Developing a clear message involves taking your complex research and pulling out the key points that you want people to know. Imagine you’re talking to your non-scientist next door neighbor about your work—how can you describe it in a brief statement that is easy to understand? Why is your work important? What do you want people to do with the information?

Important evidence to collect includes data, stories, and a call to action. You also want to know who your audience is and have the ability to adapt your message to a variety of audiences when necessary.

Develop Your Message
Adapt Your Message
Apply Your Message
Message Frameworks
Additional Resources

Develop Your Message

A message is a statement or set of statements that describes your work and why it is important. It should be written in clear, concise language that is easily understood by a wide range of people. Here, we provide a few tips on creating effective messages for your research.

• What is the benefit? You have committed your professional life to this work, but the rest of us have not. You have to create a context for your research that encourages people to care. How many people are affected by the disease you are studying? What is the cost to society? What is the pay-off for your hard work?
• Why is it important to you? Is there a personal reason why this matters? Describing this connection is often a good way to connect to an audience.
• Translate from scientific jargon to concrete, common language. Even in scientific audiences, colleagues are relieved to hear presentations or see posters that are presented clearly. And given the interdisciplinary focus of much of today’s research, “generalist” language will enable others outside your area of expertise to engage your work more effectively.
• Use metaphors and symbolic language to connect complex scientific concepts to commonly known images and processes. Is the neoplasm two centimeters wide or is the cancer the size of a dime?
• It is not enough to simply describe what you are doing. Often (indeed, almost always in research), the really exciting stuff is up ahead. What’s next? What do we hope to see from your research or from others in the coming months or years? Is there a call to action? If possible, describe what people in the audience can do to push this work ahead.
• Marshall a range of evidence. In a scientific presentation, you will need a clear, data-driven description of your research to back up your findings. But for non-scientific groups (and even for scientists to some extent), don’t forget to tell stories or provide anecdotes that support the case for why your work is important and how it is effective.

One tool that can help you organize you message is this worksheet, developed by Valerie Denney of Valerie Denney Communications. It is a simple but powerful tool that can help you develop or fine-tune your messages. Once you’ve created a message, if you’d like us to review it, please email John Beilenson at jbeilenson@aboutscp.com.

Adapt Your Message

Massage your Message Tips from Strategic Communications & Planning on adapting your message for different audiences.

Framing (and Reframing) your Message from the Frameworks Institute.

Apply Your Message
                          
Message-Driven Posters provides some helpful tips on how to use a clear sense of message to develop a more effective poster.

Managing the Conversation offers tips and techniques to help you get through your next interview with style and substance.

Message Frameworks

A message framework is a set of related messages that together provide the rationale for and description of a program or body of research.

This framework can be used to organize any number of communications activities. For example, the framework's argument can be reflected in the structure of a general speech or in boilerplate descriptive information.

Clearly, the messages and sub-messages developed for a general message framework will not be sufficient for every communications task one faces.  Rather, a message framework is meant to be a handy resource to help you (and perhaps your staff) be more efficient and to provide a foundation from which to work.  A framework is most powerful when everyone in an organization or group understands and uses it.  When everyone is “singing from the same sheet,” the resulting consistency (and repetition) amplifies the impact of an organization’s communications.

To support a broader range of communications, an organization may also develop additional messages that are important to specific audiences.

The message framework can also be used to manage free-flowing conversations with key audiences and the media. It can help one respond positively to negative questions. When staff is confronted with media or other interviews, it can help them stay on message.

1. Context: Consider the context or rationale for your project/research, and put it into a few easy-to-understand sentences.
2. Project Description: Briefly describe your project/research. Again, in a few sentences.
3. Messages: Your main messages should be written clearly and concisely.
4. Evidence: These are the sub-messages that support your main messages. Evidence can also include key data points or stories.

Here, we provide the Hartford Foundation’s message framework as an example. In it you’ll see components outlined above: context, program description, messages, and evidence.

In addition to the narrative and bullet-style message framework, you can also create a sheet that summarizes your messages and sub-messages and presents them in a visual format, which may be more helpful in some situations, such as during a phone interview with a reporter. The illustration below shows the main message for the Hospital at Home program surrounded by its sub-messages. The point here is that each of the messages in the corners provides a way to pivot back to your central message and vice versa.

Hospital at Home

Additional sample message frameworks:

GSWI
IMPACT

Additional Resources

Clear, Simple, Concise Messages is a chapter from NOW HEAR THIS, a report produced by Fenton Communications. It includes excellent examples of messaging that works.

Message Modules – Use Your Elevator Pitch as the Building Block for Stronger Content from nonprofit communications expert Nancy Schwartz.

Message Framework Worksheet from nPower Seattle is an easy-to-use worksheet that guides you through the creation of a specifically formatted message framework.