How to craft messaging for the right audience

This blog is part of our Advocating For Afterschool series, where we share tools and best practices to help make the case for afterschool to funders, partners, and policymakers at the local, state, and national levels. To see more installments of the series, check out the Advocacy tag on The Afterschool Snack.

An important part of funding and advocacy work is being able to craft your messaging for the audience in front of you. The same program can be described in many ways, and the framing that resonates with a corporate partner is not the same framing that resonates with a policymaker focused on the STEM workforce.

To help programs do this, the Collective for Youth Empowerment in STEM and Society (CYESS) created the resource: Make the Case for Funding STEM and Civic Engagement in Afterschool Programs. The resource isn't limited to funder conversations — the same narratives can support advocacy conversations with policymakers as well. It helps you identify who you're speaking with and then share the messaging that will resonate most with that audience, expanding the narratives surrounding out-of-school time STEM and civic learning programming for advocacy or fundraising.

The resource organizes five narratives, each built around a different audience's concerns: a general funder, a corporate partner, a STEM-focused foundation, a civic engagement funder, and an education funder without a STEM or civics mandate. Each one follows a concern-solution-return on investment structure, naming the problem that the audience already cares about, positioning afterschool STEM and civic engagement programming as the solution, and describing the return on investment in terms that the audience will recognize. The underlying program stays the same - only the framing changes.

How to use the Resource

1. Identify your audience.
   1. Before you write or speak, get clear on who you're addressing and what they're likely already concerned about, whether that's workforce readiness, civic participation, student engagement, or another issue.
   2. Review the resource’s suggested talking points to tailor your message based on your intended audience’s priorities.
2. Integrate your own program details.
   1. Take the relevant narrative and layer in your own outcomes data, participant stories, and community context so the messaging reflects your specific program rather than reading as generic.
   2. Make sure to include the return on investment information that resonates best with your audience.
3. Share your message!
   1. Now it’s time to send that email to your policymaker, set up a meeting with a potential funder or community partner, or write an op-ed for your local newspaper.
   2. With it being an election year, take your carefully crafted message to a town hall meeting, share your talking points out loud with candidates seeking your vote, and ask them how they will deliver on investing in these vital programs.

You can also visit cyess.org for more tools to support your STEM and civic engagement programming, or reach out to cyess@afterschoolalliance.org with questions.