Good communication strategies always combine intuition, experience, and careful study. Through our monthly Flashcards and other efforts, Sightline aims to tap into the combined expertise and instincts of a network of savvy communicators while collecting and distilling state-of-the-art research from a range of perspectives, from public opinion analysts to scholars and strategists.

To help you dig deeper, we've compiled this list of resources on top organizations, websites, blogs, articles and books on values communication. It's a work in progress; please send resources you’ve found useful to Anna Fahey, anna@sightline.org.

Sightline resources

• Word on the Street: In this Daily Score blog series, Sightline communications strategist Anna Fahey examines the latest polling data and political messaging from the U.S., Canada, and beyond.
• Sightline Flashcards: Sightline’s new monthly updates on communications strategy focuses on values communication.

Research organizations

• FrameWorks Institute is behind major national studies – for both advocates and businesses – about how Americans talk about issues and how media discourse influences their perspectives. FrameWorks' approach—strategic frame analysis--involves several methodologies. Poke around the website for useful studies that apply to your work as well as good primers on communications strategies. Though their work is proprietary, they often share it with interested parties.
• The Metaphor Project focuses on the art of "speaking American" and "American storytelling" as a way to integrate shared values into public communications strategies that people can relate to. Scholar, writer, and activist Susan Strong is the driving force behind this online project.
  
• Real Reason, a new venture founded by a handful of George Lakoff followers, is setting out to apply their own research approach—based on cognitive linguistics, media analyses, focus groups, language data analysis, and other methods–to the concept of frames, what people latch onto when it comes to policy and identity, and the communications of social movements. Keep your eye on them.
• Berkeley Media Studies Group. A venture founded by former colleagues of George Lakoff, BMSG works with community groups, journalists and public health professionals to “leverage the power of the media to advance healthy public policy.” They offer media advocacy training, professional education, and strategic consultation.
• Demos is “a non-partisan public policy research and advocacy organization committed to building an America that achieves its highest democratic ideals”. They are part think tank, part advocacy group; their work with FrameWorks Institute on how to talk about government is worth checking out.
• The SPIN Project. Though perhaps not very strategically named, SPIN provides accessible and affordable strategic communications consulting, training, coaching, networking opportunities and concrete tools – such as a big and very useful toolkit focused on incorporating the value of “opportunity” into public communications.
• The Longview Institute. This spin-off of Lakoff’s Rockridge Institute is working to “reframe the public debate to make a moral vision more persuasive and resonant" as well as a host of other goals. Lawrence Wallack is the key figure behind this venture, and he’s active in advancing framing theories and doing media training. He’s smart and he’s located in Cascadia. Portland, to be exact.
• The Opportunity Agenda, a project of the Tides Center, distills reams of raw data, media analysis, and scholarly work on the language and public opinion surrounding social justice -- from race, education, healthcare, and criminal justice to the environment -- into a toolkit on how to employ the "opportunity frame" in communications strategies.
  

Blogs

• Framing Science is an insightful blog written by communications scholar Matthew Nisbet. Nisbet keeps up on how political strategists, scientists, and the news media are talking about global warming, stem cell issues, and other current debates so that you don’t have to. He’s also in cahoots with Chris Mooney, one of our favorite writers.

• Frameshop is a blog written by Jeffrey Feldman, political consultant and author of the book, Framing the Debate: Famous Presidential Speeches and How Progressives Can Use Them to Change the Conversation (and Win Elections). Feldman’s blog focuses on issues of national significance in the US and provides framing analysis of speeches and media texts – it’s a good way to keep up on national events through the lens of language strategy.
  
  

Articles

• How Democrats Should Talk, Michael Tomasky, New York Review of Books. Michael Tomasky reviews three books that focus on political communications strategies, including Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear by Frank Luntz.

• Retelling the American Story, Lawrence Wallack, The Oregonian. In this op-ed, framing expert Wallack underscores the importance of telling stories that communicate deeper meaning and connect communities.
• Counseling Democrats to Go for the Gut, Patricia Cohen, New York Times. Review of Drew Westen’s new book, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the, and discussion of the ramifications of political strategy that favors emotional appeals over appeals to rational decision-making.
• Language for a Change: To win, progressives need to speak with an American accent, David Kusnet, In These Times. Kusnet, a Democratic speechwriter and campaign strategist makes a case for articulating shared values and speaking in plain English.
• The Power of Story in Social Movements (pdf), Marshall Ganz Harvard scholar Marshall Ganz makes a case for storytelling as central to social movements because it constructs agency, shapes identity, and motivates action.
• Rational Actors or Rational Fools? (pdf), Implications of the Affect Heuristic for Behavioral Economics, Paul Slovic, Melissa L. Finucane, Ellen Peters, and Donald G. MacGregor.
  

Books

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip Heath and Dan Heath.
Mark Twain once observed, “ A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.” His observation rings true: Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas struggle to make their ideas “stick.” In this indispensable guide, the authors reveal the anatomy of ideas that “stick” and explain sure-fire methods for making ideas stickier, such as violating schemas, using the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating “curiosity gaps.”

Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, Antonio Damasio.
Damasio, Professor of Neurology at the University of Iowa School of Medicine, basically went against everything everyone ever thought about reason, linking it closely to emotion (and proving it with a neuroscientific research, much of it his own clinical work and the work of his wife, Hanna Damasio.) This is an important reconsideration of the relation between mind/brain and body in emotions and decision making, challenging long-held conceptions of rationality and giving meaning to the term: “gut reaction.”

The Progressive’s Pocketbook of Persuasion, Courtney Dillard
Courtney Dillard is an assistant professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Media Studies at Willamette University in Oregon. With this book she equips communicators and political organizers with ten key tools for connecting with voters by “communicating who they are, their values, and what they have to offer the nation.”

Framing the Debate: Famous Presidential Speeches and How Progressives Can Use Them to Change the Conversation (and Win Elections), Jeffrey Feldman
Feldman presents fifteen key speeches by American presidents, offering in-depth analyses of the “big ideas” and images—the “frames”—that each speech evokes. Throughout, he demonstrates how effective framing techniques can be applied to today’s political debate.

Speaking American: How the Democrats Can Win in the Nineties, David Kusnet
This “citizen’s guidebook” for campaigning that Kusnet wrote in the 1990s makes a great case for talking about values and for talking like regular people.

Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, George Lakoff
With this book, UC Berkeley's Lakoff burst onto the political scene. Despite recent critiques of his work, it must be said that Lakoff got many people thinking more deeply about the words we use and the values that draw us together.

Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision, George Lakoff and the Rockridge Institute
A follow-up to Elephant, this book serves as a guide for long-term communications strategy and is available in its entirety online at the Rockridge Institute website.

Words that Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear, Frank Luntz
Having supervised more than 1,200 surveys and focus groups all over the country and advised a slew of conservative candidates, conservative pollster and political strategist Frank Luntz knows what he’s talking about when he says: “It’s not enough to be correct or reasonable or even brilliant. The key to successful communication is to take the imaginative leap of stuffing yourself right into your listener’s shoes to know what they are thinking and feeling in the deepest recesses of their mind and heart." Take it with a grain of salt--he is the one who came up with “death tax” other slogans that look a lot more like spin than good communications.

The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, Drew Westen
Does our gut control political decision-making? Westen, a political thinker and psychologist who's getting a lot of attention on the national stage these days, offers a serious and groundbreaking investigation into the role of emotion in deciding the life of the nation, looking at data across several Presidential elections from the 1950s through 2000.

A Scientist's Guide to Talking With the Media: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists, Richard Hayes and Daniel Grossman.
Scientists can and should reach a broader audience with their findings. In this book, Hayes and Grossman draw on their expertise in public relations and journalism to empower researchers and scientists in a variety of fields -- notorious for poor PR judgment and lack of communications savvy -- to liberate important findings and data from laboratories and lecture halls via smart messages that resonate with the press and the public. The authors provide tips on how to translate abstract concepts into concrete metaphors, craft meaningful soundbites, and prepare for interviews -- as well as advice on becoming a reporter's trusted source on controversial or complex issues.