Why Wonder
At Wonder, we accelerate progressive social change.
We’re experts in messaging, storytelling, psychology and opinion research. We believe curiosity and smart research create amazing, breakthrough moments to make the world a better place. We also understand that human beings are Heartwired — that emotions, identity, values, beliefs and lived experiences shape our decisions on complex social issues — and use that knowledge to help our partners create social change.
Audience Insights
We conduct audience research that gets at the heart of how our audiences feel, think, and act, and we turn those insights into actionable recommendations for how to more effectively Heartwire your communications. Our team has deep experience in moderating research interviews and focus groups, conducting rapid message testing, and analyzing qualitative data and we partner with leading quantitative public opinion researchers to deliver insights that can drive action on issues like climate change, immigration, and the economy.
In 2016, with support from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Wonder: Strategies for Good and Goodwin Simon Strategic Research embarked on a broad, three-year audience research project. We saw the opportunity to build a stronger conservation movement that reflects the values, identities, lived experiences, and needs of all people.
To create effective messages on the politically-heated and emotionally-complex topics of excessive wealth and progressive tax policies, the Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute (EWDi) partnered with Wonder: Strategies for Good to conduct deep audience listening, qualitative research, and qualitative message testing.
Friends of the Mariana Trench partnered with Wonder to uncover the barriers and opportunities in promoting a conservation mindset among youth, elders, and school leaders, and adapt messaging strategies to meet the needs of an evolving political and narrative landscape.
Communications & Message Strategy
We develop messaging strategies to help our partners communicate more effectively about their work with key audiences. Our partners work on tough social issues within complex and changing landscapes. We create organizational messages and develop communication strategies that are Heartwired to reach key audiences on a range of issues including housing and homelessness, health equity, immigration, and more.
Case Studies
With support from the Tipping Point Community, Community Housing Partnership came to Wonder and asked: How can we inspire greater support to make more progress, even though some people are still living on the streets? How can we inspire San Franciscans not to give up?
Everyone needs health care. And everyone should have access to the care they need, regardless of their income, the color of their skin, or the language they speak. Enter the California Health Care Foundation’s Innovation Fund.
Wonder helped Roca harness the humanity of the people it serves in their organizational narrative so their words could match the passion they bring to their work. The key to this shift was defining people not by their behaviors and challenges, but as human beings with lived experiences beyond their control.
Capacity Strengthening
We craft trainings that empower advocates to build skills in messaging, strategic communications, public speaking, story-telling, and audience research. Our experts tailor capacity strengthening to specific organizations and cohorts of organizations. For example, we have trained hundreds of immigration advocates on evidenced-based strategies for winning the immigration narrative, and partnered with foundations to build storytelling, audience research, and other communications capacities among their grantees.
Case Studies
The California Immigrant Policy Center engaged Wonder: Strategies for Good to adapt The Ultimate Messaging Guide to Winning the Immigration Narrative into a training program for advocates working across the immigrant rights movement, with the goal of facilitating learning and broad cultural adoption.
Narrative Change
We guide our partners through the Heartwired approach for narrative change that builds narrative power across movements. By working with movement advocates to identify opportunities for narrative change to take hold among audiences, our team has transformed cultural narratives, including to achieve the freedom to marry for same-sex couples.
Case Studies
As advocates working to advance health justice for immigrants face a rapidly changing and increasingly hostile environment, Wonder worked with Community Catalyst and its Voices for Health Justice partners to co-develop a messaging guide for the field based on new and existing research and real-world learnings.
The Economically Just Narratives Project partnered with Wonder to understand how to shift mindsets and narratives in Oregon, and build towards a future where everyone has what they need to thrive.
Policy Change
We leverage the Heartwired approach to build or broaden support to change policies. Our work has led to lasting policy change like granting medical-aid-in-dying to terminally ill patients and increasing funding for community colleges in Texas.
Case Studies
For 20 years, advocates worked unsuccessfully to provide a legal option for terminally ill people in California with six months or less to live to request life-ending medication. How could they succeed in a state as racially and ethnically diverse as California?
Behavior Change
We unpack the emotions, values, beliefs, lived experiences, and identities of our audiences to make faster progress on socially sensitive issues. Our team utilizes deep audience research to unlock effective formulas for changing audience behavior, including on COVID-19 vaccine uptake confidence and students who see themselves as college-bound.
Case Studies
Students and parents have intense and conflicting emotions about post-secondary education and financial aid. Research with the California Student Aid Commission illustrates that messaging interventions can effectively untie those psychological knots and empower all students to see a future after high school by applying for financial aid.
A Heartwired messaging guide for people working to advance equitable COVID-19 vaccine uptake.
A Letter From Robert Pérez
Wonder’s Founder and Chief Exploration Officer
Years ago, I was working with advocates to boost Christians’ acceptance of LGBT people. It sounds difficult now, so think of how impossible it felt back then. Except it wasn’t impossible — but it did require a new approach to social-change communications.
Working with my colleagues in public-opinion research and psychology, our research uncovered a conflict that many Christians feel: they cared about the LGBT people in their lives, but they worried about staying true to their church’s teachings.
The traditional approach to communications hammers audiences with messages that ignore this conflict, eventually writing conflicted audiences off as a lost cause. We were able to create a messaging strategy that helped Christians manage their conflict, bringing them to our side and garnering wins on issues like the freedom to marry for same-sex couples.
I founded Wonder to help other changemakers make progress on complex social issues using the same approach. Using smart research, we can uncover our audience’s conflict, help them manage it, and make the impossible suddenly become possible. — Robert