HOW TO: Craft Calls to Action that Overcome Barriers

November 19, 2012 by

Don't need hurdles... I can fly!!!Why would people ignore your call to action even when you effectively grabbed  their attention and engaged them emotionally?

Most often, your messaging failed to provide solutions to barriers stopping them from taking action.

There are six common barriers to action:

1. Hard. Your call to action must be perceived as easy to do—either immediately (e.g., “give $15 now without leaving Facebook” versus making people click off to another site to support your cause) or within a definite timeframe and context (e.g., pick a designated driver before you go to a bar instead of “make sure your friends do not drive drunk”).

2. Too abstract. Asking people to “save the earth” or “eat healthy” will accomplish little. Instead, make the complex simple and focus on easy actions that will make a difference (e.g., ask people to replace incandescent light bulbs with LEDs or drink water instead of soda pop or juice).

3. Impossible to visualize. Related to numbers one and two above, people need to be able to form a mental picture of themselves doing the action you desire (e.g., ask people to send an already written letter to a politician via email rather than asking them to support “stopping war”). Simply put, if they cannot visualize it, they won’t do it.

4. Too risky. Make sure your call to action does not ask people to spend an inordinate amount of time or money on your cause and carefully consider any concerns they might have about putting their reputation on the line. Help people become active in your cause by making a series of small asks before any big ones or focus your efforts on interpersonal influencers who can create social pressure to act.

5. Not a priority. In many cases, people have too many other commitments and choose to ignore a call to action. Find a way to increase the urgency (e.g., have donations matched dollar for dollar or participate in a fundraising competition on a specific day. Or, like number four above, focus your efforts on interpersonal influencers who can create social pressure to act).   

6. Forgettable. Make your call to action short, simple, and memorable (e.g., think the environmental mantra “Reduce. Reuse. Recycle,” not something long-winded about reducing the amount of solid waste your household produces, recycling your newspapers and plastics…).

Your turn? Did I forget any key barriers to action? Please let me know in the comments section below!

Filed Under: Communications, How to Tagged With: , , , ,

Mobilizing Grassroots Communities with Social Media

October 23, 2012 by

Editor’s Note: Shonali Burke recently let me know about some exciting public relations work she is doing for the nonprofit Center for Community Change and connected me with Zack Langway, its digital campaign director. Zack is also the digital campaign director for its nonprofit sister organization, the Campaign for Community Change. Both organizations are doing some innovative work using social media for grassroots organizing of low-income people and people of color. Zack agreed to answer some questions about how they do it, and his responses below are just fascinating. Read on…

Korean drummers participating in Center for Community Change rallyQ: What is the most important way social media has changed grassroots organizing, particularly reaching faith, low-income, and hard-to-reach communities?

A: Social media, as part of an online organizing strategy, is a natural marriage of community organizing and 21st-century technology. The world is getting bigger, but technology is bringing us closer and closer together. I don’t see online organizing as a change to grassroots organizing, but rather a complement. Where we might have spent hundreds of hours pounding the pavement and knocking on doors to let people know about an issue, today we can rally thousands of people in a few hours. For example, in late September we got involved in an effort to stop Towson University from allowing a “White Student Union” hate group. In a few hours we were able to rally 1,200 signatures to the University President, and as of today, some 4,000 people have signed on to this message. We’ve also been able to use social media to keep our community notified of our progress and how their action made an impact.

Q: How do you quickly and cost effectively determine which social network (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, Meetup, etc.) would connect and mobilize a specific grassroots community best?

As an organization, we’re pretty platform-agnostic when we’re figuring out the best way to mobilize a community. We meet communities where they are. It’s the same as organizing any community—if you knock on their door, you’re more likely to get a response than leaving a note and saying, “Hey, meet me at my office at noon.” We knock on digital doors—sometimes that means through mobile and SMS, sometimes that means through Facebook, and so on—but we try to build community around an issue where we know from experience the community exists. There’s not a science to it—it’s trial and error sometimes—but the more we try, the more we test new tactics and theories in our online organizing work, the more we are learning about our communities, where they are, and how we can better mobilize them in the future.

Q: Do you ever determine a specific audience would be best reached through traditional offline organizing?

A: Well, we know that not all of our communities are online. It’s something that as online organizers we hear a lot of—“our people aren’t there, so why should I be organizing there?” Truth is, a lot of our communities are online. People of color have high adoption rates of mobile technologies—smart phones and not-so-smart phones that can receive SMS updates, messages from Twitter, and ultimately connect them to power in their community through the phone in their pocket. But again, that’s not 100 percent of our community. So we use online tactics as a complement to offline work. We figure out ways to identify at community events who could be a digital activist. We leverage tactics that bridge online-offline gaps, like asking folks in an online faith community to print a petition and circulate it at their place of worship.

Q: How important is identifying and connecting network leaders in your online organizing strategies?

A: We do a lot of one-to-one outreach, and it is on two levels: we want to support and receive support from community leaders in their own online engagement, and we want to get to know the “face behind the Facebook,” so to speak, in reaching out to other online organizers in the progressive movement. Each partner in any coalition and each organization in any movement has a slightly separate set of goals, values, and desired outcomes, but aligning online organizing to reciprocally amplify each other’s message is a big part of what we strive to do.

Q: What is your best success story in mobilizing faith, low-income, and hard-to-reach communities with social media?

A: There are so many successes in mobilizing hard-to-reach communities. We are working with Sunflower Community Action in both urban and rural areas Kansas to mobilize immigrant communities and allies to turn around an anti-immigrant wave of sentiment. Our work with the Ohio Organizing Campaign continues to be paying off with an increased growth in supporters via email and social media channels as well as amplifying the work that the organizers on the ground are doing with rapid response campaigns and live coverage of Community Congress’ around the state. But I think the most inspiring work I’ve been a part of this year is in Minnesota, where we are working with a great faith-based group, ISAIAH. They are identifying, organizing, and empowering people of faith to vote NO on a voter restriction amendment that would require state-issued photo ID to vote. ISAIAH is creating a community that includes urban and rural Minnesotans, students and senior citizens, and people who may have never considered themselves “activists”—all people of faith that know voting is a right that cannot be denied because someone can’t afford a trek to get a photo ID, or because someone is serving in the military and can’t show a photo ID when submitting an absentee ballot, as the amendment requires. The notion that photo IDs prevent voter fraud is itself a fraud—we see in Minnesota , as in every other state, that this is a problem that is so small, it’s nearly nonexistent. So we are working with ISAIAH to talk with people of faith, people that believe that inclusion is a moral right and know that voting is an undeniable right in our democracy—and we are seeing unprecedented levels of activity and action in the online communities we’re establishing for people of faith to get involved with the fight to defeat the initiative.

Special thanks to Shonali for connecting me with Zack!

Filed Under: Causes, Strategy Tagged With: , , ,

Need for Strategists, Not Tactical Wizards

October 12, 2012 by

Wizard origami by Jon Tucker via FlickrEditor’s Note: The Twitter button counter is malfunctioning on this post.

I write a lot about social media. How it is important. How it is changing the communications field in fascinating—but sometimes wacky—ways.

Today, I am going to step back a bit. While social media represents a massive shift in the way we communicate and inspire action, it is not a magic bullet that enables you to ignore timeless communications principles.

Like any other form of communication, it needs to be integrated into a coherent strategy. For communications practitioners, that means a communications plan of some kind.

  1. What do you want to accomplish? What are your goals and objectives?
  2. Who are your target audiences? What do you want them to do once they have received your message?
  3. What strategies will you use to reach your objectives? What will be your communications mix (i.e., public relations, advertising, promotion, and direct marketing)? What research will you use to inform your decisions?
  4. How will you measure results? How will you know if you achieved your objectives?
  5. What will your plan cost to implement?

If your focus is advertising, you might include additional text on the competitive climate you or your client is operating in, tone and style, and your principal idea (consumer benefit). If you are in marketing, you might focus additional text on timing; your or your client’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats; or the four Ps of product, promotion, placement, and price. If you are in public relations, you might concentrate on detailing tactics and communications channels that flow out of your strategies. Or if you are in public communications, you might focus heavily on generating the community support your audience needs to overcome barriers stifling change.

The bottom line, however, is that a sound strategy is the glue holding any successful communications plan together. Not social media know how. Not tactical wizardry.

That is true today. It was true yesterday, and it will be true tomorrow. Now matter how tools and models of influence change.

Filed Under: Strategy Tagged With: , , , ,

Using #SMEM Lessons Learned for Public Diplomacy

September 26, 2012 by

social media vintage foto by socialmedia_nl on flickrWhat do natural disasters and social media swarm-fueled diplomatic disasters, such as the recent anti-Islam film riots, have in common?

One hundred percent certainty that they will occur regularly, albeit unpredictably.

Now that one third of the world’s population has Internet access and 79 percent of people in the developing world have a mobile phone (more than the percentage with access to electricity), anything anybody writes on social media, no matter how small their audience, has the potential to go viral. This is especially true if an organization with an agenda and a large audience uses a social media post as a flash point.

Bottom line?

The diplomatic and pundit community ought to take note of the crisis communications insights the Social Media for Emergency Management (SMEM) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) crowd on Twitter has developed and tested the last few years. Many of these insights could be useful in the U.S. Department of State’s transition to 21st century diplomacy and the debates it faces over whether diplomats should keep on tweeting and whether the public—which can be nondiplomatic and unstrategic as well as culturally unaware—can be trusted to help address misperceptions about the United States abroad.

A key point to remember in those debates is that the public is going to engage in conversations across borders whether diplomats and pundits like it or not.  You can join with citizen diplomats (and minimize the risk of having the public’s actions force the hands of governments on foreign policy issues in an undesirable way). But you cannot stop global conversations… at least without resorting to draconian measures, such as cutting off the Internet.

The SMEM community has found that vigilance, preparation, engagement, and seeking feedback are key to empowering self-organizing online swarms to form positively around a crisis and fuel mass collaboration in a useful way (e.g., helping those in need or disseminating early warnings to prevent deaths).

As Patrice Cloutier writes in his “crisis comms command post” blog, vigilance and necessary preparation measures include:

  • Basic, daily social media listening or business intel gathering
  • a process put in place to action any intel that merits a reaction
  • delegation of authority to put in motion your response
  • identifying and using the right channels to reach your key stakeholders
  • training every member of your organization in basic media relations and crisis management … just enough so they know how to refer calls/queries …

As Kim Stephens writes in her “idisaster 2.0” blog, an engagement policy and a plan is needed in advance to ensure effective two-way communication occurs when a crisis hits. She also recommends considering lining up virtual support teams made up of “trusted agents” who can ramp up to produce and disseminate shareable content, when required.

As Jim Garrow writes in his “The Face of the Matter” blog, audience feedback is needed to finetune your message:

…our “audience” is not a passive observer or sponge. They are now friends, stakeholders, enemies, crazy people.

They. Talk. Back.

Inserting that idea into your communications flow is the first step towards the future of communications. We can no longer stop at “audience receives message,” we now have to build in feedback loops. And (this part is really important) actually use them to engage in conversations and improve our messages and learn how to do our jobs better–directly from the people who know best!

Just a few years ago there was a lot of debate about whether social media had a role in emergency management crisis communications. Thanks to the efforts of many—including the SMEM community, the American Red Cross, and FEMA Administator Craig Fugate—along with numerous success stories and lessons learned, this debate is quieting down.

Wouldn’t it be great to have success stories in the future about online communities preventing diplomatic disasters rather than just natural ones?

Filed Under: Communications, Relief & Development Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Castrating Hate-Fueled Leaderless Web 2.0 Swarms?

September 13, 2012 by

A low-budget Islamophobic video translated into Arabic and crafted to provoke, offend, and evoke outrage near the anniversary of 9/11 is the latest example of how almost anyone can incite powerful leaderless social media swarms.

The scary thing is a tech savvy but disturbed high school or college student could pull a similar stunt.

It turns out the producer of “Innocence of Muslims”—which mocks Muslims and the prophet Muhammad and incited mob protests against U.S. diplomatic missions in the Mideast—is an Egypt-born, southern Californian, radical Coptic Christian with a checkered past. Nakoula Basseley Nakoula pleaded no contest to federal bank fraud charges in 2010, was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison, and was ordered not to use computers or the Internet for five years without approval from his probation officer.

Apparently, he was able to break his probation’s computer ban through the use of a dozen pseudonyms. He also used pseudonyms to hire a cast and crew for a movie with the working title “Desert Warriors” and shoot part of the film in Los Angeles’s Blue Cloud Movie Ranch. As the video below notes, the film’s cast and crew are complaining that the inflammatory dialogue was dubbed in after filming and the prophet Muhammad character was originally somebody named George.

A decade ago it would have been unimaginable for a small-time swindler to gain access to international communications channels to spark rioting globally. Now, it’s looking like anyone with an Internet connection, multi-lingual language skills, and communications savvy in one form or another can.

Only time will tell how easy it will be to manipulate leaderless Web 2.0 swarms over the long term. To castrate inflammatory propaganda, you need to be able to enable free-flowing ideas to percolate and crowdsource the truth in an atmosphere of trust. When the emotions of rabid Islamophobes and extreme Islamists have both been aroused—in the worst atmosphere of misinformation and mistrust imaginable—this is easier said than done.

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Filed Under: Communications, Technology Tagged With: , , , , ,