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Author Archive:

Finding the right frame in Slovenia -toolkit just published

November 16, 2017

A very interesting report has just come out. It tells the story of how LEGEBITRA, Slovenia’s main LGBT organisation, has developed their messages when the government imposed a national referendum on opening marriage to same-sex couples. This report gives a detailed overview of how the each side FRAMED the debate.

The analysis differentiates between the “diagnosis” (what people believe is the problem), and the “prognosis” (what people think is the solution).

The findings are summarised in the tables below

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The report further includes valuable practical information on how the Focus Group Discussions were organised and conducted.

While the report does not release any information on what messages were actually developed as a result of the analysis and the FGD, it still provides an essential reading for any campaigner for sexual and gender minorities!

 

Elements of a Frame

September 13, 2017

The Frameworks Institute distinguishes 11 elements of a frame. A useful “mapping” of the various elements you should consider when developing a message.

Framing is the process of making choices about how to communicate. Strategic framing is making these decisions with a clear goal in mind and with the intention of cueing a specific response in the interests of social change. In Strategic Frame Analysis, the various ‘choice points’ are considered ‘frame elements.’ It can be helpful to framers to think of each of these frame elements as serving a specific purpose or doing a communications ‘job’ in discourse. With the purpose of the tool in mind, framers can feel more confident in their choices, and use the frame elements with greater intentionality and fluency.

 

Context Establishes the nature of the problem as either a public “issue” that concerns us all, or a private “trouble” affecting only those individuals experiencing the problem. Strategic framers “widen the lens” on the context, choosing a panorama over a portrait, and appealing to systems rather than sympathy.
Explanatory Chains Makes clear, concise, and explicit connections between underlying problems and visible outcomes. Supports consideration of the problem and appropriate solutions by allowing average citizens to quickly grasp the essential insights that experts take for granted.
Explanatory Metaphors Explains how an abstract, unfamiliar, or misunderstood system or process works by making a carefully developed comparison to a concrete, familiar domain. Supports consideration of the problem and appropriate solutions by allowing average citizens to quickly grasp the essential insights that experts take for granted.
Messengers Supports consideration of the communication by selecting a speaker/writer whose identity or perspective is viewed as objective, trustworthy, and reliable.
Narrative Overrides default expectations and engages interest by anticipating questions and providing a coherent story that sticks together.
Order Deciding on sequence of message elements strategically, considering research when choosing what goes earlier or later in a communication
Social Math Supports the language-based framing choices with numbers that advance and strengthen the overall communication strategy. Translates data to a more comprehensible and compelling terms by making a comparison to a familiar domain on a relatable scale.
Solutions Supports engagement in the issue by establishing that problems have solutions; directs consideration of collective, public responses to social problems.
Tone Supports consideration of the message by establishing it as explanatory and reasonable. A reasonable tone (as opposed to a rhetorical or partisan tone) also signals that this is a message for ‘everyone,’ not just those who already agree with the point of view being expressed.
Values Establishes why the issue matters and what’s at stake. Strategic framers look to tested, collective Values that reliably orient the communication toward consideration of the public nature of the problem.
Visuals Supports the language-based framing choices with images that are consistent with the overall framing strategy. Most often, Visuals do the work of illustrating Context and Tone – strategic framers therefore literally widen the frame of a shot, and choose images that are explanatory and informative rather than hyper-emotional.

 

Why social change needs to be a laughing matter

July 5, 2017

Reproduced from Wagingnonviolence.org

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Struggles against human rights abuses or militarism are rarely linked — in thought or discussion — to humor. As serious matters, they deserve serious, strategic thinking about how to dismantle the power structures that enable them. But what if humor itself is a powerful tool for doing so? In “Laughing on the Way to Social Change,” in the January 2017 issue of Peace & Change, Majken Jul Sørensen explores this possibility in the context of three recent examples of activism in Sweden and Belarus, asking how the use of humor affects the way nonviolent action operates — particularly its ability to disrupt dominant discourses and therefore challenge power.

In the first example, two Swedish activists flew an airplane through Belarusian airspace, dropping 879 parachuted teddy bears with signs reading, “We support the Belarusian struggle for free speech.” A response to an earlier action where Belarusian activists assembled stuffed animals in a central square — bearing signs like, “Where is freedom of the press?” — the parachuting bears ultimately resulted in two Belarusian officials being fired. The second and third involved a Swedish anti-militarist network called Ofog, or “mischief.” In response to NATO military exercises in Sweden, Ofog created a “company” whose purpose was to make these exercises more realistic by providing civilian casualties. Dressed as businesspeople, activists walked through the streets “recruiting” ordinary Swedes for “jobs” as killed, wounded or traumatized civilians. In response to a Swedish military recruitment campaign, Ofog added words to recruitment ads, changing their intended meaning. For instance, on one that said, “Your friend does not want any help during natural catastrophes. What do you think?” Ofog added, “By the military. Other help is welcome.” Using the ambiguity inherent in humor, these actions were able to catch their audiences off guard, spark discussion and bring attention to free speech or militarism in ways different from how logical argumentation could have.

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Sørensen examines all three actions from the vantage point of Stellan Vinthagen’s four dimensions of nonviolent action to see how humor might contribute to, or detract from, their operation. The first, dialogue facilitation, refers to nonviolent action’s ability to maintain an openness towards the adversary even in the midst of conflict. On the one hand, a humorous action like those above might inhibit dialogue if observers are “suspicious or annoyed” about the actors behind it or the lack of clarity around its meaning. On the other hand, especially compared to more aggressive forms of resistance, humorous action signals an inherent openness through its playful approach, providing an invitation to dialogue and also lots of “‘material’ for conversation.”

The second dimension, power breaking, is the one Sørensen sees as best served by humor. It is widely understood in theories of nonviolent action that those in power will not give up their power — or even engage in dialogue — unless pressured. Humor is well positioned to break through dominant discourses — themselves forms of power — by disrupting the language and symbols used by those in power to represent reality in a particular way and providing alternative interpretations of that reality. Doing so opens space to question what has been considered “normal” and “natural” — like the need for a military to keep one’s community safe.

The third dimension is utopian enactment: the ability of nonviolent activists to enact, at least momentarily, the new reality that they envision — as when black civil rights activists in the U.S. South engaged in normal, everyday activities like eating or swimming in “white only” spaces, enacting the integrated society they hoped to create. Utopian enactments show that other realities are possible and can create “hope [and] joy” in the midst of anger and despair. Humorous actions are well suited to such enactments, as they engage the imagination and are not bound by the usual constraints of “reality” — as seen in the international solidarity enacted by teddy bears.

Finally, the fourth dimension, normative regulation, re-establishes nonviolence as the norm and violence as an aberration — seen in the training for and maintenance of nonviolent discipline, even in the face of violence. Humor can play a role here in defusing potentially violent confrontations with police, as “a carnivalesque atmosphere” can make interactions “less hostile.” In cases where humorous actions can be interpreted as aggressive or involving ridicule, however, their productive role in utopian enactment and normative regulation may decrease.

While humor may contribute nonviolent action’s effectiveness in some of these dimensions, it may detract from it in others. While parachuting teddy bears through Belarusian airspace challenged the regime’s authority, it did not invite dialogue with the regime — only with the general public. Ofog’s actions disrupted dominant militaristic discourses and engaged the general public in dialogue, but they did not enact the new anti-militarist realities activists envisioned. Most importantly, though, humor — “by playfully twisting the language of power” — provides a tool for activists to engage in what Sørensen calls “discursive guerrilla warfare.”

Contemporary relevance

With the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, U.S.-based nonviolent resistance has received a massive jolt of energy. Beginning with the Women’s March the day after the inauguration, the resistance has had a lot on its plate: the possibility of nuclear war with North Korea, escalation of war in the Middle East, and the undermining of international organizations and agreements, but also immigrant and refugee rights and protection, a racist law enforcement and criminal justice system, climate change and environmental deregulation, the normalization of sexual assault, an inflated military budget at the expense of crucial social programs, the gun lobby, health care, abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, anti-Muslim prejudice, workers’ rights and economic inequality, and even an emboldened white nationalism — to name a few. In this context, the more we can learn about effective activist techniques — including humor — the more successful we will be at pushing back against the racist, militarist, sexist, science-denying agenda before us.

Practical implications

How can these insights about the use of humor in nonviolent action be applied to current resistance to the Trump agenda, as well as to other nonviolent movements elsewhere in the world? First, it may be useful to conduct an analysis before undertaking an action (as part of a nonviolent campaign) to assess its likely effects on the operation of the four dimensions of nonviolent action, as outlined by Vinthagen: dialogue facilitation, power breaking, utopian enactment and normative regulation. Which of these will be strengthened and which will be weakened through the action — and are these trade-offs worthwhile and useful for the overall goal of the action? Second, similarly, activists should ask themselves: who is/are the intended audience(s) for the action, will different audiences be affected or respond differently, and are these responses useful for the overall goal of the action? Finally, on the basis of this analysis, how might the action be improved to more effectively challenge dominant discourses and spark discussion while minimizing the ways in which it could be read as aggressive or disingenuous?

This article was published in partnership with the Peace Science Digest. To subscribe or download the full issue, which includes additional resources for each article, visit their website.

How pledging to act with other people could change the world

July 1, 2017

We wanted to share this very interesting article that offers valuable suggestions on how we can create stronger movements, without needing to form bigger organisations, nor formal alliances (which always get bogged down in internal politics, ego issues, etc.).

The suggestion developed here is to invite collective pledges on a specific action. The “if you will I will” approach leaves everyone free to choose the rest of the tactics deployed by each. It also is a very clever way to activate the “social proof bias”, which suggests that people’s attitudes and behaviors are mainly modeled on what they see happening in society.

A good food for thought for LGBTQI activists!

 

By Gail Bradbook

This piece was originally posted on Compassionate Revolution in June 2016:

Compassionate Revolution was launched in summer 2015 as a grass-roots run platform for hosting pledges of collective action- “I will if you will”. The pledges can be acts of art (like mass graffiti), acts from the heart (like group meditations or modelling kind behaviour in politics) and acts of civil disobedience (like tax or rent strikes, work to rule, blockades etc). Here’s why this initiative is so vital at this time.

According to political theorists like Hannah Arendt and Gene Sharp, power is always located in the collective – i.e. amongst all of us ordinary folks. This is true, despite the fact power may seem to be centred in Whitehall or in the billionaire owned media, or in the City of London or any other places we feel we have no power over. Since we are being pushed around by an Establishment, increasingly disdainful of true democracy and definitely without our or the planets interests at heart, the fact that we don’t wield our power as a collective can be a real stick to beat ourselves with! Over inability to assert our power implies that it is our collusion with or passivity which allows the system to stay in place…

We hear “Why aren’t people on the streets” when the latest scandal erupts. And “People are so apathetic, nothing will ever change”.  These statements presuppose two things:

– that actions, demonstrations, blockades and so forth emerge spontaneously, when in fact they are always organised. When Rosa Parks sat on the “white” part of the bus in segregated America, spurring a wave of similar acts of defiance, the event was carefully orchestrated by the civil rights movement- it was no spontaneous act. Campaigns for change need to be organised, this doesn’t imply central management, but it does imply a body of people committing to an action and calling for others to join in. The “system” has worked hard over many years to erode the organisations that are able to mobilise people, like trade unions. Fortunately the internet offers new mechanisms for more nimble, grass roots organisations to mobilise people. Horizontal, distributed networks have increased power.

– that people are passive because they don’t care. The passivity of the population is ensured by a number of mechanisms – sure it includes distraction through mind numbing media and socially acceptable drugs. Passivity can also be maintained by providing a vested interest in the status quo, however this is constantly being undermined through economic forces and the erosion of public services. Gene Sharp, in Power and Struggle, argues that obedience is often merely habitual and sharing examples of disobedience will encourage others to join in.

The civil rights movement in the US mobilised only 1% of the US population. A recent university study shows that when 3.4% of a population rises up a revolution is possible. This is about 2.2million people in the UK, (bear in mind around 10 million people vote Labour or Green and that beyond party politics many movements have a complaint about neo-liberal capitalism at their heart (the environmental, peace, anti-austerity and economic justice movements for example).

So the question is, if we argue that 2.2m people in the UK would like a rapid redistribution of wealth and power (a revolution) how are we to go about organising that?

Tim Gee, in Counterpower suggests that social change happens through the 4C’s:

The raising of Consciousness about an issue, the Coordination of different organisations, a stage of Confrontation (civil disobedience) and Consolidation of gains by having detailed policy solutions ready and energy to drive them home.

Within the current landscape we possibly have too much consciousness raising – the echo chamber of sharing on social media, of this issue and that disturbing fact and so on. The solutions offered are generally to pay an organisation some money and to support the re-sharing of information (what I call, tongue in cheek, the pyramid selling of sh*t information!). Perhaps 2.2m already know enough but need encouragement and example to act? Coordination amongst groups can be weak, as is the spreading of confrontation, despite incredible efforts by some amazing campaigners, in the face of media lock down, on reporting successful actions.

So how does the “ordinary, progressive, left leaning” individual decide to get involved in an action and commit to doing so? How could organisations best coordinate and share resources, without needing to form coalitions, requiring the merging of cultures and detailed agreements? Conditional commitment- the use of pledges “I will if enough others will” offers a simple way forwards.

Pledging to join collective action is not new. The labour movement transformed when wild cat striking was replaced by organised unionism “I will strike if you will” is the basis of a strike ballot.

The successful rent strikes of 1915, through “Mary Barbours Army” involved the pre-agreed actions of groups of women in tenement blocks. Those involved placed their pledge ‘RENT STRIKE. WE ARE NOT REMOVING.’ in their windows. “This is how they organised the resistance: one woman with a bell would sit in the tenement close, watching while the other women living in the tenement went on with their household duties. Whenever the Bailiff’s Officer appeared to evict a tenant, the woman in the passage immediately rang the bell, and the other women put down whatever work they were doing and hurried to where the alarm was being raised. They would hurl flour bombs and other missiles at the bailiff, forcing him to make a hasty retreat.”

The Women’s Tax Resistance League (part of the movement of suffragettes), formed in 1909 with the slogans ‘No taxation without representation’ and the more direct declaration: ‘NO VOTE, NO TAX’. 100 members were willing to take up this form of protest. A two-tier approach was adopted, which meant that some took action immediately (40), while others declared they were willing to become tax protesters once the total number of members reached 500. (However, the total never exceeded 200 – this was before the days of social media!)

The current successful rent strikes in UCL have been designed and organised by conditional commitment expert and activist Roger Hallam. First it focused on one hall, through face to face contact, by asking people how they felt about rent and the condition of the hall and whether they would strike if 100 people did it together. By the deadline 150 had agreed to strike and the story went viral (35,000 shares of a Guardian article). Then numbers increased to 700, half through online sharing.

The Keystone Pipeline pledge of resistance is possibly the most successful current example of conditional commitment. By March 2014 there had been 398 arrests of peaceful protestors who had pledged to undertake acts of civil disobedience in their opposite to the Keystone Pipeline, which would transport the dirtiest tar sands energy across North America. A further 162 were arrested in 2015 and by June 2015 over 97000 people had pledged their willing to participate in peaceful actions which might lead to arrest.

The current challenge is to get pledging / conditional commitment at the forefront of our collective psyches. Organisers of actions could spend time considering how to mobilise a greater number of people. For example those at home can support a Direct Action against an organisation (for example by participating in a telephone blockade of the organisation targeted). Roger Hallam encourages organisers to think about escalating their actions to achieve greater outcomes each time and involve more people. He has given detailed information about what supports this process. Dissent can be designed!

As grass roots movements and organisations gain confidence in conditional commitment, it will be possible to agree “cross fertilisation” of movements – encouraging those focussed on one action to support the simpler pledges of another, building cooperation and numbers. This itself can be done as a conditional commitment- “We will involve our network in your action if you will involve yours in ours” or “we will work together on a joint action if 6 other organisations agree to be involved”.

In this way, escalating actions and mobilising across networks, in a joined up but loosely held strategy, could be the process for seeing the big changes required.

So the Compassionate Revolution website can host pledges of action – we are trying to offer a range of pledges so that people can exercise their muscles of “peaceful mischief” and feel part of a collective (not all actions are illegal and we de-risk for the majority). A new action can be advertised to those who have already joined another actions. If we demonstrate the viability of this approach maybe Avaaz and others will step up to offering civil disobedience to their bigger databases. We need to normalise these approaches and we have social media on our side to reach the numbers. Join a pledge or several?:

Allow People to Change by Modeling Change Journeys

June 29, 2017

On June 26, 2017German Chancellor Merkel announced her change of heart of same-sex marriage. For details, see report from LA Times by clicking on the image below.

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Right, it’s clear that the real reason for this is that widespread pressure has made it politically impossible for her to resist any longer, especially as the opposition was going to use her stubborn resistance to an issue most Germans support as a major argument in the upcoming elections.

Still, this shows how important it is to create the story of a change journey, so that

a) it gives leaders a chance to move without loosing face

b) it allows conflicted people to model their own change. So people can say “I’m like Merkel, I changed my mind”. Once the head of government does it, it just becomes more acceptable for all.

Obama’s own change journey was a key milestone in the debate on same-sex unions in the US and clearly paved the way for the Supreme Court decision: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/may/09/barack-obama-supports-gay-…

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But it doesn’t always need to be that high level. Many clever campaigns have modeled such change journeys by people that the campaigns’ target group find easy to relate to. See for example this transcript from the US campaign on same-sex marriage:

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SECURITY one-sheets

June 27, 2017

EQUALITY LABS IS A SOUTH ASIAN AMERICAN HUMAN RIGHTS START-UP WORKING AT THE INTERSECTION OF STORY, ART, AND SECURITY.

The team has developed a series of very useful security sheets for various purposes: securing your I-phone, your Android, your identity, etc.

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These resources are very simple, clear and user-friendly. You can access them HERE

Can we enter the fight against extremism?

June 20, 2017

Very useful for activists: maybe homophobic campaigns can be identified as extremism and erased from Youtube!

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From Google BLOG
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Terrorism is an attack on open societies, and addressing the threat posed by violence and hate is a critical challenge for us all. Google and YouTube are committed to being part of the solution. We are working with government, law enforcement and civil society groups to tackle the problem of violent extremism online. There should be no place for terrorist content on our services.

While we and others have worked for years to identify and remove content that violates our policies, the uncomfortable truth is that we, as an industry, must acknowledge that more needs to be done. Now.

We have thousands of people around the world who review and counter abuse of our platforms. Our engineers have developed technology to prevent re-uploads of known terrorist content using image-matching technology. We have invested in systems that use content-based signals to help identify new videos for removal. And we have developed partnerships with expert groups, counter-extremism agencies, and the other technology companies to help inform and strengthen our efforts.

Today, we are pledging to take four additional steps.

First, we are increasing our use of technology to help identify extremist and terrorism-related videos. This can be challenging: a video of a terrorist attack may be informative news reporting if broadcast by the BBC, or glorification of violence if uploaded in a different context by a different user. We have used video analysis models to find and assess more than 50 per cent of the terrorism-related content we have removed over the past six months. We will now devote more engineering resources to apply our most advanced machine learning research to train new “content classifiers” to help us more quickly identify and remove extremist and terrorism-related content.

Second, because technology alone is not a silver bullet, we will greatly increase the number of independent experts in YouTube’s Trusted Flagger programme. Machines can help identify problematic videos, but human experts still play a role in nuanced decisions about the line between violent propaganda and religious or newsworthy speech. While many user flags can be inaccurate, Trusted Flagger reports are accurate over 90 per cent of the time and help us scale our efforts and identify emerging areas of concern. We will expand this programme by adding 50 expert NGOs to the 63 organisations who are already part of the programme, and we will support them with operational grants. This allows us to benefit from the expertise of specialised organisations working on issues like hate speech, self-harm, and terrorism. We will also expand our work with counter-extremist groups to help identify content that may be being used to radicalise and recruit extremists.

Third, we will be taking a tougher stance on videos that do not clearly violate our policies — for example, videos that contain inflammatory religious or supremacist content. In future these will appear behind an interstitial warning and they will not be monetised, recommended or eligible for comments or user endorsements. That means these videos will have less engagement and be harder to find. We think this strikes the right balance between free expression and access to information without promoting extremely offensive viewpoints.

Finally, YouTube will expand its role in counter-radicalisation efforts. Building on our successful Creators for Change programme promoting YouTube voices against hate and radicalisation, we are working with Jigsaw to implement the “Redirect Method” more broadly across Europe. This promising approach harnesses the power of targeted online advertising to reach potential Isis recruits, and redirects them towards anti-terrorist videos that can change their minds about joining. In previous deployments of this system, potential recruits have clicked through on the ads at an unusually high rate, and watched over half a million minutes of video content that debunks terrorist recruiting messages.

We have also recently committed to working with industry colleagues—including Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter—to establish an international forum to share and develop technology and support smaller companies and accelerate our joint efforts to tackle terrorism online.

Collectively, these changes will make a difference. And we’ll keep working on the problem until we get the balance right. Extremists and terrorists seek to attack and erode not just our security, but also our values; the very things that make our societies open and free. We must not let them. Together, we can build lasting solutions that address the threats to our security and our freedoms. It is a sweeping and complex challenge. We are committed to playing our part.

How to reclaim Family Values from haters: A great guide for activists!

June 16, 2017

In 2016–2017, ten movement leaders and experts from the LGBTI, women’s rights and progressive faith movements charted the use of family in recent years of progressive activism.

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They engaged with 200+ experts, movement leaders, activists, scholars and grant makers through a survey, a conference and consultations with key organisations.

 

[box] “To continue winning over hearts and minds, social justice activists must complement their traditional approach based on rights, laws and standards (“We have the right to marriage”, “We have the right to free movement”) with a values-based approach (“We love each other and want to commit to spending our lives together”, “We all belong to a family”). This requires a fundamental shift in the conception, organisation and running of social justice campaigns.”

This guide invites social justice activists  to consider placing family equality at the centre of our progressive strategies, discourse and actions.

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[box] “Campaigning publicly about family appeals to people – law-makers, the public, specific audiences and their fundamental sense of what a family truly is about: love, care, belonging, and deeply shared values. Appealing to these shared values is essential to effective social justice activism”

 [box] “Good strategic communication and messaging can only be grounded in good prior research into what messaging will best appeal to voters’ and politicians’ values”

Download the guide now 

How to f…ck up your video

March 16, 2017

Reproduced from Charity.com

By Tom Tapper, co-founder and creative director, Nice and Serious

The five villains of charity video production (and how to defeat them)

Image: Nice and Serious

Since 2008 we’ve produced hundreds of videos for charities at Nice and Serious. Some have been a big success, others less so. But over time we’ve seen a familiar pattern emerge; the faces of five fiendish villains we all struggle to fight.

You might recognise some of them. We’ve painted a picture of those villains along with our tips to defeat them.

Informaticus

Meet Informaticus. He’s probably the most common villain we encounter. He overwhelms viewers with facts and figures, to the point where they disengage and drop-off. Why? Because humans don’t respond well to numbers; as it takes time for us to process them and they don’t emotionally resonate with us.

How to defeat him

The story is your greatest weapon against Informaticus. We can’t get enough of a good narrative. Find something tangible and human and recount the details. Have confidence that from the specifics of the story, viewers will see the bigger picture. Don’t forget audiences expect to be entertained by video content, not just informed. And always ask yourself: why would anyone want to watch this? If you can’t think of a good reason, keep working on the story.

Cautious Nauseous

This is Cautious Nauseous, a fiendish villain that feeds on your fears and anxieties. She knows you’ve got a lot riding on the film production – people to please and targets to hit –  and she’ll convince you to play it safe. The result? A video that’s uninspiring or unsharable.

How to defeat her

First of all, you need to become comfortable with some level of risk. Secondly, push your creative team (internal or external) to develop original creative ideas that meet your objectives. Thirdly, try and road test your concepts and scripts with colleagues, friends and family to get a fresh perspective. Finally, if you’re ambitious with your film, you’ll need to bring key stakeholders along with you from an early stage.

The Jargonaut

If you know a lot about a subject, you’re vulnerable to the Jargonaut. It represents a video with a robotic voice over and a script peppered with jargon. The result? People are sent to sleep.

How to defeat it

You have to fight the Jargonaut on two fronts. The first is language. Keep sentences short, words simple and the tone conversational. Read everything out loud – it will help highlight stumbling blocks. The second front is voice. Avoid a cold, generic voice over (sometimes referred to as Mid-Atlantic). Each accent has its associations, for example, in the U.K. a Scottish accent is considered trustworthy and a Geordie accent is considered friendly. So choose an accent that fits your organisation.

Miss Hit

Miss Hit is a villain without a target. She releases arrows in all directions, hoping one will hit. She represents a brief without a target audience, or an audience which is far too broad. Sometimes she gets lucky and hits the target, but mostly she misses, because it’s hard to judge the impact without a target audience in mind.

How to defeat her 

The most effective way to defeat her is to set a narrow target audience. And the good news is this is starting to become commonplace. But it’s no good defining a target audience if you don’t put it into place. Which is why we recommend creating a persona, and judging the creative against it. The result is that feedback goes from ‘I don’t like this because’ to ‘I don’t think Sarah will like this because’. This approach forces you to judge ideas more objectively.

The Blubbersaurus

The Blubbersaurus is a powerful beast. It represents the overuse of sorrow; the video smothers your audience in despair. The result? People have little sense of hope or agency. And if this approach is taken too often, it can leave your audience desensitised and disengaged with your cause.

How to defeat it

The key is not to fight the Blubbersaurus, but to befriend it. To evoke emotion is a powerful communication tool; a sorrowful scene can be a strong motivator to act. After all, jeopardy is a key part of a good narrative. But it’s important that you use emotional stories sparingly, and you give your audience a genuine sense of agency – by taking action they can help solve the problem you’ve just exposed them too.

Regardless of whether you work in a charity, corporate or agency, we’re all susceptible to the five villains. What’s important is that we familiarise ourselves with their fiendish faces and be mindful about the creative decisions we take in the film production process.

Preparing the ground for a campaign launch: lessons from This Girl Can

February 16, 2017

Tanya Joseph, director of business partnerships at Sport England, wrote this great article for the Charitycomms.org website. It offers great insights into what you can (and should) do before you launch a campaign, to ensure it kicks off nicely. Remember a few campaign principles:

  1. No one likes a ghost town. So you need a good ground of supporters before you start so that the campaign already looks active and popular.
  2. Critiques and trolls are on the lookout, watching every move you make and desperate to jump on you, so make sure you occupy the ground and have a great crowd of supporters ready to shoot off. If you don’t, your campaign might kick off with a horde of wolves on its heels.
  3. Hit the ground running. Once the campaign starts, you cannot afford to loose the momentum. So galvanizing energy beforehand to create momentum and support will free your time and energy to reach out strategically to this “second tier” of supporters, which you could not reach out to earlier. This time is precious, so don’t waste it by using it to get your fans on board. They should already be there.

 

Preparing the ground for a campaign launch: lessons from This Girl Can

Image: This Girl Can

Launching a new campaign is always stressful. Is our creative right? Do we have the right media strategy? Have we got the tone right? Is the call to action clear? These were among the hundreds of questions we were asking ourselves in the weeks before we launched This Girl Can.

At the CharityComms Developing behaviour change campaigns conference, we explained how we used insight to ensure we were able to say yes to all of these questions and inspire millions of women and girls to get active.

But let’s be honest. Although you may tell yourself (and your boss or board) to have confidence in the insight, that won’t stop you fretting. If you are anything like me, you prepare the ground so that when you do go live, your campaign gets the best possible reception.

Getting our ducks in a row

Before the This Girl Can TV ad hit the airwaves in January 2015, we spent two months getting our ducks in a row. We wanted to make sure that when This Girl Can leapt into living rooms up and down the country, there was a welcoming committee ready to embrace it.

I was as sure as I could be that if the women we were targeting saw it, they would be positive about it. But I was also nervous that some people wouldn’t get it.

As part of our preparations, I wanted to gather some allies. We needed to have enough people out there who knew what we were trying to do and who would support us should we come under attack.

Talking to influencers

In the last eight weeks of 2014, a small team of us met with dozens of people we had identified as being influential on our audience – journalists and producers, politicians, industry leaders, bloggers and vloggers. Instead of seeking immediate coverage, we wanted them to understand the rationale for the campaign, the insight that lay behind it and the approach we would be taking. Rather than sharing all the creative, the team relied on facts, stats and pure passion for the campaign. I am pleased to say it worked.

Broadcaster Clare Balding loved the idea of the campaign and immediately asked to be involved. In fact, she loved it so much, she offered to host the screening we did for key stakeholders and talked about the campaign on every TV sofa she sat on in January 2015.

Talking and listening to women on Twitter

As well as building our coalition of influential supporters, we also wanted to recruit some regular women too. Again, we wanted to make sure we had a small cohort of well-informed women online.

We started with Twitter. We didn’t post much to begin with; we were very much in listening mode. Then we started to jump into conversations. A woman might tweet that she had intended to go to the gym but ended up in a coffee shop and @ThisGirlCanUK would come back with “at least the intention was there, better luck next time”. She might then respond and some of her followers might get involved in the conversation. I have to admit that I was very apprehensive about this. I really didn’t want people thinking we were spying on them but it worked because we got the tone right and only got involved where we added value.

By the time we went live with the ads, we had around 2,000 Twitter followers. The day before the ad was aired we encouraged our followers to watch out for it. And they did. The amazing 90 second version of our ad burst onto our screens in the first ad break of the 7.30 episode of Coronation Street on Monday 12 January 2015. Our 2,000 followers loved it, tweeted about it and within 12 hours that number had increased ten-fold and our online community continues to grow.

Reaping the rewards

Our strategy to create a community of advocates worked – we have built an incredibly engaged group of supporters who love the campaign and get what we do. They are like family. And we treat them as such – we talk to them and listen, share experiences with them and tell them about things before we tell others.

It was hard work doing the ground work, especially when we were trying to get ready for the actual launch, finalising creative and doing PR to generate post-launch coverage. But it was worth it.

More like this
Find out more about the This Girl Can campaign from the presentation at Developing behaviour change campaigns conference

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