Working as a communications professional in the field, I often hear how challenging it can be to talk about preventing sexual abuse, assault, and harassment. In fact, if there’s one constant in my 15+ years at NSVRC, it’s hearing from others about the difficulties they face when communicating about sexual violence and how it can be prevented.
Thankfully, over the years—and with the help of partners like the Berkeley Media Studies Group—NSVRC has learned a great deal about how to communicate more effectively about prevention. This learning has led us to develop a series of tools on best practices for prevention messaging.
We’re excited to share the latest resource in this collection: Message Matters: Talking About Health Equity.
This new tool offers strategies for engaging communities around health equity by aligning messages with the values of specific audiences. It includes clear examples of how to talk about health equity in plain, accessible language.
The resource starts with a refresher on prevention messaging strategies, then dives into the importance of leading with values—like safety, connectedness, justice, fairness, care, compassion, and keeping tradition. These values help us connect with our audiences on a deeper level, allowing messages to resonate more strongly and meaningfully.
We also explore how to take a “landscape” view in our messaging—moving beyond individual behavior to highlight the broader social and systemic factors that shape people’s experiences and opportunities.
Our goal for this tool is to help you talk about complex concepts like health equity in ways that are approachable and meaningful to diverse members of your community. It includes ready-to-use message examples that avoid jargon, making the conversation more inclusive for a broader audience.
We hope you’ll put these ideas into practice—and when you do, we’d love to hear how it goes. The iterative process of testing, learning, and improving is at the heart of our prevention messaging work.
And if you’re new to the concept of health equity and want to dive deeper, we highly recommend checking out our report: A Health Equity Approach to Preventing Sexual Violence.
Still looking for more tools to support your health equity messaging? The Frameworks Institute recently released the Communicating Now: Framing for Health Equity toolkit to help you communicate effectively about community-led, collaborative approaches to eliminate health disparities.