Driving Social Change

Core Services

As a full-service agency, we provide the complete range of strategic communication services to advance the work of social purpose organizations. From designing and implementing direct change campaigns and crafting powerful narratives, to creating social purpose brands and harnessing the social impact potential of digital, we help clients make lasting impact.

Capabilities

• Audience and marketing research 
• Audience/stakeholder mapping and engagement
• Campaign management and strategic counsel
• Change campaigns 
• Community engagement, partnerships and collaborations
• Digital services 
• Earned media/public relations
• Graphic design 
• Infographics and whiteboard animations
• Measurement, evaluation and results reporting 
• Narrative, issue framing and message development 
• Paid and donated media/public service advertising
• Planning
• Social purpose branding
• Spanish-language creative services 
• Training and technical assistance
• Thought leadership

Narrative and Issue Framing

Narrative can be one of the most important tools change agents have in advancing a more just and sustainable world. Narratives shape what people think and believe, and what they’re willing to support or do. We draw on research to articulate new values-based narratives to frame issues, change public dialogue, shift power dynamics and drive changes in mindsets, societal expectations, policy and practice. Learn how narrative can be a tool for social change.

Capabilities

• Evaluation
• Narrative scans and analyses
• Narrative, framing and message development
• Message framing and testing
• Message guides and tools
• Qualitative and quantitative research 
• Social listening and environmental scans

Change Campaigns

We research, develop and design, and implement and evaluate campaigns to impact attitudes and understanding, behavior and social norms, and systems and policies. Guided by the voices of diverse stakeholders, we co-create integrated solutions to complex problems. We specialize in multi-stakeholder campaigns and work with coalitions and movements. And we marry the best of social marketing with our proven approach to public will building to create change that lasts long after the campaign has ended.

Capabilities

• Advocacy and public policy initiatives
• Knowledge dissemination campaigns
• Narrative change initiatives
• Public will building
• Social marketing/behavior change campaigns

Research

MG designs strategic communication initiatives grounded in insights and understanding from research. We design and conduct qualitative and quantitative research to identify, segment and learn more about stakeholder groups; to explore levels of understanding and behavioral intentions; to surface core values as decision drivers; to identify pathways to policy and practice change; to test narratives and messaging, and to identify baselines and measure progress and results. Learn More.

Capabilities

• Audience and marketing research
• Environmental scans and competitive landscape audits
• Exploration of core values and decision drivers
• Identification of baseline measures of awareness, understanding, behaviors, levels of support, etc.
• Internal and external communication audits and assessments
• Literature and secondary research reviews
• Stakeholder mapping, analysis and segmentation
• Testing of narratives, message frameworks, brands and campaign strategies
• Tracking, measurement and evaluation

Digital Services

We harness the power and reach of the digital to listen, see trends and patterns, facilitate or accelerate engagement and to drive activation. As a catalyst and leader at the intersection of technology, social impact communication and public will building, we work with our clients to develop digital strategies, find insights, engage stakeholders and advance social change initiatives. From advocacy and community building to fundraising and stakeholder engagement, we help change agents utilize digital to advance mission.

Capabilities

• Data driven analytics and social listening
• Stakeholder insights and engagement
• Campaign strategy and execution
• Creative and content strategy
• Tech strategy and product development
• Community growth strategy

Branding and Graphic Design

A brand is more than a logo. It reflects the aggregate experience—what people think and how they feel about an organization. MG crafts brand identities that resonate with diverse stakeholders, build trust and carry powerful stories. Our full-service design team translates that brand into powerful and compelling creative assets across all mediums and channels in ways that connect, convey relevance and compel action. And we ensure that the brand is lived in the culture of the organization by designing training, tools and engagement programs.

Capabilities

• Ad creative
• Brand audits and assessments
• Brand message and brand story development
• Brand training
• Brand and visual identity development/refresh
• Brochures, annual reports and other print materials 
• Competitive and landscape audits
• Digital graphics
• Environmental and interpretive design
• Graphic design and production
• Infographics
• Logo design and visual identity
• Naming
• Tagline development
• Videos and whiteboard animations

Strategy

We help organizations plan for and move forward with repositioning, growth or greater mission alignment. We create strategies alongside stakeholders, building a shared sense of ownership, and ensuring recommendations are realistic and actionable. We take care to build a process that fits our clients’ capacity and leaves room to scale up or down as needed.

Capabilities

• Operationalizing equity (designing and applying an equity lens across policies, practices, strategies and programs) 
• Organizational, portfolio and initiative impact assessments 
• Resource, revenue, campaign and sustainability planning 
• Strategic planning

Culture

We partner with organizations to create or strengthen values-based cultures that advance mission, guide leadership decision-making and behaviors, and ensure stakeholders have a positive and consistent experience in every interaction. Taking a systemwide approach, we help transform policies, practices, rewards and recognitions to reinforce desired actions and behaviors to create sustainable culture change. Culture lives in an organization’s history, its people, structures and programming. Realigning the culture helps achieve equity, diversity and inclusion goals.

Capabilities

• Change management
• Design or adaption of systems, structures and teams
• Exploration of values-based behaviors 
• Justice, equity, diversity and inclusion organizational assessment

  

Capacity and Skills Development

We meet organizations where they are, helping them define their needs and opportunities, and then providing support and sharing the knowledge, approaches and tools needed to carry the work forward independently.

Capabilities

• Coaching to shape vision and priorities, and nurture a values-based culture 
• Leadership, governance and board development
• Partnership and coalition building
• Resource development 
• Technical assistance and training for staff, affiliates, networks and other groups in:
  • strategic communication
  • messaging, media and outreach
  • community engagement
  • policy advocacy 
  • movement building
  • environmental conflict resolution, including issues of natural resource management, land use and other environmental policies
  • intercultural conflict mediation, including historic issues of race, class and culture
  • justice, equity, diversity and inclusion 
  • fundraising

Experiential Design and Facilitation

We take a human-centered approach to ensure all participants—whether in-person or participating virtually—feel heard and part of a larger vision, take ownership, and are excited about the co-created solutions and plan forward.

Capabilities

• Convenings 
• Public engagement processes 
• Retreats  
• Virtual learning and event design
• Workshops and planning/creation sessions

Our Approach

No two communities, Tribal nations or social groups are alike. We check our assumptions and a one-size-fits-all perspective at the door. This approach—focused on developing relationship-centered collaborations and strategies—is rooted in:

• respecting all cultures and facilitating processes that encourage people to have a real and open dialogue, listen and learn from each other, recognize power structures, find ways to transform relationships and disrupt systems that exclude, so communities, even those in conflict, find mutually beneficial pathways
• facilitating systems change that takes into account the unique and individual needs of everyone in the system
• co-creating solutions is the collaborative process of drawing from the diverse base of knowledge, creativity, expertise, perspectives and lived experiences of communities in order to help participants explore shared values and understand diverse perspectives
• developing actionable strategies that draw on a deep understanding of the needs, values, cultural context and experiences of stakeholders
• creating audience-informed communication so content and design are based on literacy, accessibility and cognitive needs, spoken language and context

The Intercultural Lens

Across all our work, we use our own theory-of-change framework called the “application of an intercultural lens.”

The lens does four things:

• helps identify, embrace and consider the multiple intersecting identities of stakeholders 
• allows us to understand cultural context and be guided by community strengths and cultural and ancestral wisdom
• serves as an organizing principle to identify needs, opportunities and power dynamics
• guides the co-creation of messages and strategies that lead to action and results

We apply an intercultural lens to everything we do. Learn more!

Offerings Across Our Practice Areas

The application of an intercultural lens and the process of co-creation are scalable. Both can be applied to a range of opportunities, from a small organization wanting to more authentically serve a specific community, to a public agency needing to balance and address the needs of multiple and distinct communities, to very large national, multi-community, multilingual narrative change, social marketing or movement-building campaigns.

Clients come to us for specific intercultural engagement work, as well as to apply the intercultural lens to our other practice areas.

With the intercultural lens, we have helped change agents to:

Strategic communication

• replace and create new narratives
• build movements that shift power and policies
• design crisis communication that effectively meets the needs of all communities to protect themselves
• brand organizations and coalitions to authentically live and express justice, equity, diversity and inclusion 
• bridge communities in conflict

Organizational strategy and innovation

• conduct organizational assessments and planning processes that authentically engage all voices, recognizing that leadership and good ideas come from everywhere, and accounting for power dynamics
• operationalize commitments to equity, diversity, justice and inclusion, designed for authentic and sustained impact and ownership across the organization

Intercultural engagement

• design policy, practice and behavior change campaigns that are driven by community-expressed needs and community-defined solutions that effectively engage specific communities
• develop multilingual campaigns that go far beyond translation to ensure clarity and cultural logic, and that place multilingual communities at the center of defining problems and creating solutions

Multilingual Communication

MG provides services that communicate narratives, message frames and visual creative across language and cultural context. Learn more.

Capabilities

• Spanish Language Creative Services
• Transcreation
• Multilingual communication