Risk Communication
Framing your message
One of the best ways to overcome some of the communication barriers to is how you frame your message. Message framing is a fancy term for what angle you use for how you develop your message. Framing allows people to create different kinds of mental models. This makes information more accessible and easier for people to intellectually process. You can frame your message for specific audiences or for the entire community. Frames can be combined with other frames to help you shape the words to use, the tone of the conversation, and even which topics you select. Framing is not intended to deceive or manipulate people, but rather to make information more accessible to them and how they think[1].
Several good ways to frame your messages:
Framing your resilience messages takes thought and time. Knowing your audience helps you craft your message, but it’s also important to prepare multiple frames or angles when going into a conversation.
Important things to consider include:
- The goal of your message: What do you want people to learn and what do you want them to do with the information you have just given them
- People’s individual values: We all have our own values, such as our political ideologies, religious beliefs, sense of civic responsibility.
- Make information “real”: People often don’t think that they personally will be affected by floods, storms, or even the effects of climate change. It’s important to show how they can be affected.
- Bring the impacts into the present, rather than the future: on the present helps people realize that the effects of climate change are not solely in the future and that impacts already are occurring locally.
- Find real life examples and stories to use: This helps people see that their community is at risk from floods and sea level rise.
- Tell a story rather than just presenting facts and figures: People inherently learn better from stories than from statistics. A story helps people mentally process complex information better than simply presenting numbers.[2]
Some specific ways you can frame messages are:
- Focus on the problem or impact: This type of message framing focuses on a specific problem and provides ways to address the issue. If the problem is sea level rise, then frame your message around flood resilience in the short and long-term. For example, you can talk about the impacts from Hurricane Sandy and how certain decisions now may make the recovery from future storms easier and less expensive. By focusing on a specific problem and providing potential solutions, you can help avoid information and emotional overload that drives people away from the overall conversation. However, when using this frame, it’s important that you don’t completely ignore the overall big picture, including other problems or impacts. These are needed for context and to help people avoid what’s called “single action bias,” which means they do one thing and think they are protected against all risks and threats.[3]
- Make it local: Many people who think climate change is occurring also think they will not personally be affected. By framing your message around local impacts that already have been measured or felt, the people you’re talking to may realize that they too are vulnerable.[4]
- Be Prepared: This type of message framing focuses on using preparedness for the future as the main theme in the conversation. While this may seem simple, this framing can be complex. For much more information on how this message framing works, read The Preparation Frame.[5]
- Civic Responsibility: People almost always value togetherness and civic-mindedness, even if they may act in their own best interest. By framing conversations to invoke togetherness (such as using “we” and “us,”) people in your community may be more likely to support methods that benefit everyone as a whole.[6]
- What can we do: Providing real and actionable steps that individuals and the community as a whole can take is a crucial component of any long-term resilience conversation. You want to give people a sense of hope, that things can be done to help mitigate risk in the short and long term. Come into a conversation with a few ideas and present opportunities for brainstorming for solutions.
How to not frame a conversation:
While there are many good ways to frame messages, there are message framings that research shows are not effective. These ineffective ways of framing messages is very common, and local officials are encouraged to learn what they are and take the time to avoid using them.
- More information: This frame assumes that all people need to make changes is more information or data about climate science or economic impacts. This is probably the most common way to frame the conversation around resilience and climate change. However, this is a very ineffective framing for several reasons. It assumes that everyone values scientific and economic information equally. It also assumes that lack of knowledge is the only reason people have not made changes. This framing ignores the importance of personal values and emotions are to people in the conversation about resilience. While science is an important aspect of the conversation, it should not be your primary focus and, with certain audiences, may need to have a very small inclusion.[7]
- Triggering emotion: This relatively common message framing centers on triggering deep and negative emotions, such as fear, anxiety or worry. The problem with this framing is that people can only worry about so much at one time. By triggering these emotions, you may end up causing people to leave the conversation. You may also end up triggering what’s called fatalism, which is the sense that it’s too late to do anything, so why bother.[8]
[1] Center for Research on Environmental Decisions. (2009). The Psychology of Climate Change Communication: A Guide for Scientists, Journalists, Educators, Political Aides, and the Interested Public. New York.
[2]Dahlstrom, M.F. (2014). Using narratives and storytelling to communicate science with non-expert audiences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111(suppl. 4), pp.13614–13620.
[3] CRED, 2009
[4] Pike, C., Doppelt, B., and Herr, M. 2010. Climate Communication and Behavior Change: A Guide for Practitioners. The Climate Leadership Initiative.
[5] Pike, C., Eaves, S., Herr, M., and Huva, A. (2015). The Preparation Frame: A Guide to Building Understanding of Climate Impacts and Engagement in Solutions.
[6] National Network for Ocean and Climate Change Interpretation (NNOCCI). (2015, March). One-day introductory workshop. Jacques Cousteau National Estuarine Research Reserve, Tuckerton, N.J.
[7] Chess, Caron and Branden B. Johnson. "Information is not enough." Creating a Climate for Change. Ed. Susanne C. Moser and Lisa Dilling. 1st ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. pp. 223-234. Cambridge Books Online.
[8] Moser, S.C. "More bad news: the risk of neglecting emotional responses to climate change information", Creating a Climate for Change. Ed. Susanne C. Moser and Lisa Dilling. 1st ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. pp. 64-80. Cambridge Books Online.