Goals of the Presentation: - Provide participants with a deeper understanding of the theory behind values based messaging. - Work through the components of VBM - Develop effective messages transferable across issue areas - Create usable messages in a variety of mediums

1. Summer Convening
July 18th, 2013
Winning the Debate:
Using Values Based Messaging to Rebuild &
Rebrand the Progressive Movement
Dustin Beilke, Values Based Messaging Specialist &
Jennifer Epps-Addison, J.D., Economic Justice Director
for Citizen Action of Wisconsin

2. Workshop Goals
● Provide participants with a deeper
understanding of the theory behind
values based messaging.
● Work through the components of
VBM
● Develop effective messages
transferable across issue areas
● Create usable messages in a variety
of mediums

3. What is Values
Based Messaging?

4. VBM = A Right Wing
Tool?
The reality is that conservatives have been
more effective at utilizing values based
messaging to shape the issue climate over
the long-term.

5. VBM is a TOOL that can be
used by ANYONE

6. Values Based Messaging =
Always on the Offensive:
If Progressives aren't driving the conversation,
we've already lost. If you are playing defense,
you're working from a deficit.

7. Conservatives try to reframe the debate around the
Affordable Care Act using Values Based Messaging after
the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare's constitutionality

8. WIsconsin Values
Communication
Initiative
The Theory Behind Values
Based Messaging

9. If We Want To Start Winning
We Have To Reform The Progressive Message
1. Progressives wrongly assume most effective
persuasion limited to facts & arguments.
2. Argue each issue in a separate silos.
3. Our tactics are based on snapshots of public
opinion which do not provide a roadmap of
what opinion must be built to support a more
just society and a richer democracy

10. Reforming Progressive Message
Continued...
4. Persuading from values and beliefs is more much more
impactful in short & long term.
a. Speaker credibility is the most important element of
persuasion--value-based moral appeals increase credibility
b. Communicating through progressive values builds up
support across issues, and builds public opinion for long
term.
c. Values-based appeals harder to counter because
create their own moral context.

11. Key Takeaway Concepts
of Values Communication
1. Builds on existing cultural capital,
values built up over generations.
2. Values-based discourse is more effective
in short term because creates own
context, improves credibility, inoculates
against responses
3. Focus on values forces a consideration of what
progressives are trying to achieve in the long term. Can
be basis for long term strategy and opportunity for
greater ALIGNMENT.

12. Humanistic
Perspective
1. Over 2,000 years ago Aristotle, one of the leading rationalists in history,
argued that both ethos (character) and pathos (emotion) trump logos
(reason) in public persuasion.
2. Large body of academic symbolic theory holds that humans perceive reality
through narratives (stories large and small).
○ Better than arguments and facts for creating a context for shaping
view of reality.
○ Reach the preconscious brain and trigger powerful pre-existing
emotional associations.
○ Powerful way to make values claims, including villains, heroes, and
dramatic action with clear "morals of the story" with application for
interpreting the external world.

13. Strengths & Challenge
Values Discourse Strengths
1. Taps into existing historically constructed frameworks which are
culturally powerful and shared across society.
2. Creates potential to build up shared values which cross the divides and
sectors of the progressive community, creating the potential to align our
issue campaigns in a way that builds progressive opinion long term.
Values Challenge
If not combined with powerful moral emotions and compelling narratives,
can produce abstract and flat discourse
Solution: Blend values-based approach with deliberate efforts to trigger
powerful moral frameworks that already exist in the human brain.

14. Human Moral
Foundations
Jonathan Haidt
(1) Care/Harm
(2) Fairness/Cheating
(3) Loyalty/Betrayal
(4) Authority/Subversion
(5) Sanctity/Degradation
(6) Liberty/Oppression
http://www.moralfoundations.org/index.php?t=questionnaires

15. Best Human Moral Triggers
For Progressives (pre-rational)
Fairness/Cheating Foundation: Humans are
morally outraged when someone gets away
with something, when worthy are punished and
unworthy unfairly rewarded.
Liberty/Oppression Foundation: Humans
morally outraged at attacks on liberty. Must
trigger that emotion through concrete and
compelling language and stories.
Source: Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind (2012)

16. Using Moral Triggers -
Example Tax Fairness
● The moral emotion of unfairness is the reaction we have
against people who take more than their fair share, we are
outraged if other people get much more than they deserve.
● Once a moral emotion is triggered, it primes people to
receive information that follows
● A long term strategy for building support for public
investments in opportunity is to repeatedly trigger the
emotion of unfairness of tax system
● Then, systematically use this moral reaction as a bridging
strategy to a broader concept of a fair economy and over
time remap the people's perceptions and beliefs

17. It's been done before. . . .
Huey Long barbecue speech (play first 40
seconds)

18. Emotional Sequence
Trigger emotion of fairness/cheating
Once triggered with narratives of unfairness
that creates an emotional response of moral
indignation bridge to values of
responsibility, which has policy implications
as emotional resolution based on
specific communication context, bridge to
values of freedom and opportunity to provide
further impetus to building support for
progressive economic vision.

19. Values That Win!
1. Freedom.
--Both positive and negative liberty
2. Responsibility.
--to each other and to common good
3. Cooperation.
--without cooperation, freedom leads to divided society
4. Opportunity.
--Both inequality/discrimination and positive sense
of conditions needed for true opportunity (economic,
environmental, health, education)

20. Core American Values
Freedom: All people should have the freedom
to lead fulfilling and stable lives, supported by
the basic foundations of economic security and
equal opportunity.
"True individual freedom cannot exist without
economic security and independence. People
who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of
which dictatorships are made." --Franklin
Delano Roosevelt

21. Freedom to Achieve the American Dream
Workers go on strike for fair pay and the right to
form a union @10:07

22. Core American Values
Responsibility:
Requires we each do our fair share. That means we have
the responsibility to improve our lives through hard work,
education, and by acting with honesty and integrity. It also
means that those of us who have prospered have a
responsibility to the community at large to help expand
opportunity for others.
"We need a spirit of community, a sense that we are all in
this together. If we have no sense of community, the
American dream will wither." - President Clinton

24. Core American Values
Cooperation: Without cooperation, freedom
leads to divided society that can't function and
can't govern.
"The reluctance of so many Republican governors
to cooperate with ObamaCare has led to the
creation of a system that looks more like the
House bill. The federal government will run the
exchanges in 25 states and will have primary
responsibility, in partnership with states, in seven
more."
--Richard Kirsch

25. Gender Discrimination

26. Opportunity
Opportunity: Embraces the diversity of American society by
ensuring all people--not just the rich and powerful--have the
opportunity to turn their talents and ambitions into a meaningful
life. Everyone who is willing and able to work should be able to
find a job that provides fair wages, benefits, and working
conditions.
We know that America thrives when every person can find
independence and pride in their work, when the wages of honest
labor will liberate families from the brink of hardship. We are true to
our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that
she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else because she is an
American, she is free, and she is equal not just in the eyes of God but
also in our own. — President Barack Obama

28. Values Message Format
1. Lead and end with core American/Progressive
Values
2. Trigger human moral responses and identify a villain
3. Articulate core progressive beliefs about an issue
and reinforce them over and over to shape public
opinion
4. Use narrative and stories to convey values and
beliefs
5. Use clear "separating issues" that communicate who
you are (and who progressives are) and define
conservatives as not sharing American values.

29. The Affordable Care Act
Making healthcare more secure and
returning control to consumers
1

30. Before the
Affordable Care Act
It was legal for health
insurance Companies to
DENY COVERAGE
to kids with cancer and other
pre-existing conditions.
We must never go back!

31. Denied
Pre-existing
condition
We must move forward!
Starting in 2014
It will be illegal for health insurance
Companies to
DENY COVERAGE or
CHARGE HIGHER RATES
to all people with pre-existing conditions

32. Freedom: Every American should have the freedom to
control their own medical decisions without interference from
insurance companies.
Access to Health Care is an
American Value

33. Access to Health Care is an
American Value
Opportunity:
●Americans who lack access to
stable and affordable health coverage do
not have a fair shot at the American
dream. They face a constant threat of
having their lives and careers devastated
by health disasters that also become
financial disasters.
● Every American should have the
opportunity to change jobs or start a small
business without losing health coverage.

34. Use narrative and stories to convey
values and beliefs:
"I'm a personal care worker; I work at a group home
and make $9 an hour taking care of people's health.
Even though I work to keep other people healthy, I do
not have affordable health care myself. I have not
been able to qualify for BadgerCare, in fact I'm just
over number 141,000 on the waiting list. I'm a father
of three, I want to give my children their chance at the
American dream but without health insurance, we're
looking at an uncertain future." Terry - Milwaukee

35. Access to Health Care is an
American Value
Responsibility:
●Everyone should take responsibility for getting health care coverage
for themselves and their families so long as it is made affordable and
accessible.
●The insurance industry should be able to make reasonable profit but in
return should be held accountable by not profiting from abusive
practices and discrimination.

36. Use clear "separating issues" that communicate who
you are (and who progressives are) and define
conservatives as not sharing American values:
Starting in 2014 we will live in an America where
everyone has the freedom to control their own
healthcare decisions no matter what.
Conservatives want to take us back to the days
when getting sick meant destitution for a family. If
you believe in an America where every citizen can
get affordable coverage no matter where they
choose to work or what gender they are, than join
the movement to protect and expand the
Affordable Care Act.

37. And that is Values Based Messaging
in a Nutshell!
Now that folks are experts, let's
actually practice what we've learned!