Making Nursing Visible Integrating Frameworks Institute Strategic Communication with Collective Impact for the Nursing Profession
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University of Minnesota
Abstract
Nursing is the world’s largest health profession, with more than 28 million nurses globally and over four million in the United States. Yet nursing’s contributions to health, healing, and societal well-being remain systematically undervalued, inadequately communicated, and structurally invisible. This article argues that nursing’s visibility challenge is not a collection of separate organizational communication problems but a single structural dynamic requiring a coordinated, profession-wide response. Drawing on a meta-analysis of strategic communication documents created for eight nursing and health organizations using Frameworks Institute Strategic Frame Analysis® methodology, and integrating these findings with John Kania and Mark Kramer’s (2011) collective impact framework, this article provides nursing organizations, associations, and professional societies with the conceptual foundations for understanding why nursing’s invisibility is structural and why collective action is required. The core principles of Frameworks Institute strategic communication as applied to nursing is explored. Practical strategies for integrating Frameworks methodology with collective impact practices are described. A step-by-step how-to guide any nursing organization can implement immediately are delineated, and a call to action for coordinated effort across the profession’s organizational ecosystem to realize collective impact is issued.
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To understand why nursing’s visibility requires collective action, leaders must first understand the mechanism producing invisibility. It is not accidental. It is not a failure of marketing. It is structurally produced by dominant paradigms that privilege certain ways of knowing and dismiss others. A meta-analysis of strategic communication documents created for eight nursing and health organizations—Organization A, Organization B, Organization C, Organization D, Organization E, Organization F, Organization G, and Organization H—revealed that every organization, regardless of its focus, confronts the same dynamic: essential dimensions of nursing’s work are rendered invisible by paradigms that reduce complex realities to inadequate simplifications (Pesut, 2026). The Frameworks Institute, founded in 1999, has spent more than two decades developing and testing evidence-based communication strategies for social issues. Their approach—Strategic Frame Analysis®—is grounded in framing theory: the recognition that how an issue is presented (framed) fundamentally shapes how audiences understand and respond to it (Bales & Gilliam, 2004). In their seminal 2011 article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, John Kania and Mark Kramer introduced the concept of collective impact—a structured approach to cross-sector collaboration in which multiple organizations commit to a common agenda for solving complex social problems. The integration of Frameworks methodology with collective impact produces seven guiding principles that any nursing organization can adopt. These principles emerged from the meta-analysis of cross-organizational communication patterns and reflect the shared cognitive terrain all nursing organizations must navigate. Behind the strategies and how-to guides, there is a deeper truth that this analysis reveals. Nursing’s organizations are not fragments of a broken whole. They are facets of a living system, each one illuminating a different dimension of what it means to nurse, to care, to know, to heal, to advocate, to create, to write, to attend to the full complexity of human health and flourishing.
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Pesut, Daniel. (2026). Making Nursing Visible Integrating Frameworks Institute Strategic Communication with Collective Impact for the Nursing Profession. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/278917.
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