Messaging Guide for California Advocates Working to Reduce Injuries and Fatalities from Firearms

‘Together is where we save lives’: A messaging guide for California advocates working to reduce injuries and fatalities from firearms

In 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General declared injury and death from firearms a public health crisis, which highlighted the critical and ongoing need for solutions to the crisis grounded in principles of community action and systems change.

No matter who we are or where we live, we all want to reduce the public health problem of injury and death from firearms — and everyone can play a role in keeping people safe. But the promise of prevention is often missing from narratives about gun violence.

To help advocates shift the narrative, PHI’s Berkeley Media Studies Group (BMSG) partnered with the Hope and Heal Fund to create a new resource: “‘Together is where we save lives’: A messaging guide for California advocates working to reduce injuries and fatalities from firearms.” Advocates can use the guide to reframe how we talk about the most common forms of gun violence, which are also the least likely to grab headlines: domestic or intimate personal violence, suicide, and community violence.

This guide is intended for advocates; it aims to give them a roadmap for using the news to lift up those solutions and amplify messages from the communities most affected by the problem, so that the narrative around efforts to prevent firearm injury and death is as robust as prevention, intervention, and healing work happening around the state.

This resource is designed so that advocates can read its sections in any order, picking out what’s most useful and allowing users to:

• Focus on one goal at a time. Addressing a problem this big demands investments in time, energy, and resources that can take a very long time. This guide is designed to support advocates and organizers working to advance a variety of smaller, incremental changes at the community level, as well as bigger overall objectives.
• Frame prevention, intervention, and healing in the context of racial equity and community-led action in messaging and communication.
• Focus on using the news to reach decision-makers (that is, anyone who has the power to create change in institutions, systems, and communities), as well as those who can influence them.

The guide also includes advocate FAQs to get started; templates for designing your own messaging; a worksheet to identify ways to make your issue relevant to the media using examples from recent news; and more.

Understanding context

This section of the guide explains how audiences’ existing knowledge come together with the information environment (like news coverage) to influence how they interpret messages about firearms and firearm access.

Learn more about these topics in the guide:

• Beliefs about firearms
• Understanding news frames
• News frames about firearms
• Techniques for reframing

Shaping Strategy

Communicating effectively helps us get where we want to go. But you can’t figure out what you are going to say until you decide what you want to do. Language is important, but it’s not first. Messaging is never first: it flows from the specific policies, cultural shifts, or programs you want to see, not the other way around.

BMSG’s tried-and-true approach is to use the Layers of Strategy, which helps advocates think through the components of a communications strategy. To develop your overall strategy, determine:

• What is the problem you want to solve, and how do you want to solve it?
• Who has the power to make that change and what should they do?
• Who can you mobilize to exert pressure and advocate for your cause? What’s the next step they can take to be part of the solution?

Learn more about these topics in the guide:

• Naming the problem and solution
• Promising practices
• Identifying key audiences
• Mobilizing allies

Developing messages

Your overall strategy guides everything that you do, and media frames around firearm injuries and deaths can shape your audience’s “starting point” for conversations about safety and community-led approaches. But what about your message? How will you — or your messenger — frame the problem and solution, convey the values that matter, and convince your audience to act?

To develop your message strategy, think about:

• Who needs to hear your message?
• Who should convey your message?
• What should they say?

Learn more about these topics in the guide:

• Audience
• Messengers
• Message components
• What should you do when time is limited?

Using the news

Advocates may decide to use a combination of media types to reach their intended audiences. To guide this decision, consider the following questions:

• In light of our overall strategy, is news media the best way to reach our audience?
• If not, what might work better? In some situations, for instance, delivering remarks at a meeting, base-building, or organizing an email campaign may be more effective.
• If so, which outlets are most likely to reach our audience?
• When would media attention have the biggest impact?
• What strategies will we use to gain media attention?
• How will we know when we’ve been successful — or need to change course?

Learn more about these topics in the guide:

• Identifying news outlets and reporters
• Engaging journalists
• When a reporter contacts you
• Getting coverage
• Supporting authentic messengers

Sample messages and promising practices

To make our suggestions more concrete, we offer sample scenarios and messages, applied to real-life examples of promising practices (like localized data collection, support for those at greatest risk of harm, and investment in community leadership) to reduce injury and death from firearms.

Learn more about these topics in the guide:

• Community-level violence
• Intimate partner violence
• Firearm suicide

Originally published by Berkeley Media Studies Group