Communicating Effectively

One Massachusetts is working with Public Works:The Demos Center for the Public Sector, a national project which is partnering with key organizations and coalitions throughout the country. Public Works is engaged in a deliberate campaign to rebuild broad public support for government's unique mission and role. As a first step in this campaign, Public Works has been traveling around the country conducting trainings and hosting workshops.

In these trainings and workshops, we:

• identify Americans' current patterns of thinking about government and how these prevent the public from having a broader conception of government's purposes;
• share concrete, research-based recommendations about how the public can be brought to a more constructive view of government, and thereby be more open to public solutions to our shared challenges;
• discuss enduring values that can be associated with government and used in a wide variety of policy contexts and debates; and
• explore how framing techniques can be used to effectively structure messages about government's public purposes.

Participants in the ONE Massachusetts learning community are already beginning to use these "How to Talk About Government" lessons to promote their own issue and policy priorities. ONE Massachusetts members are also helping their boards, clients and neighbors come out of their issue silos to understand the role played by public structures in keeping their communities healthy and the role our taxes play in supporting those public structures (e.g. educate our children; maintain a safe environment; provide police and fire protection; care for low income families, the elderly and the disabled; promote economic development and jobs; etc).

You can get a sense of how we are training people to be better communicators about government and public issues by following the links below:

For more about the Demos “How to Talk About Government” project you can to the website of Public Works: the Demos Center for the Public Sector; a good place to start is with two ejournals about their work: http://www.demos.org/publicpurpose/1/index.cfm & http://www.demos.org/publicpurpose/index.cfm

For more about Framing and the communications theories that underpin our training go to the FrameWorks Institute and their Framing Public Issues Toolkit. In particular the MessageMemo in the Toolkit is a good strategic piece to read. Here you can find a comprehensive document that presents the framing theory and practice specific to the How to Talk About Government project.