Services
Message Development + Positioning
The most effective messages are not developed in a corner office, but through listening carefully and closely to the audiences and communities that experience your impact firsthand. At Mission Partners, our More Than Words approach to message development is built through this community-first lens, which helps organizations understand and close the gap between how they see their impact and how outside audiences perceive it. We distill complexity into language that persuades with both fact and emotion, then embed it through frameworks, materials, and training so the message doesn't live in a single document but in the fabric of an entire organization. Throughout, we bring an intentional, inclusive, and asset-based lens so that the way you talk about your work reflects the communities within it.
Mission, Vision, and Values Development
Message Frameworks
Positioning Language
Key Message Development
Issue Mapping, Crisis Strategy, and Response
Message and Perception Testing
Community-Informed Research
Message, Media, and Presentation Training
"Working alongside Mission Partners has been transformative for Prism. With their support and expertise, we were able to refine our brand and focus our messaging strategy at a critical moment of our early development as a newsroom."
Editor-in-Chief, Prism
Featured Case Study
NewsMatch
We built a peer-set audit, a message framework, and positioning that a national campaign's newsrooms could carry as their own, with 187 of 198 participating newsrooms using the materials we created, helping drive $47M+ to nonprofit news in a single year.
our work in action
Additional Case Studies
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Our audience-perception research led to a message and brand overhaul that modernized a respected name and clarified its role in a healthier, more inclusive democracy.
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How introducing one key phrase helped spark this organization's most successful fundraising campaign.
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We helped this nonprofit reframe a national narrative around what it looks like to embrace immigrant families.
Related insights and resources from Mission Forward:
How to Respond to Breaking News. Access our ‘Power of Three’ framework for deciding whether, when, and how to speak.
How to Deliver Clear Feedback that Drives Mission Impact. Learn the three Cs of clear, candid, consistent communication.
Disability Visibility. A grounding reflection on the power of communicating for the masses and the margins.
From Soft Skills to Hard Truths. Our signature research report surveyed 831 purpose-driven leaders on executive communication as a business strategy.