/systemic change?

 

Case study of presence to narrative power: Overturning the “Muslim Ban”
A coalition of advocates led by Rethink Media won the narrative space around Trump’s 2017 Executive Order (banning foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries) by maintaining his original framing of the order as a “Muslim Ban”, which he attempted to reframe as a "travel ban". After persistently and proactively building and maintaining presence around this issue over four years (2017 to 2021), President Biden overturned the Muslim Ban during his first day in office in January 2021.
While there were ongoing legal attempts to overturn the Order during this period, in the end it was the successful narrative presence work that led to the change - keeping pressure on the opposition, highlighting a clear mismatch between the law and public attitudes, and paving the way to overturn such a law in the future – and ultimately, achieving narrative power.
Read more about this case study: “Winning the narrative space around the Muslim Ban: lessons on how to achieve “presence” in the public debate".

 

Explore the three guiding principles of strategic communications that underlie this theory of change.