Framing an Organization’s Mission with Theirworld
maslansky + partners
The language experts from maslansky + partners take on the smartest, savviest, and sometimes stupidest messages in the market today. CEO Michael Maslansky and President Lee Carter bring their experience with words, communication, and behavioral science to the table — along with a colleague or client — and offer up a “lay of the language.” Their insight helps make sense of business, life, and culture, and proves over and over again that It’s Not What You Say, It’s What They Hear™.
What’s so hard about doing the right thing? In today’s environment, it’s often met with skepticism. So how do you take an organization with a noble cause: like educating the world’s youth and ending the global education crisis and get people to both care and act about it? In this episode, Lee Carter, Ben Feller, Will Howard, and podcast guest Justin van Fleet from Theirworld talk through the process we go through in framing an organization’s mission and impact in a way that ensures you’re heard the right way.
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LINKS MENTIONED IN THE SHOW
Lee Carter’s book, Persuasion
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TRANSCRIPT BELOW
HearSay Language Moments
Lee Carter:
They said what? Welcome to Heresay, a podcast from the language strategists at Maslansky and Partners, where we give our take on the strategy behind the smartest, savviest and stupidest messages in the market today and what you can learn from them. Our philosophy is it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear. And that’s why we call this Hearsay. I’m Lee Carter, president and partner of Maslansky and Partners and author of a book called Persuasion, and I’m very excited about this episode to be joined by a couple of my colleagues who I’m gonna introduce now. First, I’m joined by my fellow partner Ben Feller, who has a long specialized career in finding the right language for nonprofits and the education community. His clients have included the United Nations Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and several leading American universities covering education crises as well as the classroom challenges of student and teachers as a former national education writer for the Associated Press. Ben, thank you for joining us this morning.
Ben Feller
Hi Lee, it’s great to be here. I love talking about education and language.
Lee Carter:
And Will Howard is a Senior Vice President and colleague here at Maslansky and Partners, who joins us just about anytime we have a chance to talk about the art and science of framing, but also has a deep background in ESG, which is something else that we’re gonna be talking about today. And then Justin van Fleet is the president of Theirworld and executive director of the Global Business Coalition for Education, really focused on a mission on ending the education crisis that exists globally. Justin, thank you for joining us today.
Justin van Fleet:
Happy to be here, thanks.
Lee Carter:
So today we’re talking about the challenges of communicating when you’re doing good. Now this should not be so hard because doing good should be easy to talk about but sometimes it’s not as easy as you think. So we thought it made sense for us to bring someone like Justin to join us who’s doing an awful lot of good in the world with his organization, Their World. So Justin, can you tell me a little bit about what your organization does?
Justin van Fleet:
Their world is a global children’s charity and we’re focused on ending the global education crisis and unleashing the potential of the next generation. And so when I say the global education crisis, what I’m specifically referring to is the fact that 175 million children before they reach the age of five have never gone into a preschool. A quarter of a billion children will never go to primary school. And if we look at where all that ladders up over the course of the next few years, by 2030, there’ll be 1.6 billion young people on the planet and more than half of those, 825 million, will not have the most basic skills they need to participate in society or to enter the workforce. These are basic literacy and math skills that have either never gone to school, had to drop out early because of social pressures, or learned so little during the time in school because of the poor quality that they’re not equipped for their future. And so that’s really the challenge that we’re up against and what we’re focused on solving.
Lee Carter:
So, sounds like great work. I guess it’s probably pretty easy to get people to understand what you do and why it matters. Ha ha.
Justin van Fleet:
I wish. It’s messy and complex. And I think that’s the greatest challenge. It’s so nuanced. And each country, and each culture, and each community is so different when it comes to education and what education is for and the purpose of it and how you fund it. There are all of these different pieces that come into the mix. And so it makes it slightly complicated when we’re trying to run our hard-hitting projects and get these big campaigns out there with messages to convince political leaders where to invest and to bring along our various constituencies. We work with civil society organizations, we work with several thousand youth campaigners in over 100 countries around the world, and we have a global business coalition where we have businesses that we’re also trying to bring behind the cause and help them invest in education. And so when you have different audiences that you’re trying to engage, different messages you’re trying to deliver to different leaders, it can get pretty messy pretty quickly.
Lee Carter:
Sounds like it can get pretty messy pretty quickly, just like a lot of our clients have challenges getting through when you have so many different things that you’re trying to get across, messages from audiences. But have you noticed that it’s harder to get your message out there lately?
Justin van Fleet:
Depends on the audience. I think everyone realizes the value of education. Everyone thinks that a child should have the right to go to school. So I think that’s the easy part. It’s a hard message to find someone that’s against our cause and against the issue of helping kids get the best start in life and really fulfill their potential and change the world. I think the question or the challenge is then sort of come with the how. Who funds it? Where does the money come from? When you’re talking about lower-income countries, what can governments do when they’re constrained by both cash and capacity? What’s the role of international community, the donor countries, the big institutions like the World Bank or the UN agencies. There’s different roles for different people and how you bring all of those together to create change can be complex at times. When it lines up and everybody’s lined up to really focus on an end goal and result, you can make a big impact. We have some examples of that through the work that we’ve done in the past and that’s where you really get traction. That’s where you can really move the needles. You can get everyone aligned behind a single message and I’ll go forward in the direction to make change.
Lee Carter:
So Ben, I want to bring you into the conversation. I know you have a lot of background in the education space. What do you think are some of the challenges that come with communicating the impact of something like Justin’s trying to do? Or what do you think might be some of the obstacles that an organization like this might be facing?
Ben Feller:
So the way that Justin framed the challenge is interesting to me because in covering national education for years before moving into the work that we do and trying to make messy and complex less so, one of the big problems for anybody dealing with education and solving that global crisis is the sheer scale of it. So when you’re talking about 175 million children, 825 million children, it’s hard for people who even do care about this to know what to do with that the scale can be overwhelming. And it goes to how do I fix the problem? And then it goes to the work that we do. How do you communicate it well? And so I found in writing about education problems at a national level, when you make it smaller and you make it more personal, you make it more relevant, as long as you’re choosing examples that actually fit that bigger picture, people start to say, oh, okay, I’ve been in a situation like that. My child went through that. My school was dealing with that. And the more that you can connect it to people’s personal experiences, the scale starts to matter. In fact, it helps because you’re like, well, I knew we were dealing with this. You’re telling me that one out of every three children is going to be faced with the situation, whatever the stats are. Now you have them just in there. Okay, what can I do? And, and I’m heartened to hear that you said, people get it. What you’re doing there. Nobody’s really against your mission. That’s great. You, your advantage compared to a lot of clients we work with that people start in the right place. But then, okay, so how do I get into your story? If I’m a business, if I’m a parent, right? If I’m an education advocate. And I think the easier that you can make it for them to see and feel their own life in your story, then that scale becomes less of a.
Will Howard:
And Justin, I’m really curious if you all talk about or think about it all. I, when we work with clients on the kind of for-profit side, you know, if you’re selling a candy bar, you spend a lot of time talking about differentiation. Like what’s our niche and why, why pick our candy bar or why pick our car or our financial services product. And I’ve been intrigued as I work in the nonprofit space as well, that you know, you don’t necessarily think of differentiation in the same way, or you wouldn’t expect to going in when we’re talking about charity, but, but it’s still, I mean, for an issue as compelling as saving the children and education, there are a ton of organizations trying to do it. And do you, have you all had to have conversations or think through, how do you think about what your lane is or what your version of that is, or if I have $10 to give, why would I give it to yours versus someone else, not to say necessarily that yours is better, but that yours is. What is your lane or how do I think about it?
Justin van Fleet:
That’s a great question. We’ve spent a lot of time early on thinking about what it is that makes us unique and why do we even exist? Why do we get up every morning and come to this organization and roll up our sleeves if there are so many other groups out there working in education? And what we’ve really focused on doing is building a coalition where we play a distinct role. So we’re not a large service delivery organization. We’re not a UNICEF. We’re not a Save the Children. We’re not the World Bank out there financing education at large scale. And we’re also not a local delivery organization. We’re not in a specific community, only operating in one province. What we’re trying to do is connect the dots that allow us to do what we call unlock big change. We’re looking at what are those big levers where if we can influence the right political leaders, influence the right governments, that we can then pull a lever and have funding or new policies flow out that allow the small community organization to have more government support to actually roll up their sleeves and scale up what they’re doing and what works. If you’re UNICEF or Save the Children, we’ve prioritized an issue like we did with education emergencies and now there’s so much more funding going from governments to prioritize education, humanitarian disasters, that you get more funding to actually go out and do your work and work with governments. So what we see is our role is very catalytic in a rising tides, lift all boats capacity so that if we can, if we do our job well. All of the other organizations working in this space have more political backing and have more funding to do their work and deliver more change in the ways that they work. So that’s really our goal. We have that ability to sit outside of government. We don’t take funding from government so we don’t have to worry about what if our funding will be cut if we say something in particular, if we go off a particular issue, where other organizations do have that and they have to be a bit more political. So that’s where we really see our specific niche in this topic. The other part of that is constituencies. So we run an organization, the Global Business Coalition for Education. It’s the only group that brings together businesses on a non-competitive basis to identify how they can learn and share from one another and do better in this space. Then we also have a program called Global Youth Ambassadors where we bring 2000 young people each year into a two-year training program and they’re in dozens of countries across the planet. And it’s helping them become campaigners for these causes in their local communities and at the national level so that when we have a campaign, we actually have boots on the ground in countries that are actually helping those organizations get lined up and receive funding and do better in what they’re doing. So that’s sort of a bit of the differentiation piece. And if I could just go back to what Ben mentioned, your first comment is making it personal because I’m a stats person. I have a PhD, worked at the Brookings Institution. I love numbers, I love data. But you’re right, and the campaign that we’re running now in early childhood education development is the first campaign that I’ve found to be so universal that everyone can resonate with it. Everyone, no matter if you live in the US, in the UK, in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, there’s a global childcare crisis, and you know what it’s like if your sitter calls off sick, or if the childcare is closed, or you can’t go to work on a certain day, the dropout because the cost is so high. And stay home and take care of your children. It’s a universal issue. So we’re getting a lot of traction in that particular campaign. And I think it’s because of your point, it’s something that everyone can relate to. It’s the most universal campaign I feel like we’ve had to date because of its relatability at that very individual level.
Ben Feller:
Well, that’s great to hear. And I really love your frame of unlocking big change. That conjures immediately a sense that you guys are different and you’re trying to fix something that nobody else is. I think the role that you played as we listened to it, you started by immediately saying, well, we’re not this, right? We’re not this. And so it was really clear what you are because people understand Save the Children and these other organizations. But also it’s human nature to say, okay, if I’m gonna work with you, what do I get? So people picture products, you’re going to put a computer in every classroom. Well, it’s not that, or they picture services, right? We’re going to come down and provide humanitarian aid. And you guys are in this different space. You know, you’re a catalyst. And that is so important to unlocking the change. You’re the only one doing what you’re doing, but it’s also more abstract or less sexy. And so, and it’s also layered in with this idea that Will was talking about with differentiation, you know, companies compete. It’s in their nature to compete. So what you’ve done in pulling them together in this non-competitive space to work together is fascinating. But nonprofits typically don’t compete or they’re not overt about it. They’re like, hey, if you’re trying to solve a global crisis and we are too, let’s work together. Let’s share ideas. And that’s great, because we need that. But it makes it really hard to break through in your messaging because you have to be willing to differentiate yourself. You have to be bold and say, here’s who we are. And this is what we do that’s different than anybody else. And be proud about that. Because that attracts funding and attract support and people say, oh, I’ve got lots of choices, I want to go to you, tell me more. And that’s, I think, probably where we would direct you.
Will Howard:
Another question I’ve run into with clients, especially in the nonprofit space, where I think, I think companies, nonprofits are often willing to be opportunistic about where they can make a difference as opportunities present themselves over time and the organization kind of pursues the opportunities that are available to them to make a difference because they care about the issue and making progress, whatever that looks like, is that you can end up in a situation where your commitments are quite diffuse. Like you are doing a lot of different things. And as you even talked about, you know, we are in a lot of spaces. I was looking at some of your communications material and, you know, you start with education and then I saw something about birthing on the second page and I was like birth square that I thought we were talking about school and now we’re in the hospital, but as I looked at it and I saw that you started to bring it back to the first two years are the key to forming like brain health and basic skills. And that’s the window where if you don’t have the right foot, you manage to bring it back to education. And I just wanted to ask if that was an intentional conversation you all have had about, okay, if we’ve got our finger in all of these pots, what’s the common ingredient.
Justin van Fleet:
It’s such a good question. The way we’ve thought about it is there are three buckets or themes that we feel are really important for young people. So the best start in life, and so that’s that zero to five. And that’s everything from a healthy birth, family support, health and developmental opportunities in preschool to prepare a young person to succeed in school and then in life. So best start in life is our first bucket of work. The second is a safe place to learn. So making sure that every young person has access to a school that they feel safe in learning in. Primarily our work has been in humanitarian crises where we’ve done most of those projects and initiatives and campaigns. We also focus in on marginalized populations, in particular girls in other types of groups, child laborers and making sure that they have the right and the opportunity to go to school. And then the third is skills for the future. So making sure that whatever you’re leaving school with or education or whatever your education looks like is something that you can go out into the world and participate and make a difference. And so that’s the way we think about it. The best start in life, and a safe place to learn, and the skills for the future, the three main priorities that we have in the broad space of education.
Will Howard:
I just have to say that when I looked at those three things, I smiled because when I’m first sitting down to think about how I should frame something, there’s a tool that I always go to, which is, well, what is this? What does this do? And why does it matter? And those are the three questions that I kind of play with and how I could answer those different questions. And each of your three areas maps to one of those, right? Like you’ve gone to the why it matters with the best start in life, which is the bigger picture emotional benefit. You’ve gone to what it does, which is what are the skills that we’re actually giving them? What are they actually going to learn through this process? And then I think really interestingly, and we’ll talk about some of the work we’ve done later. And I’ve actually seen this theme really work in this space. You’ve taken it to the, to the place, the safe space to learn. Like, what is this? It’s about a place. It’s about a classroom. It’s not about big E education. It’s not about education reform. It’s about a thing in a place and made it physical. What is it? And I think that’s really powerful. And you’ve kind of covered all your bases across those three. So I thought it was a, it was either great strategy or great serendipity to see those, those boxes check.
Justin van Fleet:
Probably a little bit of both, but that’s great.
Lee Carter:
So, Justin, I’ve got a question for you, and that is, you know, a lot of our clients are big companies, and they partner with organizations like yours, and they’re often trying to figure out how to explain that partnership or that collaboration and why it makes sense for them to be doing that. So what if one of your business partners came to you and said, can you just give me some language? How do I talk about this partnership and why we’re doing it? What do you tell them?
Justin van Fleet:
That’s a great question and it depends on the business and depends on the partnership. I think that’s where it serves. There’s no one partnership we do looks the same. There are a lot of common threads within them, but they’re all a bit distinct and different. We have some companies that come to us because they want to do more in education or they want to understand how they can use education to drive either a social issue they care about or drive aspects of their business at the same time, sort of have that dual gain or dual benefit sit down with them and actually help them think about how to make the best use of their assets to make change. And so that conversation is very much about we’re helping you make a greater impact in the world and also at the same time advance your business. And that could be looking at whether you have products and services, whether it’s communities that you work in, whether it’s the expertise that your leadership of the business could bring to the table just by mentioning the issue and going out and talking to governments where you’re working to raise profile. So there’s a whole lot of different areas of work that we can do with companies in that area. But then other companies really want to drive on-the-ground progress and on-the-ground change and that’s where we partner up and we run a project or we run a campaign. So if Microsoft or HP came to us, I would say our partnership is all about helping young refugees get back into school and make a future for themselves and rebuild their country. We’re doing a huge program right now in Ukraine with those companies where we’ve delivered 70,000 laptops and learning devices and today as we speak there’s 1.5 million Ukrainian refugee or displaced children who are either using one of those devices in a computer center in their home or connecting into a classroom taught remotely by a Ukrainian teacher using one of those devices. And so they’re having a huge impact and a huge footprint. And so it really depends on what the company is. We always go back to what the company wants to achieve, and that’s where we start from. It’s not work with us because we’re doing this great thing that’s independent of you. It’s the conversations where we can drive your business goals, and at the same time, you can have a huge impact on society and the next generation. I don’t know if that makes sense, but maybe you can actually help me with that. Maybe that’s what I need some help from your group.
Lee Carter:
Makes perfect sense.
Will Howard:
No, I mean, that makes absolute sense and it’s hugely aligned with the way we’ve been advising clients, especially recently to thinking about talking about the good they’re doing in the world is you have to tie it into who you are as a business and also how it honestly just makes business sense for you to be involved. I think we’re in a time where extracurriculars feel a little dangerous for companies to say that they’re just kind of dabbling in an issue because they care about it or playing politics. And if they can instead link it to HP. You know, talking about how the next generation of tech literacy, literate kids is the next generation of customers, right? Like making it about a symbiotic relationship between their business interests and their, um, what would otherwise be kind of philanthropic investment. I am curious.
Justin van Fleet:
It’s funny you say that because I’ve seen that change over the years with the companies we’ve been working with. Where it started out, they’d support education from a philanthropy or CSR portfolio. And over the past decade, it’s shifted very much to these are our goals as a company, both our internal ESG metrics and also here’s a couple social things that we pointed out that we want to be able to affect. And if it doesn’t match with that, we’re not doing it. And so it’s exactly to your point. It has to fit straight into the business strategy to be a good partnership with the business.
Will Howard:
Continuing with that arc of timeline, have you noticed a change recently where we’ve been talking a lot about clients with some of their hesitance to be communicating in the wake of some of the scrutiny and the woke-ism accusations? Have you noticed clients pumping the brakes at all on their either participation or communication around these issues? Or as you said at the top, are we dealing with something so fundamentally positive when you’re talking about children that they feel safe kind of soldiering ahead on this.
Justin van Fleet:
Yeah, I think on education we’ve been pretty safe in that sense because there is a strong business case. I mean, there are so many businesses seeking talent, having trouble finding the right talent that need the skills for their own business to succeed, that need young people that can come in with innovative ideas, that need to have better government relations and governments are always trying to deliver higher quality education systems, or that need consumers in markets that they’re trying to enter that actually have disposable income having a basic level of education to participate in society and participate in the economy, you’re not able to buy the goods and services a business has. So I think there’s a really strong business case overall that fits with education. But I think as other issues have become more prominent in sort of the space of ESG, whether it’s climate, whether it’s DEI, my belief is that you can’t have a diverse workforce if you haven’t given the opportunity to young people from and be part of, and you can’t have a group of people that care about and can address climate change if they can’t read or do basic math. So I think there’s a direct link there, but that’s where I find the breakdown where it’s becoming a bit more difficult for us because those issues are taking prominence in a lot of the corporate portfolios where education’s sort of a secondary thought, but not seen as the main primary solution.
Will Howard:
Mm-hmm. I love what you did there, by the way, just naturally. And it’s something I think we see clients struggle with sometimes is, you know, whatever, they take whatever the simplest explanation of the activity is and put it at face value, we’re donating education and they don’t take that extra step to explain the link between that and whatever the advancement of the goal is. With a little thought and the right story. You can link education to DEI. You can link education to climate. You can link it to just about whatever, right? If you tell the story and if you connect those two dots for people and that to me is like framing in a nutshell and it’s that extra step of storytelling on top of just taking your commitments at face value.
Justin van Fleet:
It’s so funny you mentioned that because we just put out this ESG playbook which was specifically focused on that. We took the top 14 material risks that companies have and then we tied education solutions to addressing those risks to help them sort of make that internal link and then have metrics around both of those social and business aims.
Will Howard:
So smart. I find those kind of resources so valuable because I do think people struggle sometimes to tell that story.
Lee Carter:
And so I want to build on that and talk about a couple of other examples of work that we’ve done to try and help some nonprofits tell their story in a more effective way. So let’s just talk for a second about some case studies of similar challenges that we’ve worked on. Will, I want to start with you and dig into one of our partnerships that we have at Maslansky and Partners. We work with Pencil. If you could just tell us a little bit about the language that we did with them and how it might be relevant to this conversation.
Will Howard:
Well, I’m not going to have to try very hard to make it relevant, because I think so many of the challenges they were facing are some of the ones that we’ve already highlighted here. So pencil. As an organization operating in New York, helping serve public school system in New York and in particular they played a very similar they played a connecting role and a facilitating role, bringing together businesses and schools and trying to get kids into offices to see a working environment and also get working professionals into the schools to kind of expose the children to what those people’s careers were like, helping these kids see what the professional opportunities were out there, help them learn some of the skills relating to the office that maybe don’t get taught in school, how to introduce yourself, how to work on a resume, how to get an internship, things like that. But the role that they played was ultimately a facilitating role. They were a middleman or a broker. And sometimes it’s a little hard when you’re the middleman to articulate your value. Your value is indispensable, but it is not intuitive, right? To explain why you’re a necessary piece of this puzzle when it’s the partners you’re connecting who seem to be the focus of the story. And so we had to work with them a little bit. We taught the kind of the overarching piece of language we came up with was the core idea that they’re fundamentally connecting students to success and leaning into that connecting aspect. But I think that the part that I found the most powerful in the work was trying to find what the benefit of that connection is and how it really translates into an actual real world result. And so we had opening eyes, opening minds and opening doors as their three areas of focus, right? Where you’re trying to help kids realize what’s possible, realize where they could be, kind of getting a sense of what they could grow up to be. And I think that even some of the making it physical with the opening the doors and really thinking about getting these students in spaces they wouldn’t otherwise have had access to like if I’m in a you know an underserved public school in New York, am I really gonna have a chance to get that internship? Or see what it’s like in that office and even realize these options on the table for me I think is was a really powerful shift that we helped them work.
Lee Carter:
Another one I want to talk about is Head Start. And Head Start focuses on that same area that you talk about from birth to five years old. And it is an amazing organization. And as you said, they have one of those challenges where it’s like, how could you oppose taking care of kids and giving them opportunities, except back in 2010, they were facing just that. Because the way that they were talking about themselves was making them seem like they were a program that be cut. So in 2010, Republicans took over Congress under Obama, and Republicans took over Congress with a promise of cutting excess spending. And Head Start at the time, instead of positioning themselves around opportunities, around the kids, was very much talking about themselves as a program, one of the last programs from the war on poverty. They were really focused on a lot of the language that made it a program of the left legacy, rather than a program that was focused on opportunities and kids. So they came to us and they said, we know that we can agree that this is a program we need to protect. This is about something that we can all agree on, which is giving kids opportunity and access to things that they wouldn’t otherwise have. And it wasn’t just the kids, the whole surround for the families in those early years. So we did some research, we took a look at their language and we realized their language was just causing more problems than it was doing good. It was really creating a political event. People looked at it as a welfare program rather than an education program. And so we changed the language instead of talking about it as one of the, you know, as a program, instead of talking it as something to the war on poverty, instead of talking about it at all of these things, we talked about it as creating opportunities for all kids to have access. And it changed the debate. So instead of losing funding, they gained funding. And they’ve used that language for the last 13 years. Interestingly, now they’re trying to figure out their reason for being in the world where we might be having universal pre-K still very much a role for them. But staying relevant, it’s been interesting. But that change in language is something that’s really lasted and helped them get through the last 13, 14 years, which is, I think sometimes you change language, you change perceptions, change the category where people place you, and it says, OK, now you make sense, whereas before you might not have.
Will Howard:
One last one that I just wanted to mention, too, because it’s very tied to that what I think is so smart that their world has done by talking about the safe space to learn and the place, is we did some work around education reform in a red, in a kind of a purplish red state, where we had to make this issue as bipartisan as possible. And we went in and we were essentially doing something similar to Head Start where we were trying to talk about the need to increase funding for the schools. But the messages we tested, it was like we did sessions with Democrats and sessions with Republicans and we were talking to committee men and they were people who were, you know, died in the wool, active in each of the parties locally. And the things that one session liked the most were exactly the things that the other session liked the least. Like if you say we need to invest, spend more, we need to put more money, our schools should be palaces, we need to be number one in the world, the Democrats loved it, and the Republicans just heard, we don’t care about comparing ourselves to other countries and also why are you, we don’t wanna spend all this extra money, right? And then conversely, it’s like we need the right incentives and we need to reward people who do well. And the Republicans are like, yes, that’s exactly what we should be doing. And the Democrats say, that’s not what the point is here. Right. And, and it seemed almost impossible to find common ground, but the, especially whenever you were talking about education, big E as like this space that needed to be reformed, but the one thing everyone could agree on is that the classroom needs help, like the classroom as a space is the place that we should be supporting. It’s the place everyone wants everyone to be having a good time. It’s where they think all the money should be going. And it’s other places that it starts to get fuzzier what the benefit of the dollar is when you’re spending it. So focusing less on education and more on stronger classrooms, also making stronger communities. And that was kind of the core piece of language was stronger classrooms, stronger communities. And you essentially cut out the fuzzy middle part, the education system, and you focus on the smallest possible space, the classroom and the end result the unresolved place, the community, right? And take out the difficult middle part of the burger.
Justin van Fleet:
Something that made me think about one of our arguments that we use when we’re trying to get people interested in education, it’s that same notion of the classroom. Because if I go to anyone and I say, would you walk into a hospital that looked like an emergency room or an operation room from 100 years ago and have brain surgery? You’re like, no way, I’d never do that. Would you put a child into a classroom and do brain surgery, you know, invigorate and then try to get their brain to develop? In a classroom that looks the same way it did 100 years ago, and that’s exactly what we’re doing. People can start to imagine, well, yeah, the classroom hasn’t changed in the past 50, 100 years, yet medical technology, medical science, and the health system has, and so using that as a comparison of how important it is to invest in these spaces and make them look different and feel part of the times as sort of the world’s developing around us, and education remains so unchanged in the way that we think about what education is.
Will Howard:
I love the comparison of education to brain surgery. That’s the kind of reframe that I think makes people think differently. We are in a child’s mind changing things. This is high stakes. I love that as an interesting, different way to look at the, and pitch, that totally shifts the conversation.
Ben Feller:
See, Will is naturally just more optimistic than I am. I think it’s actually equally cool, but I was gonna ask you, Justin, about a problem, because I’ve been steeled in the fights of Washington, D.C. on education. So, you know, listening to Will and Lee talk about the education cases we’ve worked through successfully, I’m thinking about the story of their world and how many of these things you’re already doing well. So you have the resonant idea of unlocking big change, right, gets people excited. You have the three buckets or pillars that you focus on that frames it up really well. Um, you’ve got the audience mindset when you talked about working with businesses, what problem are you trying to solve? Not what you’re doing, but what do they need? So a lot of these things are working well, but you used a word in one of your previous comments that I think is really sort of sneakily dangerous and that’s secondary education is secondary, secondary to climate, secondary to DEI. And that was what I found in covering education was such the battle and in counseling universities and nonprofits is the battle is that when people hear education, the importance of it, they say, oh, of course. And anytime I hear somebody say, of course, I go, uh-oh. Because when you’re in of course mode, it means, I know that, I assume that, now tell me something different. And the point is they’re not fully grasping the challenge and the urgency of education. So my question for you is, as you’re thinking about all the things you’re doing, what is there we’re doing to instill a sense of urgency, particularly with businesses? And is that creeping into your language challenge?
Justin van Fleet:
You’re right on the money right there with that assessment because the conversation data, this reframing and what we’ve been talking about, it’s when it works with people. When people already get it but they’re also engaged. And I think you’re right, most of the people assume, oh yes, of course, it’s important but we’ve got these climate goals that we have to hit these targets on this year and that’s my main focus. So of course, you know, kids have to learn and read and write and that’s fine, but we’re gonna focus on climate. And so I think more so than, we talked earlier about competing between nonprofits and nonprofits tend to work together. And what we’re actually trying to also work together on is work across sectors because what I find is that nonprofits actually tend to compete more in different sectors. You have the education nonprofits fighting against the climate nonprofits for the same pot of funding. And so what our tactic is, is how can we work with the folks that do health and child development? How can we work with the individuals and the organizations working on climate? So that we’re all working together in that sense because that’s where we can really Rising tide lifts all boats of educations not just secondary but essential to all of those strategies and what those organizations are doing And so I think that’s you’re exactly right because every time you get the of course But we’re gonna do this other thing that we’re already focused on because that’s gonna happen and then I think companies are the one audience the one that constituency that’s starting to feel this even more and understand the importance of this and it’s mainly driven by the skills and the talent gap. When 50% of recruiters cannot find the right talent for the jobs that they have available right now, that’s an education issue and that’s not an issue where we can just retrain people when they’re 18, 19, and 20. It’s actually rewiring young people when they’re born at the age of 0 to 5 when all of the soft skills that companies want in their workplace. Teamwork, creativity, innovation, working with different types of people, appreciation for diversity. You can’t teach a 27-year-old or a 45-year-old that really easily. It’s something that you can teach a three-year-old really easily. And they can take that through their education journey and into the workforce. And so that’s, I think, one of my challenges right now is I’m trying to convey to the business audience in particular that early childhood development is so essential for the future of their businesses. If they actually care about these talent issues they’re facing now, it’s not an acute issue. It’s a chronic issue. We have to go back a decade into the pipeline to really resolve in the longer term. And that’s with our Act for Early Years campaign. Getting the business community involved has been a different type of challenge for us. And it’s because of that issue of it being a secondary issue or not the most important issue of the day. But I think with childcare costs, the impact it’s having on employees showing up to work, the loss of $3 billion in revenue in the US each year because of childcare issues that their employees have, that it’s starting to resonate in a way that we can potentially use those realities and those personal experiences to get people behind the cause.
Ben Feller:
Well, see, I love that, Justin, because you see what you did there. When I’ll lay back to the beginning, you made it personal. So these education challenges, when you talk about them as the United States isn’t competing well on reading a math scores and we haven’t for years, it washes over people. It matters, but it’s sort of societal. It’s abstract. When you say I can’t get the workers to make my company thrive or my employees can’t show up because they don’t have childcare, then it’s personal. We need to do something. Well, we have an urgent challenge, but we also can help solve that. And that’s, I think, what matters, and that can rally the business community. So you have urgency, you have a solution, and then the last part of it is, and you can do something about it. Here’s how we think about it. Now you’ve just straightened that line and made it so much shorter to caring, and all of a sudden, you’re not talking about education as secondary. You’re talking about it as essential.
Will Howard:
Mm-hmm.
Ben Feller:
And that’s, I think, you know, businesses are thinking about what do we need to succeed today and tomorrow and who can help us. It just it’s a in some ways it’s such a practical conversation and education the way you’ve already tied it to all these other things is I think it’ll continue to work in your benefit but you there’s almost like with education as a special burden it is so pervasive. Everybody can relate to you know somebody in their family, their own education experience, they know somebody who’s a teacher. They’re out of work and they need to be retrained. It’s so pervasive that it becomes almost like it washes over. It’s too big. And if you make it personal and urgent, then you start to get into action.
Will Howard:
Yeah. It’s the urgent versus chronic if people properly waited to the future and the importance of the future, it would, we would have a much easier time with all the work we do in the financial services space, trying to get people to save for retirement. They, they don’t like people just in reflexively wait the present problem much more than the future problem, even if the future problem is cumulatively harder. And so I like that you have not only made it personal, you have made it timely. So you’re still focused on the long-term benefit, and you’re still serving the long-term benefit, but you’re also pointing to visible gaps today that we’re helping to close.
Lee Carter:
Exactly.
Justin van Fleet:
See what you did there you’ve made me go back and I have to increase my 401k contribution match up. By the end of the day now I’m thinking now I’m getting worried you’ve made it personal.
Lee Carter:
So I want to do a little bit of a frame storm here. And I know we’ve got a few minutes left. So I’m going to try to do this in a little bit rapid fire way. And we always say that the first thing that we need to consider is your target audience, because we say that it’s not what you say that matters, it’s what they hear. So one of the things that we like to do is ground ourselves in your audience. Now I know you have a number of them, but for this exercise, Justin, I’d like us to think about one of your audiences that you’re trying to reach. If you could just tell me who they are and what they care about, we’ll start playing with some language.
Justin van Fleet:
Let’s go the business route. Let’s try to think about these corporates that we’re trying to have come behind education.
Lee Carter:
Okay, so you’ve got some big companies out there. What do they care about?
Justin van Fleet:
So they care about the bottom line. They care about quarterly revenue. They care about their employees showing up to work. They care about being relevant in the marketplace. Ultimately, they care about the societies where they live and work, and they wanna make an impact and be positively seen. So there’s a lot about perception and community engagement in there as well, I’d say.
Lee Carter:
Let’s think about, so you’ve got a bunch of different kinds of companies you can work with. You have technology companies, as you mentioned. You could have a pharmaceutical company, you could have a financial services company. For purposes of this exercise, which one should we zero in on?
Justin van Fleet:
We can go anywhere. What do you guys think would be most interesting? The technology companies are easier for me because they have products and services that can go into the education marketplace. There’s a bit more of a direct return if we want to go for something on the easier side. If we want to pick something more challenging, we can go to financial services and give that a shot.
Will Howard:
I think that the technology seems like the place to start if that’s the one that works. I have a couple questions right off the bat about words you’ve chosen that we could think about. So I always start with, you know, the what it is question, what are you, and what are the nouns you’re dealing with, to me is always a really interesting one. So the first thing I noticed is you are a global children’s charity. I have two questions there. Why charity? Was that something you were, you know, legally that’s the term? Or do you notice a difference between how people respond to a charity versus a nonprofit?
Justin van Fleet:
That’s a really good point. So we started out in the UK where charity is the legal term and we’re a registered charity. In the US we have a 501C3, so we’re a registered nonprofit organization. So we have both that we can work with in the words that we choose to use and I don’t know which one.
Will Howard:
Okay, and have you noticed a difference? Do you notice a difference or any assumption people? Yeah.
Justin van Fleet:
Well, I think charity, especially from an American perspective, I think Americans think of a charity as sort of giving money to help someone who’s not well off. I think that’s sort of like the thought behind it, whereas what we’re doing is much more dynamic and campaigning and innovative and pushing the boundaries of where society and policy is. And so I think it’s a really good point because I think the word charity may actually bring up sort of a sense of something a bit more stale. If you’re an American audience, for example, compared to what we’re actually doing day to day.
Will Howard:
I also go back to the question of how are you supporting my bottom line? I think the word charity to maybe. Ring some write-off bells. Like this is money that I’m giving away for a good cause. I’m donating to a, like the phrase is always donate to a charity. A donation is distinctly divorced from an investment. Right. And so I almost wonder if the charity word takes us to a more of a giving money away space and as opposed to that aligned with business objective space.
Justin van Fleet:
And that’s part of the reason why in the US, that’s where our global business coalition for education is registered. It’s registered as a 501C3 so we can talk about it in a different type of way and not have to use that legal term charity necessarily because it’s much more, we’re looking for much more than just giving money. Yes, giving money is great because it enables us to do the work that we’re doing, but we actually want partnership. We actually want people rolling up their sleeves and doing something a lot more innovative in working with us in a way that brings their skills and talents and resources to the table, into the challenge.
Will Howard:
And you talk about yourself as a children’s charity as opposed to an education or workforce development or any of those other kind of blanks you could have slotted in there. Is there a reason you guys went with children?
Justin van Fleet:
Children, it goes back to a lot of our history as an organization. We started out very much in the birth to five space initially, in a community-based, supporting local community organizations to do the work that they’re doing. And so I think it’s been almost a legacy term. We’ve always started with the individual, started with the child, and then helping them grow into all of these different spaces throughout life.
Ben Feller:
This frame of unlocking big change, Justin, I’m always thinking about when we do language exercises with our clients, let’s be provocative. Let’s see how far we can push with not the goal of are we cool, are we bold, are we aggressive, but always thinking about the audience. If they’re sitting across from you, like, no, you really need to hear this. So when you talk about unlocking big change, how far would you be willing to go if we said unlocking big change like no one else is? Like no one else can? Is there a theme there that you say, oh, okay, so I’m looking at all these global foundations and organizations. You guys are unlocking something like no one else is? Prove it. Back it up. But at least then you’re pulling them into a conversation. How comfortable would you be?
Justin van Fleet:
I think that’s great because I actually do believe in what we’re doing. We are distinct and we’re doing something that other organizations aren’t doing and we are unlocking big change in ways that others aren’t. Otherwise we wouldn’t have the track record and the examples I could then easily point to when someone says, what does that mean? How do you do it? So I’m actually willing to push it further, Ben. I like that suggestion.
Ben Feller:
Yeah, I think that is something that we might have unearthed in this conversation because you can back that up right away with here’s how. It’s not abstract, it’s real. And now you’ve pulled them in.
Justin van Fleet:
Exactly. I really like that. This is perfect timing because we’re having a lot of our strategic planning meetings right now for next year in our campaign meetings. That’s great.
Will Howard:
I go back and forth on this one, cause I’ve run into a lot of clients who are, who are using it. The, the education crisis, it feels like we live in an age of a thousand crises, like everything is a crisis. Um, do you find that it’s an arm race basically, and you have to use crisis to even get airtime too, because everyone else is calling it a crisis? Um, how has that phrase played for you?
Justin van Fleet:
I find the word crisis helps us quickly give the scale of the challenge. Half of the world’s population is not on track to have the most basic skills they need and be left out of the future of the economy. It opens up that conversation really quickly but then allows us to pivot to the solution. So what do we need to do? We need to get every child where they’re born with the best start and we can go straight into the solutions. So I do find it useful in that area but I do think given the number of crises that are at any given moment around the world, we need to be quick to provide sort of the hope and solutions so we can’t just stop at, we’re solving the global education crisis and then end the conversation there. We need to quickly pivot into what the solutions and what the hope and what the positive messages are because that’s what I feel despite there’s this crisis out there that we’re working to solve, we’re actually, we have positive stories every day. If you sign up for our newsletter, you’re getting a great piece of happy news in your inbox at least once a week of someone making a better future for themselves or their community or doing something really cool or innovative. I think that’s the part that people need to hear right now, especially given what we’re facing in the world and what happens when you open up the newspaper or turn on the television or listen to the radio or a podcast about what’s happening in current events. I think crisis helps open the door, but we need to be quick to provide those solutions of hope and inspiration and good things happening because good things are happening.
Will Howard:
My one thought was if I had the chance to test this, I would love to, to me, a crisis is so manifold that it doesn’t necessarily present an immediate solution. Like it sounds diffuse and multifaceted. I know that people have started talking about the opportunity gap and like the idea of a gap is interesting because it can be closed. Like the solution is presented by the problem very immediately. And I would want to explore, is it an education shortage? Is it an education? Is there some way that you could tweak that, that just makes it solve that little bit more solvable and presents the solutions right away?
Lee Carter:
Well, I was going to go there too. It reminds me of, I do a lot of news appearances and I was, I’m on this one show on a regular basis and I realized that the segment before me always had this big banner across it that said, Breaking News Alert. And I said to the producer, I was like, is there ever a day that you don’t have a Breaking News Alert? And they’re like, actually, no, I think that’s been there for the last couple of years. And so I am curious if there is in a way that… I love that the crisis conveys urgency, but I like, as Will talked about it, trying to make it something that seems a little bit more solvable.
Justin van Fleet:
Yeah, I feel they agree. Whenever I use the phrase, we always say, end the education crisis. There’s a slight hint that the next sentence could be hope and a solution, but I think you’re right. Playing around with that could be really important.
Lee Hartley Carter:
So we love playing with words. This is what we do. I want to thank you, Justin, for joining us. Can you just tell everybody how to sign up for your newsletter if they wanted to get it? Because I’d like to get a little bit of good news in my email box every day as well.
Justin van Fleet:
Yeah, that would be great if you go to www.thereworld.org. You can sign up for our newsletter, read some good news. And if you’re a business, you can go to gbc-education.org and register your business with us. You not only get good news, but some good solutions that you can put into place in your own business.
Lee Carter:
Well, thank you so much, Justin. We love your organization and what we do, and we love to help with language. So reach out any time that you are thinking about this. And for all of you who tuned in, and thanks so much for joining us. For more language insights and to be in the loop and all the other fun stuff we’re doing, follow us on LinkedIn at Maslansky and Partners, and join our mailing list at maslansky.com/connect. That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more episodes of hearsay because when it comes to truly effective communications, it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.
