Every campaign needs good visual. But where to find what you need in the maze of commercial offers ?
A consultation on the fantastic e-campaigner community ECF forum has identified the following sites:
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
medium.com/@dustin/stock-photos-that-dont-suck-62ae4bcbe01b
(list of sources)
A great example on how to use infographics to document campaigns.
This website also provides info on how to use cartoons for campaigning. A useful resource
We have seen in a previous post how social psychologist Jonathan Haidt attempts to classify values into 5 major categories: Care, Fairness, Liberty, Authority and Sanctity.
Shalom Schwartz from the University of Jerusalem has later on developed the theory of basic values, by which he identifies 10 clusters of values:
Self-Direction – Defining goal: independent thought and action–choosing, creating, exploring.
Stimulation – Defining goal: excitement, novelty, and challenge in life.
Hedonism – Defining goal: pleasure or sensuous gratification for oneself.
Achievement – Defining goal: personal success through demonstrating competence according to social standards.
Power – Defining goal: social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources.
Security – Defining goal: safety, harmony, and stability of society, of relationships, and of self.
Conformity – Defining goal: restraint of actions, inclinations, and impulses likely to upset or harm others and violate social expectations or norms.
Tradition – Defining goal: respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs and ideas that one’s culture or religion provides.
Benevolence – Defining goal: preserving and enhancing the welfare of those with whom one is in frequent personal contact (the ‘in-group’).
Universalism – Defining goal: understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature.
These values can be mapped out according to how they relate to one another as neighbors or opposites:
This framework has been extensively used in order to identify the frames by which a target group can effectively be reached by campaigns.
Two institutions have done extensive work on how this: The Public Interest Research Center (UK) and the Frameworks Institute (USA). Ttheir websites should be on whatever is the equivalent in any campaigner’s bookmarks of a bedside table.
“Actions speak louder than words” is a well-known saying. This counts for campaign tactics too.
When a campaign has analyzed and chosen its core action message (what is known by theorists as the “meta-verb”, such as “disrupt”, “resist”, “confront”, etc.), the best campaign tactic is to not only say it out loud, but find a protest action that actually EMBODIES this verb.
Die-ins are a good example of embodiment of resistance, but there are many more examples.
Another good example is when protesters surrounded Walmart stores in toxic waste suites and cordoned them off, to represent big corporate stores as a disease.
In a similar perspective, activists have chained themselves to prison gates to ask for an innocent’s liberation.
When a giant fence was built in Quebec city to protect the negotiating conference of the Free Trade Area of the Americas, back in 2001, protesters underlined the situation by building a mock medieval siege in front of the fence.
More recently, WWF used Snapchat, an instant messaging service where messages are erased after a very short moment, to create a powerful campaign alerting on the fact that some animal species too are being erased rapidly.
In all of these cases, the format of the protest action carries in itself the message of the campaign.
Storytelling has always been central to movement building and successful campaigns. Now in the face of an increasingly complex and fragmented media environment, being strategic about how we tell our stories is more important than ever. Creating a strategy to frame an issue, build an inviting brand and distill our messages into the right memes are critical to helping campaigns generate the critical mass of popular support to win.
Story-based strategy can be used to deconstruct opposition narratives as well as craft our own stories by focusing on a few key elements of effective social change storytelling.
The Conflict: What is the problem we are addressing? How is it framed? What aspects are emphasized and what is avoided? How can we reframe to highlight our values and solutions?
The Characters: Who are the characters in the story? Do impacted communities get to speak for themselves? Who are cast as villains, victims and heroes?
Show Don’t Tell: What is the imagery of the story—what pictures linger in our minds? How does it engage our senses? Is there a potent metaphor that describes the issue?
Foreshadowing: What is our resolution to the conflict? What vision are we offering? How do make the future we desire seem inevitable?
Assumptions: What must be believed in order to believe the story is “true”? Does our opponent’s story have unstated assumptions we can expose and challenge? What assumptions and core values do we share that unite our communities around a common vision?
Find out more on each of these aspects by clicking on the respective links in the bold titles.
In their paper “Changing the Story: Story-Based Strategies for Direct Action Design”, Doyle Canning and Patrick Reinsborough develop an essential argument:
“In the advertising industry they say, “People can only go somewhere that they have already been in their minds.” This rings true for action organizing too. When using a story-based strategy, the aspect of “foreshadowing” is a key ingredient of a successful action. The action logic needs to answer the questions: “How will this conflict come to resolution? “What is our vision for a solution to this problem?”
When we forecast the future we desire through our messaging and our images, we bring people with us towards being able to imagine and embrace a visionary solution. Often times the power holder’s side of the debate relies on inertia – the belief that change can’t happen. Former British Prime Minister Margret Thatcher even coined an acronym to define this tactic: TINA meaning there is no alternative. What better way to challenge this myth then making alternatives real and visible? This is particularly powerful when the foreshadowing is incorporated into the action logic and design – the occupation of the government office transforms it into the day care center the community is demanding, the empty lot becomes a guerilla garden, the site of the planned juvenile prison becomes a playground.”
SOGI-focused activism has an essential interest in carefully integrating this aspect. Often, a major obstacle to people embracing sexual and gender diversities is an absence of representation of what such a world would look like.
Providing such a representation is crucial in opening perspectives.
An ideal example of such a representation is the famous Australian video in favour of same-sex marriage.
