Let’s start with the assumption that no one thinks mass shootings are a good thing. Starting the conversation from a place of good intention is helpful when grappling with issues weighed down by historical context and ideological divide. The public debate around guns in America rarely starts from that place, and never ends there. The place where the gun debate ultimately ends is a fascinating case study in framing.

First, some recent history.

On July 20, 2012, James Holmes opened fire on a crowded movie theater in Aurora, killing 12 and wounding 70 others. Six months later, Adam Lanza fatally shot 20 kids at Sandy Hook. Six months after that Dylann Roof killed nine people at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. Almost exactly a year later, Omar Mateen killed 49 at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, making it the scene of the deadliest mass shooting in American history. That distinction barely lasted a month, when Stephen Paddock became the deadliest mass shooter in American history, killing 58 in Las Vegas. A month later, Devin Patrick Kelley walked into the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and murdered 26. And of course, just a few weeks ago, 17 died in Stoneman Douglas High School at the end of Nicholas Cruz’s AR-15 assault rifle.

These events, not to mention the far more frequent gun violence in America’s cities, seem to carry with them the same mundane ritual as the one that came before. Our leaders offer their thoughts and prayers, and Americans take their sides in the gun debate. Those who champion gun reforms in America seek to transform the outrage into action. But why hasn’t it stuck? The answer lies, at least in part, in message framing by the other side.

After Aurora, while gun reform activists publicly called for a ban on the kinds of guns and high-capacity magazines used in the shooting, the public dialogue turned quickly to mental health. The shooter even presented himself to a jury as mentally incompetent, which the court rejected, but it didn’t stop the public debate from focusing on mental health services.

Six months later as the nation struggled to comprehend what happened in Newtown, and level-headed people everywhere thought for sure, this time, we will do something about guns, the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre declared that the threat came from “people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them,” doubling down on its message that we should do everything we can to restrict gun access to the mentally impaired, even as they declined to support legislation in Colorado that sought to do just that.

Then came Charleston, where members of a Bible study group welcomed a stranger into their house of worship, who would open fire on them minutes later. Roof was found to be another emotionally unstable individual, as pictures surfaced on the internet portraying him as a violent white separatist. Almost immediately, Republican leaders, including South Carolina’s governor, called for the removal of the Confederate Flag from State House grounds, shifting the public debate away from gun access and toward racism.

The debate following the Pulse Nightclub shooting was hijacked by debate over the TSA’s No Fly list, a subject that is barely on the periphery in terms of its contributions to gun violence in this country, but that magically found its way to dominate the debate on the floors of Congress.

Las Vegas brought us a national dialogue on bump stocks, a term that didn’t exist in the public mindset the day before that shooting, but nonetheless gripped the nation. After Southerland Springs, the debate centered around the shooter and domestic abuse, not the more systemic issue of gun access and proliferation. Now, in Parkland, something different seems to be happening with the rise of student activists, but still gun proponents are doing their best to make the debate about mental health, again.

Gun rights groups are masterful at reframing the debate around guns to focus on a relatively small contributor to a much bigger problem. It is classic reclassification of the problem. By doing so, they define the terms of the debate. This is no longer about combat grade assault weapons. It’s about terrorism, or the mentally ill, or racists, or wife beaters. Those are smaller arguments to have, and can be had on grounds that have nothing to do with guns. Further, if the problem is successfully redefined and gun control advocates fight on this newly drawn playing field, even if the NRA loses, they would have lost a much smaller battle.

As gun control advocates introduce legislation, and filibuster and stage sit-ins on the House floor to have the legislation considered, they are ceding the debate before they even file the bill. So when the next mass shooting occurs and we shake our heads and think “What is it going to take?”, consider the possibility that the answer might be to stop accepting the framing from the other side. Take a lesson from the teenage leaders in Florida, who will march this Saturday in active defiance of the persistent, strategic, and entirely intentional reframing that takes place after each one of these incidents. ​

Public dialogue is not held in a vacuum, and it is not shaped by accident. Recognizing the manipulation that goes into diverting our attention elsewhere is the first step to refusing to fall victim to it again. Reclaiming the public narrative is the next step. Watch Saturday as the nation’s young people do just that.

The social sector has long focused on the public narrative, but now feels different. Leaders of advocacy groups, foundations, and nonprofits are awakening to the critical need to identify the dominant public narrative around their issue, and assert a more compelling alternative that helps people think differently about solutions. If you are a leader in this field and are trying to find your way to shifting the public narrative around your cause, there is one place you must start: Identify the current dominant narrative.

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Why would people care? ​This issue is obviously very important to you, but why would others care? What you want to identify is how regular people would typically connect with your mission. Having trouble? Try this: If two people were having a conversation about [INSERT SOCIAL ISSUE HERE], what would they be saying? This is a different question than “Why do people care?” The answer to that question may very well be: “They don’t.” So answer the “should” question first, then turn to reality.

2. Who is involved?  The narrative – or story – around your issue has all the elements of every story ever told. It starts with characters. So, who are the characters in your story, as people see it today? When the same mythical pair mentioned above is talking about your issue, who are they placing in that story?

3. What is the purpose?  Chances are, you see the answer to this question differently than regular people might. If you work in education, you see the purpose of education as strengthening our country, while members of the public may see it as getting good grades and a good job. If you work in environmental protection, you see your purpose as reversing a fatal trend in the climate, while the public may prioritize a more short-term purpose, like preventing extreme weather.

4. Who / What can we blame?  If your cause represents a problem that needs solving (and it always does), then who or what does the public blame for causing that problem? Is it the behavior of individuals? Is it a flaw in a system? The answer to how the public defines your problem is essential to reshaping the lens through which the public considers fixing it.

5. How do we find our way out?  This is not an ultimate outcome question. It is not a visioning exercise about how life would be different if the problem were solved. This is about solutions to find your way toward that vision. How does the public consider fixing the problem? Keep in mind, the answer may be that the public cannot conceive of a solution. In communications, that mindset is called fatalism.

There is research that can help you here. The FrameWorks Institute, Goodwin Simon Strategic Research and others can be great resources for finding material relevant to your cause. But in the absence of existing material, you can engineer your own exercise, informally, to try to get to the bottom of how the public thinks and talks about the issues that you care about. Only then can you go about shifting it.

As I work with clients to develop new organizational message platforms, the idea of messages resonating with audiences seems so obvious, it need not be mentioned. “Meet people where they are,” you’ve undoubtedly heard.

This overused concept of “resonance” is a crutch for many in the communications field – simplifying the complexity of our work to a process of simply finding out what language, concepts and themes appeal to people, and then repeating those things back to them. There are implications to this approach that are unfortunate at best, and toxic at worst.

A public opinion poll on early childhood development asked respondents to identify the most serious problems that children face. Eighty-five percent responded that “parents not paying enough attention to what’s going on in their children’s lives” was the most serious. In the same poll, nearly 80% of respondents identified parents as most responsible for making sure that families have childcare, well above employers and government.

Given this example, it can be assumed that if we were to design messaging about early childhood development to “meet the public where they are,” we would adopt messaging that reflected this individualist frame, characterizing the behavior and choices of parents as the input that shapes the development of their children. Further, if we were to develop messaging to “resonate” with the public on this issue, we would largely ignore the more systemic contributing factors that research and brain science now tell us are so important to the healthy development of young children.

Even if we were to develop messaging to appeal to this widely held public sentiment for the purposes of shifting their thinking to a more productive frame, simply having reinforced the individualist mode of thinking prevents our audiences from making that shift. We have essentially dug ourselves a deeper hole, making our problem worse before we even attend to the task of fixing it.

This is an example that can be applied to virtually any issue around which we are developing messaging. If the public regards a problem as the result of individual behavior, they are far less likely to support systemic changes to fix the problem. Therefore, if we design our messaging in such a way that reinforces this unproductive pattern of thinking, even if we do so in the name of advocating for systemic solutions, our audience is more likely to maintain the unproductive frame.

Our goal as strategic messengers is not to achieve resonance. Our goal is not merely to identify messaging that appeals to our audiences. Instead, our goal is to develop messaging that makes it more likely our audiences will behave in the way we want them to.

Here’s an example. For years, advocates for evidence-based addiction policies spent valuable resources characterizing such policies through the value of empathy. Treatment and prevention represent the right thing to do for our neighbors who are struggling with addiction. They were meeting their audience where they were: stuck in an unproductive pattern of thinking that reinforced the notion that addiction is best characterized by a set of individual human behaviors, and therefore, best treated with a greater level of care and understanding for those individuals.

But researchers at the FrameWorks Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC that maps the public’s thinking around important social issues and identifies messaging strategies to navigate some of the most common roadblocks, discovered that messaging using empathy actually depressed support for systemic solutions to the problem. You read that right. Advocates for evidence-based addiction policies were actually deploying messaging that made it less likely people would support that very idea. Describing addiction using a more systemic frame, such as interdependence or ingenuity, had the opposite effect. When audiences were prompted to consider the problem of addiction as a condition that impacts all of us, or as a challenging problem requiring forward-thinking solutions, they were more likely to support systemic policy solutions. Why? Because the messaging allowed their brains to consider the problem from a different angle.

Had researchers at the FrameWorks Institute tested such messages for resonance, they would have yielded very different results. But when messaging is developed through the lens of the end goal – in this case, support for certain policies – the result is not only smarter, more effective messaging, but an end to messaging frames that have the opposite effect.

Traditional message testing simply measures the wrong metrics, and too many professional communicators respond to those findings inappropriately. The next time you develop messaging, think about your ultimate goal and forget about resonance. If all your messaging is designed to do is meet people where they are, then all your messaging will do is help them stay there.

Recently, Martin Shkreli became the latest in a long line of American corporate villains, as news broke across the internet that he had purchased the patent of a drug known to fight infections that are common among AIDS patients, and then jacked the price more than 5,000%. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and similar social networks exploded with rage, and digital advocates secretly reveled in finally finding the face and voice of all that is wrong with American healthcare.

High drug prices are nothing new to America, and complaining about them is nothing new for Americans. Behind our general, albeit begrudging acceptance of outrageous drug prices is an understanding that as Americans, we are an innovative people. We invent, and therefore we invest. We may not like admitting it to ourselves, but on a purely logical level, we accept that it’s part of the capitalist equation.

But those rules don’t apply to Martin Shkreli. He bought a drug that already existed, had already been marketed, had existing patients that depended on it, and then raised the price so astronomically as to trigger the reaction of disbelief even among those in the investing world.

What the outraged masses almost entirely ignored, though, is that Martin Shkreli isn’t the first American CEO to pull this trick. He is not even be the richest, or the most successful. According to Forbes: “Questcor Pharmaceuticals raised the price of its drug, Acthar Gel, from $40 to $28,000 per vial. The reward? It was one of the best-performing stocks in America until Mallinckrodt bought it for $5.6 billion last year. Valeant Pharmaceuticals has done big price increases on numerous drugs. The stock’s up 740% over five years and its founder, Michael Pearson, is a billionaire. Only Shkreli has drawn the American public’s rage.”

Why is it that as Americans, we pick and choose our villains, running some out of town while giving others a pass? Why did the nation erupt at the idea of Tiger Woods as a serial philanderer, but just roll their eyes at the antics of, say, Charlie Sheen? Why were Americans ready to burn Bernie Madoff at the stake, but have never even heard of Cobus Kellermann, the South African fund manager whose Ponzi scheme may dwarf that of the New York convict? And why was Anthony Weiner run out of Congress and laughed at as a Mayoral candidate, when political sex scandals are practically a cottage industry in our country?

It may have something to do with the stories we attach to these supervillains. Tiger Woods is the young, handsome athlete whose sport reminds us of our own best selves: refined, respectable and sophisticated. There is a degree of honesty with an image like that, not one of a compulsive sex addict.

Bernie Madoff became THE American supervillain because his story came at a time when Americans were seeing their homes in foreclosure, their pensions plummet, and their paychecks freeze thanks to the inexplicable level of greed and excess exhibited on Wall Street. Yes, Wall Street has always been this way, but we were given a reason to be supremely pissed off at the idea of traders making off with our retirement, and along came Bernie Madoff, whose investment talents were as imaginary as the returns he claimed.

And while Anthony Weiner certainly isn’t the first politician to write the story of his own demise, he was the first to have it captured on Twitter and then amplified by an out-to-get-you internet publisher named Andrew Breitbart, whose readers came to expect the kind of sensationalistic stories the Weiner saga (no pun intended) handed to him on a silver, uh, iPhone.

To hear the collective story emerging from Facebook, it is as if Martin Shkreli lives the life of a modern-day Jordan Belfort (Wolf of Wall Street). The pictures blasted out in angry tweets show exactly the kind of 30-something, know-it-all, trust fund baby we picture walking the halls of Choate Academy, taking daddy’s helicopter home on weekends, and catching up in his inheritance at the family Hamptons compound. His story, as it was portrayed, has all the makings of a classic tale of internet scumbaggery.

The bad news for Martin Shkreli is, that’s all it takes. A compelling story is the critical element to a reputation crisis. Once you have lost control of your story – ie: your reputation or your brand – it is very difficult and very expensive to get it back. Martin Shkreli feels as if he has done nothing wrong, or at least nothing out of the ordinary among his investment peers. He wasn’t even the first to do it, and probably not the most profitable. But in the age of social media, and immediate consumption of news that relies almost entirely on visual storytelling, he quickly became the internet’s next victim.

Should we feel bad for Martin Shkreli? That is not the lesson I am seeking to convey here. The lesson for organizations who may fall victim to a reputation attack is simple: It is far less important to defend yourself to your friends using facts than it is to recognize the story being portrayed to people who have never heard of you.

Storytelling can be a weapon as much as it is an art form, and those that have succeeded at reclaiming their reputations after a crisis are the ones that can rewrite their story by first acknowledging the power of the one written for them.

I hear from clients all the time that have exciting ideas about new communications tools they want to develop to help tell the story of their organization. Websites. Videos. Campaigns. You name it. And it is exciting when I get to help them develop these ideas into real brand assets. These are the projects that can turn a message into a story and drive people closer to understanding and supporting an organization’s mission.

To pull off these projects, there is important work that comes first and it involves a tough look in the mirror. To translate a brand’s story into a compelling work of art – either on video or some other medium – you must first spend the time examining the elements of the story.

All stories start with a Character. In a brand story, the Character answers the question, “Who are we?” It is the opening line in any introduction about your work. Name the organization and follow that with a sentence or two about what you do and why you do it.

All stories end with a Resolution. In a brand story, I like to put the Resolution up front by answering the question “What do we want?” It communicates to audiences the purpose of the organization; the large scale change they seek in the world.

Stories exist to communicate a broader Lesson. In a brand story, this is where we share with audiences why they should care about your mission. It answers the question “Why does this matter?” and typically is where an organization fits their mission into a larger context.

Any good story has some Conflict that the character must overcome. In a brand story, this is where audiences hear about the problem your organization seeks to solve. In some ways, it refers back to the Resolution, and answers, “Why don’t we have it now?”

Lastly, all storytellers share the Journey of those in the story getting from one circumstance to another. In a brand story, the Journey refers back to the Resolution, and answers, “How do we get it?” This is where organizations share their vision for the work that needs to be done to get to the better world they seek.

All stories can be summer up as the Journey a Character takes to overcome Conflict and arrive at a Resolution, for the purposes of a broader Lesson. Brand stories are like any other story and by using the common elements of a story for the purposes of brand identity, we can develop a narrative that can then be used as a lens through which all organizational messaging can flow.

Ask your nearest five-year-old to explain the complex issues of the day, and the answers may surprise you. Lack of worldly context notwithstanding, the language and thought process used by young children can teach us a lot about how we explain social problems and the solutions we advocate for. The next time you find yourself struggling to connect with your audience, try putting yourself in the position of explaining the subject matter to a five-year-old. Here are five ways it will help:

• Simplify your language: You don’t need to treat every audience like they are children, but thinking through messaging by imagining a group of young children as your audience will immediately eliminate un-relatable jargon and bring those multi-syllabic words down to simple language that is easy to remember and easy to repeat.
• Relate to your audience: The hardest thing about having a conversation with a five-year-old is recalibrating your own perspective to match theirs. Themes, issues and concepts that are commonplace for you and your peers are lost on young ears, so you are forced to model their perspective, using phrases and language they can relate to. When preparing public communication about a complex issue, it is a valuable exercise to think, and re-think how your audience relates to the words and phrases you are using.
• Get out of your own way: Knowledge and experience typically has an inverse relationship to clear communications. The longer we spend in a field and increase our level of expertise on an issue, the less capable we are at clearly articulating that issue to an outside audience. Five-year-olds rarely care about your years of experience. They just want to know what you are talking about. Practice putting all those years of experience to the side and focusing on the key, central messages that can be clearly, succinctly articulated.
• Turn the Tables on Yourself: If you find it hard to explain a complex issue to a five-year-old, ask them to explain it to you. How would a five-year-old explain immigration? People who move. How would a five-year-old explain healthcare? Helping sick people get better. Returning ourselves to the core of an issue can be surprisingly hard for us to do as adults, but children are immediately drawn to these simple explanations. Through their eyes, we can find new angles to pursue in our communications.
• Tell a story: There is no better communications tool than a well-crafted story. It is natural for us to use this ancient technique with our youngest audiences, but when it comes to communicating with adults, we often forget the classic art of storytelling. Finding the beginning, middle and end of your story arch will capture the attention of audiences ages five to 105.

The next time you find yourself struggling to connect with an audience, or you are unsure about why your communications aren’t resonating with the intended audience, think about consulting your nearest five-year-old. For these reasons and more, it may be the most valuable conversation you will have about your issue.