The Three I’s of Changing Narratives: Infrastructure, Iteration, and Insight

Narrative change requires more than good messaging—it takes the right conditions and investments to make those messages last. “Guiding Narrative Change,” from the FrameWorks Institute and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, highlights what I think of as the “Three I’s”:

• Infrastructure: building systems for testing, diffusion, and collaboration that sustain narratives over time.

• Iteration: treating narrative change as a decades-long effort, and learning along the way.

• Insight: grounding strategies in research and evidence, not just intuition

 Here are a few areas where I’ve seen these principles in practice:

• Health: At Children's National Hospital, patient stories could move hearts, but the bigger shift came when we connected them to narratives about patient-centered care and innovation. At the de Beaumont Foundation, we worked to reframe health as a community issue—not just an individual one—to help policymakers and the public value the role of public health.

• Civic engagement: At AmeriCorps and the Case Foundation, the real change came from reframing service not as charity, but as shared civic responsibility. That shift helped people see themselves as part of a collective story of belonging.

These lessons and the report underscore the fact that long-standing narratives can’t be shifted with a single campaign by a single organization. Narrative change occurs when frames move beyond isolated campaigns and into durable infrastructure, supported by research, messengers, evaluation, and coalitions. Download the report.