Messaging Matters: Why It's Crucial to Share Bright Spots and Good News About Your Community

In last week’s column, we talked about creating vibrancy and making improvements in ways that attract the growing numbers of virtual workers who can live anywhere. But making needed changes is just part of the equation. Messaging is the other part. We need to get intentional about finding our community’s bright spots and talking them up. If we don’t, who will?

Brian Boyle, founder of Issue Media Group. Image source.

Let me tell you a story about Brian Boyle. He was living in Detroit back when it was the lead story on the national news. What America was hearing about the city was not positive. People were calling Brian up and saying, “You’ve got to get your kids out of there!” Yet despite all the negative messages, when he looked around him, he just didn’t see the things the news stories described in his neighborhood. The picture being painted in the national media wasn’t Brian’s Detroit.

This drove him to start a company called Issue Media Group. Essentially, the company works with local underwriters to create quality local journalism inside certain communities. It puts people on the ground in those communities to report on what’s really happening there. Brian believes we need a lot more in-depth local news coverage, especially positive coverage.

In recent years there has been a sharp contraction in local media coverage. Media outlets tend to find stories that drive clicks, and “local news” is limited to what comes from police blotters. There is no time (and no money) to find and report on great local stories. And this erosion of local media has had serious consequences. (Of course this isn’t true for all local media. Our local paper, the Pensacola News Journal, has been the leader of positive messaging and civic engagement in our community.)

Brian shared with me a Bloomberg article titled “Local News Is Dying, and It’s Taking Small Town America with It.” The article makes the point that communities that don’t have solid local coverage have lower voter turnout and less social cohesion in general. In other words, a lack of local media coverage causes that important sense of community to deteriorate.

One thing Brian talks about is the importance of creating civic and community attachment. When people “attach” to their community, they treat it differently. They are more likely to be engaged citizens and work to make things better. Brian also says, “The next big thing is a million little things”—and the goal of many small, inspiring stories that Issue Media shares is creating that big mental shift inside its communities that ends up leading to positive change.

So here’s the bottom line: It’s urgent that we get serious about identifying and promoting our local bright spots and all the “good news” that’s happening. Messaging shapes action, and action shapes communities. If we depend on the national media, they’ll end up designing our community—and it most likely won’t be the outcome we want!

A few tips:

1. Get all stakeholders to the table. Help them create an infrastructure for pushing out messaging.

This should include the chamber, hospitals, schools, non-profits, and so forth. Too often these organizations don’t talk to each other and share good news. They might send out an occasional press release, but that’s it. Better if they all work together and constantly communicate the great news stories that carry consistent positive messages.

2. Do all you can to be a good partner to local media outlets.

Of course, much of your messaging will happen via social media, and that’s fine. Social media is powerful. Just don’t forget to support the local paper financially when you can. When sharing content or otherwise working with local media, be easy to work with. Be transparent. Be responsive. Always go out of your way to help. Certainly don’t add to the challenges they already face! Make it easy for them to tell your story. They might be short-staffed, so give them the info they need to do a great job.

3. Think of yourself as a positive ambassador.

Always be managing up the community. Encourage others to do the same. People respond to positivity. It raises our energy, makes us happier and more pleasant to be around, draws others to us, improves our relationships, and opens the floodgates to greater creativity. Remind citizens often that they, too, need to be positive ambassadors!

4. Make being negative socially unpopular.

Set a good example by talking up your community. Never “bash” it, even if you don’t agree with something that is happening. When people say something about your community that simply isn’t true, correct them. Silence implies you agree. Have the integrity and courage to speak up.

5. Be consistent. Emphasize the same themes and talking points over and over.

You want to make sure everyone is speaking in a unified voice on what makes your community great. Share good news with anyone who will listen.

6. Target both citizens and visitors.

It all works together. Citizens and visitors love the same things about communities. Plan your messaging strategy with both groups in mind and share consistent messages with both groups.

Photo by Bank Phrom on Unsplash

7. Look for bright spots and small wins to promote.

What’s going well in your community? The more good news you share, the more citizen confidence will grow. Small wins create momentum, which leads to bigger wins. What “small wins” can you promote? Soon your community looks like a place where big things are happening!

8. Make sure your messaging contributes to a culture of optimism.

Henry Ford famously said, “Whether you think you can, or think you can’t—you’re right.” We want our communities to strongly believe they can. Optimism helps us change the conversation. It gets everyone aligned and rowing together toward the same hopeful vision.

9. Zero in on those people, places, and events that create a strong “sense of place.”

Vibrant communities are cool, unique, quirky. (Click here for an earlier article on this subject.) This matters because difference, not sameness, attracts people who want to visit and settle down. The less you look like everyone else and the more you look like yourself, the better off you’ll be.

10. Share talking points with hospitality workers.

Make sure people who work in hotels, restaurants, shops, tourist attractions, and so forth have good things to say about your community and its culture. They are often on the front line with visitors. Load them up with key words and phrases and positive stories to share with customers. If you give them the language, they’ll use it.

11. Raise the civic IQ.

You want engaged citizens who are actively working toward promoting positive change. Invest heavily in civic education. When explaining a new project or improvement, focus on the why behind it. Often when people understand the big picture, they will get on board with changes. They may even become cheerleaders instead of detractors.

In Pensacola we have the CivicCon lecture series. The Pensacola News Journal and Studer Community Institute work together to bring in some of the nation’s leading thinkers and experts on solving our most pressing community problems. (This is a partnership with our local newspaper, which is really invested in civic education.) CivicCon has proven wildly successful, with more than 300 citizens at each event and more than 5,000 live video views for each session. Having people together hearing these messages at the same time has been powerful in many ways. Not only does it promote buy-in, it helps stamp out negativity (as they are armed with good information), and it creates a common language for having good discussions.

12. Drown out naysayers with positivity.

From time to time, there will be people who are deeply negative about improvements you’re trying to make. Don’t let them derail you. You’ll never make everyone happy. Just keep focusing on sharing positive messaging. And remember that social media can make five disgruntled people seem like 500!

Never underestimate the power of messaging. What we hear over and over is what we come to believe. What we believe drives what we do. What we consistently do determines how others see us—and whether they want to engage with us, live with us, invest in us…or not.

Being a message maker is a huge responsibility. Take it seriously. The quality of your messaging will make or break your community’s future. 

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