Strategic Storytelling in Action: Addressing Extreme Heat at ComNet 2025

DEY’s team, Kavita Tomlinson, Head of Strategy, and Taylor Scott, Senior Vice President, attended ComNet 2025 in Denver. For both, it was their first experience at the Communications Network Conference, an annual convening that brings together senior communications leaders committed to strengthening the impact of mission-driven organizations. The conference provided a valuable opportunity to engage with peers and reflect on the role strategic storytelling plays in shaping public understanding of complex and often underrecognized issues.

At this year’s conference, Tomlinson and Scott presented Heat Has a Name, a poster that examined how narrative framing helped elevate extreme heat from a largely overlooked climate risk into a recognized public concern. The case study demonstrated how thoughtful, human-centered storytelling can make an otherwise invisible threat more visible by connecting data to lived experience.

Extreme heat has long remained on the margins of climate discourse. While floods, hurricanes, and wildfires frequently dominate headlines, heat continues to be the deadliest climate hazard, often without comparable public attention. This disconnect is not the result of insufficient evidence, but rather the nature of heat itself. It is difficult to visualize, challenging to localize, and easy to underestimate. The work highlighted at ComNet addressed this challenge by reframing extreme heat as a human-centered issue rather than a purely environmental or meteorological one.

Developed in partnership with the Adrienne Arsht Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, the Heat Has a Name initiative examined extreme heat through multiple interconnected lenses, including public health, labor and economic productivity, housing and infrastructure, and social equity. By illustrating how rising temperatures affect daily routines, working conditions, and community well-being, the storytelling grounded an abstract risk in familiar, real-world contexts. This approach helped audiences understand extreme heat not as a distant or episodic event, but as a persistent force shaping everyday life.

The impact of this reframing has been measurable. Media coverage of extreme heat increased significantly over several years, rising from approximately 5,000 mentions in 2020 to more than 25,000 in 2024, with global reach in the hundreds of millions. This increased visibility contributed to shifts in policy discussions, emergency planning, and local government responses, signaling broader recognition of extreme heat as a critical climate and public health issue.