Based on comprehensive research, these five distilled steps provide a path to new narratives and engaging new audiences in new conversations to reduce nuclear threat.

These five distilled steps provide a path to new narratives and
engaging new audiences in new conversations to reduce nuclear threat.

11

Audience

22

Proximity

33

Persuasion

44

Framing

55

Communication

1. Audience

Understand Your Allies

Expanding audiences and creating alliances requires getting to know people and what interests them. Identify and understand people you want to reach. Ask:

“If we found a person like this, would they join, follow, or use what we’re offering?”

Download the persona template

What do they believe?

What motivates or frustrates them?

What gets their attention?

How do they invest their time?

2. Proximity

Create a Relatable Connection

Develop messages that are personally meaningful, urgent and relevant. Help believers start a conversation, and attract not-yet-believers through topics that matters most to them. Familiar and salient issues make nuclear threat more relatable.

Download Research Takeaways

Injustice

As with all other tools of oppression, nuclear weapons divide us and makes us afraid of one another.

•••

Environment

Nuclear weapons pose an unacceptable risk to our life-sustaining environment.

•••

Health

The production, presence and use of nuclear weapons puts our lives and health at risk.

•••

Economy

Nuclear threat is an economic issue. Our world is over-armed and yet our basic needs are unmet.

Download Research Takeaways
3. Persuasion

Shift from Awareness to Engagement

Shift from Awareness to Engagement

Mushroom clouds, universal symbol of nuclear danger, grab attention and score high on awareness but fail to engage people in further action. Persuasion, necessary in moving people toward personal agency, is achieved not through conveying facts but by aligning with values. 

Threat

The starting place is the belief that a statement is true. One evidenced experience is all it takes.

Concern

A threat is elevated by a sense of urgency to a concern — something your audience thinks about over and over because it matters to them and their community.

Cause

A concern becomes cause when people come together with a shared desire to achieve a resolution.  confidence to own the message.

Progress

Progress is seen when your audience takes action for the cause. It’s sustained through recognition — through progress toward a goal, appreciation from a community, and personal validation.

4. Framing

Catalyze Agency and Ownership

Nuclear threat looms in the background, ever present. Unlike proximate threats, this danger is abstract, inevitable and something others must solve. Reframing messages about nuclear danger serves to create catalyzing anger and indignation versus empathic avoidance and paralyzing fear.

Download Framing Guidance
Feeling Stuck?

Focus on community

Focusing on community is more effective than making this a personal issue or global issue: it taps into collectivism and our desire to protect those we care about. It catalyzes social pressure, the most powerful form of persuasion and, ultimately, action.

•••

Connect through cultural relevance:

Connect with the emerging dialogue where sharing is gaining momentum. To create salience and make news have messages come from a new voice. Develop messaging around broadly shared ideals: sole authority, democracy, no use/no first use, gender, and inclusion.

•••

Make it ownable:

Keep the message simple, relatable and repeatable. Your audience cannot own a message they struggle to retell or fit into a conversation.

•••

Invoke hope:

Write in a pre-detonation frame. Our assured demise fuels resignation rather than activating engagement, innovation, protest, or change.

5. Communication

Provoke Action and Inspire Progress

Confronted with so many issues each day, people focus on those that require immediate attention. To pierce complacency and create urgency use culturally current human stories that cultivate curiosity or incite indignation. Then deliver a clear path to action.

Download the messaging template

Be provocative. Avoid fact-storming.

Relentlessly bombarding people with facts about blast radius, weapons stockpiles and potential casualties from detonations is arresting. This grabs attention but fails to inspire agency or action. Provocative messaging related to current civic and financial injustice or climate and health issues — affecting people today — stands out, piques interest and deliberately elicits emotionally binding and sustained personal commitments.

DO elicit a reaction: Use a headline that intrigues, appeals to our innate desire to protect others or requires the reader to question their assumptions.

AVOID language that is balanced and measured: A litany of statistics or fair, agreeable and factual statements require no action, fail to inspire agency and mitigate the need for further consideration.

Invoke compassion. Beware of hyperbole and empathy.

Like fear, empathy strikes an emotion chord so strongly it results in avoidance rather than agency and leaves people feeling helpless. By tapping into compassion, people see a wrong they feel empowered to right and turn from helpless to helpful. 

DO harness emotional intelligence: Encourage people to take action against that which is unjust, unnecessary and unacceptable.

DO reference tangible human consequences: Connect nuclear danger to impacts on the food we eat, air we breath, water we drink or the health of our community.

Embrace the absurdity. Don’t be insensitive.

Humor can help people engage with issues that feel insurmountable, making them more relatable by creating a space for dialogue, hope or outrage in place of silent resignation or fearful avoidance.

DO illuminate a dark topic by lightening up: While nuclear threat is serious business, there are ways to convey its importance while offering some light-handed or even dark comedy to get a point across.

AVOID going too extreme: Beware of humor that is cold, callous or makes light of people who have suffered from nuclear incidents .

Be inspiring. Don’t be negative.

If the worst is inevitable, people move on.  Change happens by asking people to imagine the leaps, then mapping  the steps and stretches to get there.

DO make room new approaches: Couple incremental corrective measures with invitations for creation, innovation and non-traditional problem-solving methods. 

Don’t reinforce the status quo. Negativity, fear-mongering and a lack of receptivity to new methods, ideas and actors suppresses effort, results in stasis and reinforces inertia.

Be collaborative. Refrain from insularity.

Embrace contribution from experts in disparate disciplines. 

DO invite, network, and allow for participation: Along with physicists and policy makers, be open to technologists, media experts, investors, inventors — those that bring a different approaches that allow for new solutions.

DON’T discount those without nuclear knowledge: Insisting on nuclear expertise limits contributions from collaborators and innovators who bring tested approaches, subject matter expertise and new ways of tackling age-old problems.

5. Communication

Provoke Action and Inspire Progress

Confronted with so many issues each day, people focus on those that require immediate attention. To pierce complacency and create urgency use culturally current human stories that cultivate curiosity or incite indignation. Then deliver a clear path to action.

Messaging Guidance: Download this simple guide for connecting with Generation Possible, the most engaged, inventive and active generation of problem-solvers and policy changers.

BE PROVOCATIVE. AVOID FACT-STORMING.

Relentlessly bombarding people with facts about blast radius, weapons stockpiles and potential casualties from detonations is arresting. This grabs attention but fails to inspire agency or action. Provocative messaging related to current civic and financial injustice or climate and health issues — affecting people today — stands out, piques interest and deliberately elicits emotionally binding and sustained personal commitments.

DO elicit a reaction: Use a headline that intrigues, appeals to our innate desire to protect others or requires the reader to question their assumptions.

AVOID language that is balanced and measured: A litany of statistics or fair, agreeable and factual statements require no action, fail to inspire agency and mitigate the need for further consideration.

INVOKE COMPASSION. BEWARE OF HYPERBOLE AND EMPATHY.

Like fear, empathy strikes an emotion chord so strongly it results in avoidance rather than agency and leaves people feeling helpless. By tapping into compassion, people see a wrong they feel empowered to right and turn from helpless to helpful. 

DO harness emotional intelligence: Encourage people to take action against that which is unjust, unnecessary and unacceptable.

DO reference tangible human consequences: Connect nuclear danger to impacts on the food we eat, air we breath, water we drink or the health of our community.

EMBRACE THE ABSURDITY. DON'T BE INSENSITIVE.

Humor can help people engage with issues that feel insurmountable, making them more relatable by creating a space for dialogue, hope or outrage in place of silent resignation or fearful avoidance.

DO illuminate a dark topic by lightening up: While nuclear threat is serious business, there are ways to convey its importance while offering some light-handed or even dark comedy to get a point across.

AVOID going too extreme: Beware of humor that is cold, callous or makes light of people who have suffered from nuclear incidents.

BE INSPIRING. DON'T BE NEGATIVE.

If the worst is inevitable, people move on.  Change happens by asking people to imagine the leaps, then mapping  the steps and stretches to get there.

DO make room new approaches: Couple incremental corrective measures with invitations for creation, innovation and non-traditional problem-solving methods. 

Don’t reinforce the status quo. Negativity, fear-mongering and a lack of receptivity to new methods, ideas and actors suppresses effort, results in stasis and reinforces inertia.

BE COLLABORATIVE. REFRAIN FROM INSULARITY.

Embrace contribution from experts in disparate disciplines. 

DO invite, network, and allow for participation: Along with physicists and policy makers, be open to technologists, media experts, investors, inventors — those that bring a different approaches that allow for new solutions.

DON’T discount those without nuclear knowledge: Insisting on nuclear expertise limits contributions from collaborators and innovators who bring tested approaches, subject matter expertise and new ways of tackling age-old problems.

Download the messaging guidance

Write your new narrative

Write Your New Narrative

For an emotionally charged issue like nuclear threat, engagement depends on giving people an opportunity to move toward new solutions and away from fear. This simple roadmap has been created to re-envision communications that reignite conversations and empower progress.

For an emotionally charged issue like nuclear threat, engagement depends on giving people an opportunity to move toward new solutions and away from fear. This simple roadmap has been created to re-envision communications that reignite conversations and empower progress.

Download the Roadmap
Download the Roadmap
Schedule a consultation
Schedule a Consultation