Often, the public representation of organisations in the media in carried by the people who the organisation sees as legitimate: either the people in power (for example the CEO, the founder, the charismatic leader), the experts (the scientists) or the people the organisation works for/with.
While this perfectly makes sense for the organisations’ policies, this can prove totally ineffective to influence people outside of the organisations’ current constituency.
While it’s nice to have likable or familiar messengers, credibility is most important. People listen to the messengers that are knowledgeable and trustworthy in their eyes, and this is likely to be very different from yours. It might even get you to chose messengers that you don’t particularly feel related to. Again, what matters is not what you and your organisation think of the messenger but what the target group thinks.
Like in so many aspects of a campaign (visual, slogan, alliances, etc.), this is likely to trigger harsh debates or even disputes between the campaign team and other parts, for example the grassroots volunteers. So a good analysis of what messenger has the best impact will prove very useful.
Stories are of course best delivered by the people who lived them. But even so, there are many choices to be made as regards to who will carry the story.
Studies in the US for example have shown that on issues related to LGBT parenting, it is a bad choice to choose gay dads and feature them with their kids. It was also analyzed that featuring messengers as isolated people was reinforcing the stereotype that LGBTI people were living in isolation and rejection.
[box type=”bio”] TIP for campaigners
Advice from the Movement Advancement Project:
*Try to develop a pool of spokespeople who can speak to various audiences on various topics
* Unlikely messengers can be particularly effective in persuading an audience to reconsider an issue
[box type=”bio”] TIP for campaigners
For messengers, the Frameworks Institute proposes the following checklist:
* Who is both knowledgeable and trustworthy on the issue?
* Who is likely to be perceived as an honest messenger by the target audience?
* Who is likely to be able to satisfy these criteria AND generate media attention?
In order to make strategic decisions on your messenger, it is also essential to analyse what your opponents are doing, as they are also bound to pitch their own sympathetic messenger. In case of SOGI issues, we’ve been confronted to anti-lgbt campaigns carried by children, “nice” families, peaceful old people, etc….
As noted by by Doyle Canning and Patrick Reinsborough on the Beautiful Trouble website:
” Power holders understand the importance of deploying sympathetic characters. For instance, welfare cuts get presented as benefiting working mothers, or corporate tax cuts sold as job-creation tools to help the unemployed. Time and again, the powerful play one group of sympathetic characters off another, or argue with Orwellian duplicity that the victims of a policy will actually benefit from it. In these cases, a campaign becomes a contest over who gets to speak for those suffering. With whom do we sympathize, and are those characters actually given space to speak for themselves? A showdown results between messengers jockeying to represent themselves as the authentic representatives of the impacted constituencies.
