Framing and Developing Messages

We all know that even by selecting a targeted audience, some of those people will probably ignore your message. This can get frustrating, but by framing messages appropriately, you can develop messages that fit their existing beliefs and values. When creating a value-based message, you need to understand an individual's primary values, as well as their secondary values. Primary values include things like, responsibility to care for one's family, personal liberty, and work. Secondary values encompass things like, responsibility to care for others, personal fulfillment, and respect for authority. This is a very important step when developing messages about a concept, organization, or campaign. When you start down the right path, you produce more support for your cause. There are three "levels of thinking" based on research when framing elements:

• Level One Audiences: attracted to broad concept, reflects own personal values, the public
• Level Two Audiences: more details, issue-oriented organizations, activists
• Level Three Audiences: people who are experts in their field

When planning how to communicate to a specific audience, you need to craft your messages and operate at their level of thinking. Since we will be raising money for Safe Harbor through mainly college students, we need to use the language and conversation that college students use. By implementing marketing plans with Facebook and Twitter, we can reach many college students who use these social media sites daily. Also, since we are college students ourselves, we present familiar faces. Our professors will provide trusted voices. Since we are all part of the Clemson circle, we can have great influence on our audience. Communications that come from familiar faces and personally trusted sources are usually more effective.

A simple way of developing messages is by using a chart called a message box. First, there is your core message that is a simple one-liner stating your overall goals. This core message is usually short and memorable. After this has been developed, you can move on to stating your values, problem, solution to the problem, and the action to be taken. This message box can help when you deliver your message by allowing you to move back and forth from each section throughout the conversation.

After reading the Chapter 4, I was better able to understand the case study explained at the end. I realized just how much of an impact using the right words could have on an audience. Since "day care" and "child care" seemed more like "babysitting" to the audience, advocates searched for other names like, " early learning" and "early childhood development." The education community began using these new words because it linked school readiness with better performance in the early grades. This is important information to know when developing messages, since this could also be used when dealing with search engine optimization. We use SEO numerous times at work when creating websites for clients. By choosing the right keywords for the specific audience, that client could produce more visitors to his website and ultimately an increased profit.