Our Work

We focus on collaborative communications. The easiest analogy is to a team sport or a symphony. A professional team or orchestra has players who specialize in their roles or instruments. They work together. They are most successful when they each maximize their individual strengths in pursuit of a shared goal. Organizations are no different. By helping each organization pinpoint its strategic perspective and additive value in a campaign, we can propel the issue into public consciousness. In communications terms, we don’t want to fight over the same column inches or sound bites, we don’t want a cacophony of discordant notes that leave the audience flat, we want to measurably increase the number of column inches and sound bites for the issue overall.

People understand and relate to different issues through topline messages and core values—both ours and our opposition’s. While any “one message fits all” approach is destined to fail, some message cohesion is imperative to build public support for an issue and win long-term policy change. Overtly competing messages, stories of infighting amongst movement players, or a lack of clarity on what we are asking people to do, not only confuses our audiences, it excludes them from being a part of positive change.

In our experience, there are four critical components to developing message cohesion:

• An understanding of how the public—more specifically our target audiences—feel about an issue and what messages move them to action.
• The buy-in of organizations, experts, and spokespeople to adopt and advance those messages.
• A multi-year commitment to supporting organizations in reaching those audiences and implementing those messaging shifts in all of their communications.
• Continually adapting those core messages to be relevant to new political developments and shifts in public opinion.
• Learn more about the nuts and bolts of how we strengthen message cohesion.

Different movements have very different needs.

We begin our work in any new issue area with an extensive needs assessment examining the capacity of the groups in that sector. We couple this with a detailed media audit to identify where that movement is winning or losing with regard to their media engagement. In each case, the goal is to pinpoint where increased capacity will prove most effective and to establish baselines for measuring progress toward those goals.

Given that the goal is to use the media to shape public opinion, our analysis team tracks opinion trends and produces regular analyses—including specific messaging recommendations. While commissioned research efforts are best directed at message development, tracking and analyzing publicly available polling, in the aggregate and around key media moments, allows our team to provide organizations with solid and timely intelligence to inform their work.

There are two types of media engagement: those where you execute a proactive plan and those where you spring into action in response to breaking news stories.

In these moments, we work with our partners not just to win the news cycle, but to seize the opportunity to build the movement around our issues. In the case of crisis response, the way we choose to respond can help the community coordinate, address internal conflicts, teach new skills, expand impact, and develop muscle memory for future collaborative work. In some scenarios, we provide a coalition of organizations with shared messaging, pivot points, and near-24-hour media monitoring of how coverage is playing out in real time both online and off. In other scenarios, our rapid response zeroes in on individual organizations in need of support.

When it comes to creating policy change and moving public opinion, who gets heard matters. We refer to this as “voiceshare.” Voiceshare is one of the first data points we look at in any issue we work on. Knowing the top opposition messages and messengers and how prevalent they are relative to our own is critical. If our goal is to move the public to understand and adopt our policies, and the public is not even hearing our messages and perspective, then we are not going to move an issue forward.

While our work to strengthen voiceshare varies widely across each of our issue areas, two critical components remain the same: 1) centering the voices of those who are most affected by the issues and policies in question, and 2) ensuring that our spokespeople are trusted by and representative of the people we need to reach. ReThink works with organizations not only to strengthen the skills of their current spokespeople but to identify up-and-coming leaders and allied voices. We train them; connect them with targeted reporters; and help write, edit, and pitch content, amongst other strategies.

Whether it's our work to center the voices of the Muslim, Arab, Sikh, or South Asian community; increase gender parity in peace in security media coverage; or promote pro-voter policies, we have worked to help raise up new voices from impacted communities.

ReThink Media is obsessed—with experimentation, measurement, analysis, and learning. As a data-driven organization, we track the results of nearly everything we do, and we match that by routinely capturing subjective reviews from those who take part in a ReThink Media skills training or use one of the resources we create. We poll organizations on what they would find most helpful in their work and we poll people on what resources they are using and how. We see each campaign and each of our three issue collaboratives as learning laboratories. We take key findings from one area of our work and apply them to campaigns in other issue areas. We derive lessons cross-collaboratively and share best practices with the hundreds of organizations that we work with, informed by that learning.