Services

Driving Social Change

We are a full-service strategic and creative agency. We help clients create impact through strategic communication, organizational strategy and innovation, and intercultural engagement across a wide range of issues.

Strategic Communication

Learn about our Strategic Communication services

We use strategic communication to move people to action to advance lasting social change. We do this by combining the power of communication in all its forms with an understanding of what engages and motivates people. We connect with people’s core values to change narratives, build public will and advocate for behavior, practice and policy change; brand social purpose organizations; and promote new social norms.

Intercultural Engagement

Learn about our Intercultural Engagement services

We facilitate intercultural engagement as a deliberate, repeatable practice for working across difference––of values, culture, identity, geography, language, and lived experience. Using an intercultural lens, we help organizations understand cultural context, surface assumptions, bring multiple perspectives into conversation, and shape strategies, decisions, and communication collaboratively. This approach supports more grounded, resilient solutions and helps organizations take action that reflects the communities and systems they serve.

Strategic Communication

Core Services

As a full-service agency, we provide the complete range of strategic communication services to advance the work of social purpose organizations. From designing and implementing direct change campaigns and crafting powerful narratives, to creating social purpose brands and harnessing the social impact potential of digital, we help clients make lasting impact.

Capabilities

  • Audience and marketing research 
  • Audience/stakeholder mapping and engagement
  • Campaign management and strategic counsel
  • Change campaigns 
  • Community engagement, partnerships and collaborations
  • Digital services 
  • Earned media/public relations
  • Graphic design 
  • Infographics and whiteboard animations
  • Measurement, evaluation and results reporting 
  • Narrative, issue framing and message development 
  • Paid and donated media/public service advertising
  • Planning
  • Social purpose branding
  • Spanish-language creative services 
  • Training and technical assistance
  • Thought leadership

Narrative and Issue Framing

Narrative can be one of the most important tools change agents have in advancing a more just and sustainable world. Narratives shape what people think and believe, and what they’re willing to support or do. We draw on research to articulate new values-based narratives to frame issues, change public dialogue, shift power dynamics and drive changes in mindsets, societal expectations, policy and practice. Learn how narrative can be a tool for social change.

Capabilities

  • Evaluation
  • Narrative scans and analyses
  • Narrative, framing and message development
  • Message framing and testing
  • Message guides and tools
  • Qualitative and quantitative research 
  • Social listening and environmental scans

Change Campaigns

We research, develop and design, and implement and evaluate campaigns to impact attitudes and understanding, behavior and social norms, and systems and policies. Guided by the voices of diverse stakeholders, we co-create integrated solutions to complex problems. We specialize in multi-stakeholder campaigns and work with coalitions and movements. And we marry the best of social marketing with our proven approach to public will building to create change that lasts long after the campaign has ended.

Capabilities

  • Advocacy and public policy initiatives
  • Knowledge dissemination campaigns
  • Narrative change initiatives
  • Public will building
  • Social marketing/behavior change campaigns

Research

MG designs strategic communication initiatives grounded in insights and understanding from research. We design and conduct qualitative and quantitative research to identify, segment and learn more about stakeholder groups; to explore levels of understanding and behavioral intentions; to surface core values as decision drivers; to identify pathways to policy and practice change; to test narratives and messaging, and to identify baselines and measure progress and results. Learn More.

Capabilities

  • Audience and marketing research
  • Environmental scans and competitive landscape audits
  • Exploration of core values and decision drivers
  • Identification of baseline measures of awareness, understanding, behaviors, levels of support, etc.
  • Internal and external communication audits and assessments
  • Literature and secondary research reviews
  • Stakeholder mapping, analysis and segmentation
  • Testing of narratives, message frameworks, brands and campaign strategies
  • Tracking, measurement and evaluation

Digital Services

We harness the power and reach of the digital to listen, see trends and patterns, facilitate or accelerate engagement and to drive activation. As a catalyst and leader at the intersection of technology, social impact communication and public will building, we work with our clients to develop digital strategies, find insights, engage stakeholders and advance social change initiatives. From advocacy and community building to fundraising and stakeholder engagement, we help change agents utilize digital to advance mission.

Capabilities

  • Data driven analytics and social listening
  • Stakeholder insights and engagement
  • Campaign strategy and execution
  • Creative and content strategy
  • Tech strategy and product development
  • Community growth strategy

Branding and Graphic Design

A brand is more than a logo. It reflects the aggregate experience—what people think and how they feel about an organization. MG crafts brand identities that resonate with diverse stakeholders, build trust and carry powerful stories. Our full-service design team translates that brand into powerful and compelling creative assets across all mediums and channels in ways that connect, convey relevance and compel action. And we ensure that the brand is lived in the culture of the organization by designing training, tools and engagement programs.

Capabilities

  • Ad creative
  • Brand audits and assessments
  • Brand message and brand story development
  • Brand training
  • Brand and visual identity development/refresh
  • Brochures, annual reports and other print materials 
  • Competitive and landscape audits
  • Digital graphics
  • Environmental and interpretive design
  • Graphic design and production
  • Infographics
  • Logo design and visual identity
  • Naming
  • Tagline development
  • Videos and whiteboard animations

Organizational Strategy & Innovation

Strategy

We help organizations plan for and move forward with repositioning, growth or greater mission alignment. We create strategies alongside stakeholders, building a shared sense of ownership, and ensuring recommendations are realistic and actionable. We take care to build a process that fits our clients’ capacity and leaves room to scale up or down as needed.

Capabilities

  • Operationalizing equity (designing and applying an equity lens across policies, practices, strategies and programs) 
  • Organizational, portfolio and initiative impact assessments 
  • Resource, revenue, campaign and sustainability planning 
  • Strategic planning

Culture

We partner with organizations to create or strengthen values-based cultures that advance mission, guide leadership decision-making and behaviors, and ensure stakeholders have a positive and consistent experience in every interaction. Taking a systemwide approach, we help transform policies, practices, rewards and recognitions to reinforce desired actions and behaviors to create sustainable culture change. Culture lives in an organization’s history, its people, structures and programming. Realigning the culture helps achieve equity, diversity and inclusion goals.

Capabilities

  • Change management
  • Design or adaption of systems, structures and teams
  • Exploration of values-based behaviors 
  • Justice, equity, diversity and inclusion organizational assessment

  

Capacity and Skills Development

We meet organizations where they are, helping them define their needs and opportunities, and then providing support and sharing the knowledge, approaches and tools needed to carry the work forward independently.

Capabilities

  • Coaching to shape vision and priorities, and nurture a values-based culture 
  • Leadership, governance and board development
  • Partnership and coalition building
  • Resource development 
  • Technical assistance and training for staff, affiliates, networks and other groups in:
    • strategic communication
    • messaging, media and outreach
    • community engagement
    • policy advocacy 
    • movement building
    • environmental conflict resolution, including issues of natural resource management, land use and other environmental policies
    • intercultural conflict mediation, including historic issues of race, class and culture
    • justice, equity, diversity and inclusion 
    • fundraising

Experiential Design and Facilitation

We take a human-centered approach to ensure all participants—whether in-person or participating virtually—feel heard and part of a larger vision, take ownership, and are excited about the co-created solutions and plan forward.

Capabilities

  • Convenings 
  • Public engagement processes 
  • Retreats  
  • Virtual learning and event design
  • Workshops and planning/creation sessions

Intercultural Engagement

The Intercultural Lens

The Intercultural Lens focuses on how work happens: how problems are framed, whose perspectives are brought forward, and how decisions take shape early in the process. Rather than centering awareness or communication alone, the lens helps teams understand how people with different histories, values, identities, and experiences engage with one another in real-world contexts. 

Applied in practice, the lens helps groups surface assumptions and power dynamics, understand points of tension or misalignment, and identify shared values and concerns that can guide collective action—without requiring consensus or uniformity.

MG has developed and refined the Intercultural Lens over decades of work across sectors, geographies, and communities. We use it as a practical framework to help teams interpret context, bring multiple perspectives into conversation, and explore, test, and shape ideas, priorities, and decisions. The lens informs strategy, engagement, and communication in ways that support meaningful changes in behavior, as well as institutional and systems change.

The Intercultural Lens serves three core purposes that help organizations move from insight to action:

An organizing principle
It helps identify real needs and opportunities, grounding strategies, processes, decisions, and communication approaches in cultural context, lived experience, and both spoken and unspoken dynamics.

A prompt for dialogue and learning
It encourages curiosity, challenges assumptions, and brings forward perspectives that might otherwise be overlooked. Used over time, the lens supports reflection, adaptation, and learning as conditions evolve.

A guide for tailored engagement and communication
It helps ensure outreach, engagements, and communication resonate with the communities involved––because they are shaped by language, history, context, and how people understand and experience an issue––so participation leads to shared understanding and aligned action.

Language Matters

Language is one of the most visible ways intercultural engagement shows up in practice. We design language and communication to reflect values, cultural context, literacy, lived experience, and how people make sense of information, so messages resonate and support action within distinct communities, partners, and teams. This attention to language is as important when engaging rural or remote communities as it is when reaching out to culturally specific communities in their own language.

Our capabilities also includes:

  • Spanish-language creative services, developed originally in Spanish by bilingual, bicultural strategists and creatives
  • Transcreation, adapting meaning, tone, and intent for different cultural contexts across multiple languages when original creation is not possible
  • Multilingual communication, including collaboration with specialized translation partners when translation is the appropriate approach

Learn about Multilingual Language Services here.

Offerings Across our Practice Areas

Clients engage Metropolitan Group in different ways, depending on their goals, context, and moment of change. Some partner with us for dedicated intercultural engagement—designing and facilitating processes that help groups work across difference, build shared understanding, and shape ideas together. Others engage us to apply the intercultural lens across our broader practice areas, strengthening how strategy, communication, and collective work are designed and carried out.

In both cases, the lens serves as a connective thread—informing how we understand context, engage stakeholders, and support decision-making across complexity.

Using the intercultural lens, we support change agents through three practice areas:

Strategic communication

  • Audience research, landscape scans, message testing, and campaign evaluation that questions assumptions and seeks to understand the nuance of intercultural difference
  • Articulate issue frames and develop narratives and messaging that counter dominant narratives and create new ones
  • Develop social marketing, public will, and movement-building strategies grounded in cultural context
  • Provide the full range of strategic communication services, including earned and paid media, digital services, graphic design and more that meet the needs of diverse and divergent communities
  • Brand initiatives, organizations, and coalitions in ways that reflect shared values and purpose
  • Bridge communities in conflict through dialogue, engagement, and facilitated sensemaking

Organizational strategy and innovation

  • Support organizations through periods of change or complexity with facilitation, internal communication, scenario planning, and adaptive strategy
  • Align vision and values alignment across leadership actions, policies, practices, and incentives
  • Design and facilitate inclusive planning, visioning, and sense-making processes and space 
  • Conduct organizational assessments and strategic planning efforts that clarify direction and priorities
  • Facilitate practical, multi-party roadmaps that translate strategy into action

Intercultural engagement

  • Design policy, practice, and behavior change efforts informed by community-expressed needs and shaped through community-defined solutions
  • Develop multicultural and multilingual initiatives that center community voice and foster shared ownership, understanding, and action.

Through these practice areas we build movements of movements, develop lasting strategies that drive impact, provide expert counsel and culture change solutions, and create and implement the tools and tactics clients need to further organizational missions.

Metropolitan Group tiene una compañía hermana con sede en la Ciudad de México. Impacto Social Metropolitan Group