Progress Toolbox

Heritage tweeting points pwned the president's Town Hall

Tactics.

So, the smartMeme folks say that tactics are only useful insofar as they add to or amplify the grand unifying themes and narratives. I'd say that tactics are only useful insofar as you actually use them.

Take the Twitter. A quick glance through TweetCongress shows that Republicans on Twitter far outnumber Democrats, and that was true even before Weiner's dick pic gave us all pause.

Meanwhile, The Heritage Foundation is pumping out tweeting points to pwn the president's Twitter Town Hall. Their suggested questions were asked and asked and asked again, making those questions stick and stay, while exhibiting the kind of message discipline that Dems only dream about.

I've never been a fan of the idea that we should do what the other side is doing only different (e.g., the short-lived Air America), but this is one instance where we should be doing something - otherwise we're just ceding ground.

True believers make bad strategy

It's a classic in American politics - Eric Hoffer's The True Believer.

The book is one of those books that everybody should read. The title, however, has taken on a life of its own. We use it to denigrate the other side, criticizing their fanaticism while elevating our own. It's the equivalent of saying, "they so crazy," without recognizing that we so crazy too.

A true believer - one who sacrifices self for the future goals, who devalues the present and glorifies the past or the future, and who looks to the collective whole to fill whatever personal holes they have in their own life - well, that describes much of our nonprofit and political front-line staff (on either side).

One of my favorite organizers, a man with a penchant for wearing a bunny suit and singing Neil Diamond, repeatedly says that everybody in politics is emotionally damaged.

Being a true believer isn't necessarily negative, and the true believers certainly have a role to play. But. True believers make bad strategy. This should be obvious. You don't appeal to the mushy middle by letting the most extreme among you make the pitch. Related - true believers aren't going to love any strategy that appeals to a wider audience. 

Designing strategy - and communications + field = strategy - is where critical thinking is essential. Strategists need the ability to be critical of the status quo, of what we have always done before, and of what we are doing now in order to see whether what we're doing is working and whether there is an opportunity to try something new. 

The takeaway here is not to look down on the true believers (since we all lean a little bit that way), but to recognize our own penchant for fanaticism and to temper it with critical thinking and critical thinkers in strategic positions.

The four organs of communication

I bet you can think of two.

Prompted by this Two Years of Research Boiled Down to 46 Words review, I recently read Nancy Duarte's book Resonate on giving great presentations. Which is really about great communications. The book is worth reading, and worth having handy so that you can refer back to it. Templates and case studies of really good stories and presentations are provided.

Top takeaways, on top of those 46 words:

• In your story or your narrative, the audience is the hero. Make it about them.
• Don't be so cerebral. There are four organs of communication - the head, the heart, the gut (which includes humor and instinct) and the groin. Only the head is analytical, the rest are emotional. If you want to connect with a whole person, think about the whole person and not just what's stuck in their head.

How to write a better weblog

It should just be titled "how to write better." Or "how to ignore 2002 terminology."

Dennis Mahoney's 2002 article in A List Apart is still relevant because while tools (MySpace? Friendster?) and terminology (weblog!) might change, there are still rules for good writing.

Which is to say that art requires training as well as talent. You can't play jazz without knowing the scales first. Or, "Great writing can’t be taught, but atrocious writing is entirely preventable."

Top takeaways:

• Good writers are good readers. Voracious readers. You have to read in order to recognize what works, or what doesn't work in writing.
• Declarative sentences are good.
• Timidity will kill you. Or bore your traffic into a trickle.
• Advice to "write only what you know" increases the likelihood that you will only know the same things forever. 
• Tell a story, have a sense of humor, develop a thick skin. And so on.

The author notes that these tips may be less useful to those who don't already have some talent, but it's worth remembering that reading makes for better writing.

Thanks Mike for sending the article over.

Download this

A couple of things to keep at your fingertips:

From Spitfire Strategies, among the best of the trainers and tool providers, check out their:

• Smart Chart 3.0: A guide to making smart communications decisions
• Just Enough Planning Guide: Exactly what it sounds like

From me, because I've been doing a bunch of communications research (obvs) and figured that some of you might want it boiled down into one-pagers.

• Comms 101: The basics of effective communications
• Media 101: The basics of media interviews 

And of course, you have to define your policy goals (what are you trying to accomplish) before you can start on a communications plan to achieve them. So take it one step at a time.

Using the right incentives to get better engagement

Let's take a break from storytelling to make a case for the social science of motivation.

Here's Al Gore's former speechwriter, Dan Pink, talking about how to use incentives to get better engagement and outstanding performance.

Top takeaways:

• Traditional incentives and rewards (carrots, sticks, money, reality shows) often don't work, and may even backfire. Because those rewards narrow your focus, they can interfere with complex thinking.
• Traditional, if/then rewards of carrots and sticks do work well for simple mechanical tasks.
• For tasks that require creativity and complex thinking, higher incentives and if/then motivators actually lead to worse performance.
• What really inspires excellent performance? The opportunity for autonomy, mastery and purpose.
• People want to be able to direct their own lives, to get better at tasks and to act in the service of something larger than ourselves.
• If you want engagement, self-direction works better than management. Give people lots of autonomy.
• Best example, ROWE, the results-only work environment. (Um, wow, I want that.)

There's no threat of being overpaid in nonprofit advocacy, but that doesn't mean we're not over-managed. It also means that when we're organizing, meeting or getting on another conference call to address a complex problem, we might think about giving people the leeway to experiment and try something different.

On short-term versus long-term strategy

In my role as communications consultant for a whole range of nonprofit advocacy types, I've learned that the worst insult you can hurl at somebody in the progressive community is that they are "short-term thinkers."

We don't call people "short-sighted," because this is the passive-aggressive Northwest. No, we give them credit for being "thinkers" but backhand them with a sigh of disappointment at how their thinking is crippled for wanting to win in the short-term.

Do other progressives have this problem?

Short-term is understood to mean a campaign cycle, or a year, or a half-year, or a month, or something that is less than 30 years, or less than 10 years, or less than 5 years, or less than 2. Less than ideal, according to those who perpetrate this insult.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

I have seen every single organization in this progressive community point fingers and shake their head in dismay at the short-terminess of this or that other organization, while claiming that they themselves are leaders in thinking about the long-term but are sadly stymied in their efforts by the ubiquity of short-termers everywhere else.

You, yes you, Vance Building, no matter what floor you happen to be on, I have heard at least two other floors call you short-term thinkers. Really.

All of this is just a big pile of red herring.

Get over it. You need both.

Community organizing is communications

smartMeme did a thing that I like! 

Don't blame me for the capitalization - that's how they branded their name.

I previously reviewed smartMeme's book Re:Imaginging Change, which I found somewhat useful for its dissection of storytelling. But here, lo and behold, in their Tacking Into the Winds of Change article, it may have taken them four pages to get the point but the point is one with which I wholeheartedly agree.

Top takeaways:

• Community, field and grassroots organizers need to have or to learn message, media, tech, storytelling and a broad range of communications skills.
• We should invest in communications tools and training to help them get those skills.
• Merging or integration of field and communications will make campaigns more effective (and maybe even log a win).

Organizers - the people who knock on doors, make phone calls, and talk to people who are not already engaged - are the ones who find the stories that become the messages, and who deliver the messages to the larger audiences. Of course the field team and the communications team have to work together. Of course community organizers need outstanding communications skills - because that makes them better organizers and it means the message will reach further and resonate with more people.

Here's a rundown of the whole article (which I wrote for something else, which is why it feels like it was written for something else):

In Tacking into the Winds of Change, smartMeme organizers argue that tactical tools such as social networks and other communications channels are not strategy, and that those ever-evolving tools “can only leverage the impact of grassroots organizing when aligned with an effective narrative.”

They point out that using the right message, like Egypt’s “We are all Khaled Said,” will determine how well that message spreads, and they worry that polling and messaging to the middle has made progressives too cautious.

If the Egyptian democracy movement had been relying on the U.S. progressive playbook of 2011, they would have been spending their time and resources doing market segmentation polling with questions like, “Are you ‘somewhat’ concerned about police brutality?” Would carefully selected focus groups in Cairo have approved the message, “Mubarak must go?”

smartMeme argues that instead of simply responding to public opinion, progressives need to get out in front and shape public opinion.

They argue that current methods of messaging sacrifice vision for reach, and that progressives should be spending more time looking for messages that challenge the status quo and resonate with larger audiences. Those messages, they say, can only come from grassroots organizing.

Grassroots and community organizers often lack communications training and experience, so the way to create better frames and messages is to give them the tools they need.

In this day and age, every organizer’s toolbox and every social change campaign should include an applied understanding of story-based strategy: how to analyze dominant culture stories, reframe issues, and craft effective messages. Our movements desperately need a ground force of story-based strategists who are both versed in traditional media skills and equipped to experiment with online environments

We must invest in helping base building organizations build and integrate communications into their grassroots organizing, resulting in louder voices for justice that can resonate in the popular discourse.

The authors conclude that this merging of field and communications skills will make the difference for people-powered movements.

 

Think we're polarized now?

Nothing like a little Civil War to put things in perspective.

There was a time when two sides in American politics didn't just hate on each other's media outlets, but actually fired muskets and cannons. Roughly 620,000 people died. The Constitution explicitly favored one side of the debate, with slavery protected by its very words. Each side claimed God's moral authority and neither would be swayed by lists of facts.

Then Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, and that changed everything.

Annette Gordon-Reed details Stowe's life, and the incredible influence of Uncle Tom's Cabin in her June 13 New Yorker article, The Persuader.

The book was originally released in 41 weekly installments, in a DC-based anti-slavery newspaper - what might be an advocacy organization's email newsletter today. The story, Stowe said, came to her in visions. Importantly, she wrote it as narrative, and instead of demonizing all Southerners or beatifying all Northerners, she emphasized the corrupting influence of the system of slavery, and illustrated her points with "scenes meant to show the human capacity for empathy and for evil."

As one Southern commenter noted, "Thousands will peruse and interesting story, and thus gradually imbibe the author's views, that would not read ten lines of a mere argumentative volume on the same theme."

Uncle Tom's Cabin contested the existing Southern narrative, while still fitting within people's understanding of human nature. The story made difficult topics accessible, and changed people's minds by forcing them to ask what kind of country they wanted their nation to be.

Impressive. We could use some more of that.

You can download the whole book or order it from Amazon. Thanks Karynn for sending the article over. 

Branding

Is a progressive more like a PC or more like a Mac? Coke or Pepsi? BMW or Subaru?

Don't answer that.

In her article, Building the Progressive Brand, in The Nation, Sara Robinson explores the lack of a consistent progressive brand, comparing it to success of the long-term conservative brand.

What do Democrats and progressives stand for?

She says we don't know. Although I've talked to her, and she herself seems to have a pretty good handle on it.

Conservatives have worked hard for the past 40 years to create a long-term brand identity for their ideas. Progressives haven't. And that has made all the difference.

She argues that conservatives invested in branding, including professional marketing and public relations advice, which created a "full-on lifestyle brand, the kind tribal affiliation around which people shape their entire identities."

Making brand maintenance such a central priority explains why almost every communication coming out of the right wing explicitly reinforces the same deep values.

Robinson goes on to explain that the incentives to adopt this brand are powerful for right wing candidates. Incentives include access to deep pockets, but also communications training and what is "effectively a local franchise on that powerful national brand." Because voters already know the conservative brand and what it stands for, candidates gain automatic credibility and don't have to spend as much time defining their values or explaining their policies.

She says that the lack of a defined progressive brand means:

• We can't express what we believe in a compelling way
• People don't trust us
• Conservatives fill the void by defining us for us
• Our candidates suffer with negative brand associations

All of which may be true. 

To the extent that Robinson wants people to think harder about what they stand for, her article is a useful call to action. But in our advertising-heavy environment, the word "branding" is overused and carries unrealistic expectations.  Branding isn't magic. A brand alone won't accomplish much without an infrastructure of brand evangelists, and even Guy Kawasaki can't make your home video go viral.

My takeaways from Robinson's call for a progressive brand are that progressives need a clear definition of why we do what we do, and we need to communicate that in a consistent way in order to build trust.

I'd add that we also need to do something worthwhile. I may love my Mac and my iPhone because they are pretty and sleek and feel vaguely counter-cultural around all my Microsoft friends, but I wouldn't love them at all if they didn't work.