NAILED IT! NETBALL
Welcome to Nailed It!, a regular blog series focussing on examples of excellence in values-based messaging. Each blog post will focus on one of the main categories of helpful values – Universalism, Benevolence and Self-Direction. They come from not for profit organisations, political campaigns, governments and private companies.
We hope our examples provide useful inspiration for your own messages and narrative development. For more on values based messaging you can check out our Resources page or this quick introduction.
The issues: Humanitarian aid, gender equity
Strategic context: Mama Hope, an international development organisation, had the goal of increasing power and funding for community-led initiatives. They developed a series of ads showing community organisations as powerful and effective, rather than vulnerable or objects of pity.
The values it’s priming are: Universalism (Broadminded, Equality), Self Direction (Choosing Own Goals)
What we love about it: This video resists the hierarchical ‘charity’ framing often seen in humanitarian aid advertisements, instead using the fast-cut editing of a sports ad to show the members of a women’s committee expressing their power, agency and joy. It challenges stereotypes of women in the Global South, giving space to the participants to use their own voices and express how they feel about themselves.
What we’d change: ‘Stop the pity’ is a slight reinforcement of an unhelpful frame – the word ‘pity’, even when accompanied by the negation word ‘not’ risks putting an idea into the audience’s heads even as the ad attempts to negate it.
Want more values-based inspiration?
Check out our full list of Nailed It! examples.