We love talking to our clients about value framing as a way to build trust, stir emotion, and deepen the bond between an organization and its audience. Value framing means drawing attention to specific values and moral commitments in your messages, narratives, and stories. Research shows that value framing:
- drives attention by making your messages more salient and memorable to audiences who already share those beliefs (Nelson and Garst 2005)
- drives agreement by reframing an issue in ways that align with your audiences’ existing values (Nelson, Wittmer, and Shortle 2010)
- drives trust through value representation, or the perception that your organization embodies your audiences’ beliefs (Guo and Marieta, 2015)
But not all values do the same work. Some are broad and foundational; others are sharp and distinctive. Knowing which kind to use, and where, is the real skill behind value framing. Here are three altitudes of value framing:
High-level values
Some values are so foundational, you can predict a person’s party affiliation by their commitment to them. Values like justice, equality, dignity, and shared humanity offer a broad panorama of our most deeply held ethical commitments. We hold these values to be self-evident—and so does everyone on our side of the aisle. Your peers share them; so do your funders and supporters. They constitute a shared project for societal improvement; a team effort in which everyone has a role to play. Attend a political demonstration and watch high-level values activate “collective effervescence”—the sense of transcendence that comes from shared purpose. Sociologist Émile Durkheim (who coined the term) might have clapped gleefully—except apparently he was a real sulky guy.
One thing broad-picture values can’t do is differentiate you. So, while they're are a big part of values framing, they’re not the whole thing.
These broad-picture values are profoundly inspiring: they activate emotions, moral identities, collective visions. They speak to the better angels of our nature. One thing they can’t do, though, is differentiate you from your peers. So, while broad-picture values are a big part of values framing, they’re not the whole thing.
A human rights organization invoking “dignity for all” or “we all deserve...” is speaking from the vantage point of shared values. So are stories that present individuals exercising agency and resilience, or those that emphasize shared experience. It’s the 10,000-foot view—true of almost any organization in the space, which is exactly why it resonates so widely and differentiates so little.
Mid-level values
Some values are equally shared by all, but not equally emphasized. These values—things like teamwork, collaboration, transparency, active listening—articulate aspects of your internal culture and suggest to potential partners and funders what it’s like to engage with you. Your peers share these values, but may choose not to foreground them, because they’re busy foregrounding something else.
Mid-level values occupy, well, a middle-ground. They are neither deeply inspiring nor strongly differentiating. Yet they still have a role to play, adding texture and specificity to your communications.
One mutual aid network might build its identity around “radical transparency”—publishing its books, its decisions, its mistakes. Another, doing nearly identical work, might instead foreground “community-led process,” emphasizing that beneficiaries help set priorities. Both values are broadly agreeable. Neither is controversial. But the choice of which to emphasize starts to say something distinct about each organization’s character.
Ground-level values
Some values are unique to you. They communicate a stake, a stand, a point of view. They may even imply rejecting some other value your peers hold dear. Ground-level values act as “costly signals:” they communicate a strong commitment to an approach, set of competencies, and internal culture, to the rejection of others. Choosing one of these values means visibly giving something else up, and that visible tradeoff is exactly what makes them powerful. Because they’re what sets you apart from peers, they help partners and funders understand you better. Because they require a real sacrifice, they create the strongest differentiation of all three tiers.
Ground-level values act as “costly signals:” they communicate a strong commitment to an approach, to the rejection of others.
A disaster-response organization that frames its identity around “speed over consensus” is implicitly saying it will sometimes act before every stakeholder signs off—a real tradeoff, not just a slogan. An advocacy group that frames itself around “confrontation over compromise“ is signaling it won’t soften its demands to keep a seat at the table, even when that costs it allies. Both statements would make some peer organizations uncomfortable. That discomfort is the point—it’s what makes the value legible as yours and no one else’s.
Putting your values to work
Every level has a role to play in your communications—but each plays a different one.
High-level values activate emotion, moral commitment, and trust among your allies and supporters. Use them in fundraising appeals, stories, and vision statements, where their job is to move people. But they don’t belong in the organizational values section of your brand language. Attempting to stake a claim to a high-level value falls flat because it tells a funder nothing they couldn’t also conclude about a hundred other organizations.
Mid-level values add texture. They’re useful for filling out your culture and operating style — how you work, not just what you believe—but they rarely carry a pitch on their own. They’re good supporting material, not a thesis.
Ground-level values are built for differentiation. They’re what set you apart from peer organizations. These are what you want front and center in the organizational values section of your brand language. They belong in grant proposals and cases for support too, since funders are evaluating exactly that kind of differentiation when deciding who to back.
The strongest brand language doesn’t choose one altitude and stay there. The best communications open wide—establishing shared values that bring everyone on board—then narrow, section by section, until they land somewhere unmistakably specific.
Want to chat values? 🤔
How to write them, train your team to use them? Or about how Émile Durkheim was no fun at a party? Book a 30-minute intro call.
