I was recently facilitating a virtual workshop and a participant asked me to dive deeper into what differentiates the So What? and the Benefits sections of COMPASS’s Message Box. The distinction between these two trapezoids—thanks, middle school geometry—is subtle, and they frequently overlap, but parsing out the difference between the two can be a valuable strategy to help you further distill your message to better reach your desired audience.
The Message Box is, first and foremost, a tool that serves as a starting point for any effective communication, and, like any tool, it’s only as useful as it is usable. By teasing apart the differences and frequent similarities between the So What? and Benefits, we hope to make the Message Box an even more effective tool—and point to ways that the Message Box can be a flexible resource for helping you craft your message in a way that engages your audience and moves you, collectively, towards a shared goal.
The So What?
The So What? is, to put it simply, the crux of why your audience cares about the goal you have in mind. The So What? Is the bridge between your audience and the rest of your Message Box, in that it connects your work to what they care about. What does a journalist’s readership care about? What about your issue will move them? How might it be different from what a congressperson cares about?
A few things to keep in mind when considering your audience’s So What?:
- What values does your audience have that connect them to your issue?
- What hopes, ambitions, or aspirations can you speak to?
- What concerns can taking action alleviate?
- What social rules or cultural context might motivate your audience’s behavior?
Returning to the congressperson mentioned above, their aspirations might be grounded in representing their constituents’ interests in order to get reelected. Their values, thus, should reflect their constituents’ (which means you need to ask the question again about their constituents), and the concerns your issue addresses might connect to public health, property values, or local jobs.
Remember, knowing your audience and what connects them to your issue is the most important place to start with a Message Box. Different audiences will care about different things, and the So What? section gives you an opportunity to consider the bridge(s) that will connect them to your goal.
The Benefits
The Benefits section of the Message Box is just that: what benefits will your audience experience if they take action based on the Solutions you lay out (in the lower portion of the Message Box)? In an explicitly positive framing, the Benefits point to the specific, tangible things that your audience will experience if they engage with your message and take action. What does success look like for your audience?
Maybe you’re a toxicologist who works in public health, and you want your audience to take advantage of a program that provides water filters—the So What? is that local water supplies may have been exposed to a contaminant, and the benefit, in this case, is reduced exposure to those contaminants by using a filter.
At a glance, this might sound similar to the So What? and often, there is overlap. Afterall, the So What? very well may point to a positive outcome that lines up with what your audience cares about. In practice, though, Benefits help you articulate those outcomes in a forward-looking, motivating way.
Sometimes, the So What? is grounded in things that have negative consequences, and by including Benefits, you can reframe your overarching message in a way that is more likely to motivate your audience to take action. The Framing Effect in psychology says that even if the ultimate logic behind two different messages is the same, framing something as a gain instead of a loss can make your communication effort more effective. That’s where the Benefits section comes in: it invites you to illustrate what’s possible if action is taken, not just what’s at stake. Despite our best efforts, humans aren’t entirely rational—and that’s what makes life interesting—so subtly different approaches to messaging can make a considerable difference.
How do they complement one another?
SImply put, the So What? is why your audience might want to pursue a benefit. Finetuning for different audiences can carefully tease out the distinction between these two facets of the Message Box: for instance, two audiences can care about the same outcome for different reasons (a homeowner and local politician might care about mitigating fire risk in a neighborhood, but the homeowner cares because of their property value and the politician cares about the odds of their reelection), and two audiences can also care about the same things, but envision different paths towards an outcome depending on their resources and what is within their control.
The Message Box is a simple tool that is designed to help you in different contexts and with different audiences. By asking you to consider different strategic angles, our goal is that it will prepare you with a toolbox of messages that you can subtly finetune for your specific situations.
If you want to learn more about the Message Box, we encourage you to take a look at COMPASS’s online workshops and events—our next Message Box workshop (also known as Introduction to Strategic Science Communication) is on July 11! We also offer short Message Box practice sessions that are open to anyone who has taken a workshop with us, is familiar with the Message Box tool, and is looking for an opportunity to get some feedback on messages.
