Philanthropy’s Trigger Words — and How to Make Your Message Clear

By Matt Watkins for The Chronicle of Philanthropy

Polarization isn’t just reshaping national politics. It’s reshaping how nonprofits talk to the people they serve, the partners they need, and the communities they hope to bring together.

Every day, strategic plans collapse over a single phrase. Funders and grantees misinterpret each other’s intent. Communications campaigns spark defensiveness instead of support. Strong ideas falter not because the goals are wrong but because the message misses.

This isn’t just a matter of tone. It reflects a deeper, more structural issue. Across the country, people are speaking from different moral and cultural maps — and increasingly, they lack the shared language to bridge those differences.

Conversations today are often derailed by what I call distortion triggers — words that have stopped functioning as tools and started functioning as tests. A phrase like “equity” might inspire hope and a sense of justice in one room while sparking feelings of exclusion or blame in another. “Civility” may feel like a call for dialogue in some spaces and a demand for silence in others.

These words are saturated with moral, political, and emotional meanings that vary widely depending on people’s experience and context. When a distortion trigger is activated, trust collapses before a conversation can even begin.

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