There’s a question that researchers have been quietly debating for years: Why is Finland considered the happiest country on earth?
Economists point to social trust, policy experts highlight universal healthcare, and education specialists rave about their schools. They all have valid points. Yet there’s a common thread that weaves through all these explanations, and it often goes unmentioned.
Finland made history in 1906 as the first country to grant women both the right to vote and the right to run for office.
Fast forward to 2019–2023, and we saw Prime Minister Sanna Marin and her mostly female cabinet rolling out key policies that helped Finland maintain its title as the happiest country in the world.
The uncomfortable truth that the data consistently reveals is that countries ranking highest in happiness: Finland, Iceland, and Denmark have women holding a substantial number of leadership roles.
Rights-based organizations are catching on. And the smarter ones are translating that insight directly into how they communicate.
Take the Center for Reproductive Rights. When they faced the monumental abortion rights case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, before the U.S. Supreme Court, they didn’t open with legal arguments. They built a narrative strategy first.
They anchored everything around a single central theme: “Abortion is Essential.”
The campaign was designed to educate, raise awareness, and make clear what was at stake. The result was a coordinated narrative infrastructure that held the entire movement together, combining litigation, advocacy, and communications to advance reproductive rights, and transforming the cultural conversation around abortion globally.
That is a communications strategy at its most deliberate. And it works because it starts with the right question.
Back in 1989, legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced intersectionality, a concept that exposed a critical flaw in how many organizations were building their messaging.
They were crafting narratives for a single, idealized audience, and inadvertently leaving everyone else behind.
The organizations that course-corrected did something strategically significant. One started framing LGBTQIA+ issues in the language of love rather than ideology, immediately lowering the barrier to entry for new audiences.
Another stopped treating gender violence as isolated incidents and began naming it as a symptom of deeper structural failure, shifting the entire frame of the conversation.
These are not accidental choices. They are deliberate communications decisions rooted in a clear understanding of how narratives shape belief, and how belief shapes demand.
Research into rights-based organizations shows that their varying degrees of success are not a matter of chance. Strategic communications drive visibility, accountability, and sustainable growth.
The organizations pulling ahead are not simply asking, “What do we want to say?”
They are asking, “What story does the world currently believe, and what narrative do we need to build to change it?”
That is the mark of a mature communications strategy. And the organizations sharp enough to operate from that question are playing in a completely different league.