The Common Cause Handbook, first published by Public Interest Research Centre in 2011, is a very handy tool for considering messaging and making sure it’s resonating with your audience. Since the key focus of the collaboration with Lentara is in growing it’s appeal and audience, and their interaction with Lentara, resonance with the audience of our final communicative design must be central to our planning.

To boil it down to the core, the handbook seeks to examine what values help create today’s social norms and institutions, and what, in turn, shapes these values?

Combining this understanding with other resources like the Story Canvas from Digital Storytellers and the elements of strategy recommended by The Democracy Centre, sitting alongside other tools like Analytical tools such as Power Maps, Spectrum of Allies, Strategy Grids, Problem Trees and campaign tools Purpose Driven Campaigning handbook, (each of which I will try to do a short blog on) will allow us to come up with a campaign for Lentara that effectively reaches new audiences, but also the right audiences and not just reaches them but activates them as allies and advocates for Lentara’s Asylum Seeker Program, while understanding the hurdles and tensions around the wider national asylum story and how it’s framing impacts which values are most engaged in people when they hear stories of people seeking asylum.

The Common Cause Handbook: A Guide to Values and Frames (Summary)

Why Values Matter:
There are many other things that influence any human being in individual moments and across entire lifespans, but our values are a guiding force – abstract ideals (such as equality, tradition, wealth, creativity) that shape our thoughts and actions.

How Values Work:
Some values are compatible, likely to be held strongly together; others – wealth and equality, for instance – no so much. Research shows though that by even talking to one value, you find yourself talking to a range of related values and suppressing opposing ones. This means, worryingly, that if you’ve tried to get people to care more about say equality by appealing to their desire for popularity, you might have accidentally harmed your own cause. This section of the handbook is the most important to wrap our heads around. It highlights Swartz’s Values Circumplex and the core values identified in research that appear to be universally present in all people, each being able to be engaged to different levels at different moments in life.

How Humans Use Values:
This section of the handbook talks about how we use values to guide us in making judgements. This is the underlying reason why we should look at values at all while trying to grow Lentara’s support.

How Values Change / How Values Have Shifted:
Essentially this section highlights that values are not static, they change over the course of a lifetime and from moment to moment, and how they change on a large social scale as well as individually.

Frames:
The values we develop affect how we look at the world. This is partly through frames, which are bundles of associated knowledge and ideas in our memories. ‘Framing’ is also an important tool in communicating – and refers to the information and underlying values we leave in or out when conveying a message. Within the Asylum Seeker debate the message of “stop the boats” has been framed in a number of ways by the Coalition and Labor Governments, initially it was framed in the Howard years by demonising and othering the Asylum Seekers who came by boat through the Children Overboard incident, this appealled to the public’s Security, Conformity, Tradition, and Power groups of values or the Conservation Axis of the Value Circumplex – which include values like: Family Security, Social Order, Authority, Politeness, and Obedience – the frame in more recent years moved to the idea that stopping boats was a humanitarian approach, appealing to different group of values in the Self-Transcendence Axis of the circumplex, an area of values traditionally appealed to by more liberal and accepting frames towards people seeking asylum. Understanding which values a messages frame appeals to will be highly important to growing support for Lentara.