Mel: [00:00:00] When we think about change communication, it's often in the context of inside the workplace. So for example, a new piece of technology, a new strategy, new products and services, a restructure, new leadership, et cetera, et cetera. But there's another kind of change communication we often get involved in as professional communicators, and it goes beyond customers and shareholders.

I'm talking about advocacy, communic. Advocating for change happens all the time. People and organisations, they want to change laws, get more funding directed towards certain issues, protect the environment, et cetera, et cetera. And all of this requires changing hearts and minds in order to change behaviour.

In my career, I've inadvertently been involved in advocacy communications many times. It could be as simple as creating some social media content through to a... Full blown stakeholder engagement plan, writing submissions, campaigns, but whatever the level and whatever the cause, there are [00:01:00] five universal things every advocacy communication strategy needs.

And what are those five things? Well, that's what today's episode is all about.

Hello, friend, and welcome back to a fresh new episode of Less Chatter More Matter, the communications podcast. I'm your host, Mel Loy, and I'm recording this episode on the lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people here in Meanjin, also known as Brisbane. Now, so far this year, we've been lucky enough to have a bunch of incredible guests.

On this show, and we will keep those coming. In fact, if there's someone you really want to hear from or you have a suggestion for a great guest, or maybe you think you'd make a great guest, then get in touch. But every now and then we'll come back to these short, sharp episodes. So just to mix things up a bit, and again, if you have topics you'd like me to cover, I'm all ears.

Just send me a message. So today's episode was inspired by some work I'm doing right now with some clients around advocacy, and it got me thinking about change communication [00:02:00] in a different context. Like I said in the intro. So often what we do has an internal focus, but advocacy is just change comms in a different context.

And I've got five key elements I always think about when developing any kind of advocacy change. Comms. So let's get into them. Number one. This one's really, really at the crux of it, have one single, clear, tangible goal. Do not try and change or do too many things at once. One clear ask is much easier for people to remember and to process and to get behind.

It has to do with a cognitive load theory. So there's only so much more new information we can ever retain at once. But it's also obviously much less complicated and you just get it when it's one thing. So as an example here, if you think about the Keep Cups movement, so for those of you who may not be aware, there's worse movement a few years ago, particularly in Australia, to bring your own cups to the coffee shop.

Now, as [00:03:00] Australians, we use... A lot of coffee cups and we drink a lot of coffee so that, particularly prior to COVID, people were very much encouraged to bring keep cups. We're starting to see that come back a lot more now, which is awesome. But instead of campaigning for just general sustainability, the success of this campaign was because it focused on one specific goal.

They wanted to end the use of single use coffee cups. Now the lesson here is that by narrowing the focus to a very specific item, people had this item in their hands every day as well. They helped to make a massive problem feel much more solvable because it was just one thing that you could do to help.

You could bring your Keep cup to work or to the coffee shop. So that's tip number one. Have one single, clear, tangible goal. Do not try and cover lots of different things and lots of different issues at once. Tip number two is talk about the how. So give [00:04:00] your audience a plan, not just the what and the why.

So often we see a lot of advocacy comms or campaigns, comms talk about, you know, this is the problem, so here's the what. This is why we want to solve it. But they haven't given a plan. They haven't given a how we can solve this. And so this is similar to the first point, but it's about making it easy. If you cannot describe or provide a clear path forward, then it's just another voice adding to noise that is already there.

What are the exact steps people can take? And especially when you are advocating to government for change, this is really important. Make it easy for them. Give them the step-by-step plan. Um, a really good example here is the 36 months campaign. So this was the campaign in Australia that led to the ban on social media for children aged under 16 years.

And they had one clear ask. Like I said, in that first tip, it was lower the age... Of access to [00:05:00] social media, but they also got very clear on the legislation and the specific wording in that legislation that would need to be changed in order for that to become a law. So they provided the government with a very clear step-by-step plan on how they could do this.

Uh, again, it's not foolproof, you know, there's still issues here with tech companies being accountable and all sorts of things, but it was very successful because a one clear goal. Just lower the age, and B, they gave the government a plan of how to do that. They made it easy for them. So talk about the how, not just the what and the why.

The third tip is to make it simple and easy for people to understand and to act on. If your cause or your call to action is too technical or complex, it makes it hard to act on and people are going to move on really quickly because let's face it, there are a lot of causes out there vying [00:06:00] for your attention at any one time.

A really good example of this is the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. So some of you may remember this went viral a few years ago, people would get a bucket of ice. Dumped over their head. It was meant to, uh, be similar to some of the sensations people with ALS feel. And it went viral. And you know, you could sponsor people to go through this ice bucket challenge, but it was largely about raising awareness of this disease.

It was so successful because it was just so easy to do. You've got a bucket. You've got water. You've got ice, you've got a phone to film it on, you're done. Because ALS is actually very complex from a medical point of view. But the action was very clear. You just dump water on someone or get it dumped on yourself or donate, or you could do either of those things.

So it removed any points of friction, like, how can I help? What could I do? And replaced it with something that was very clear and it was basically a template that people could follow. [00:07:00] This is similar to what we call the foot in the door technique. So this is a behavioural science term, and I have talked about it a little bit on the show before where basically when you start with a very small, easy task for people, they, and it aligns with their values, then you can start to ask for bigger asks as you go.

The research on this, or one of the most famous pieces of research on this was from a campaign in the States, and they went around to the researchers, went around to a neighbourhood, knocked on doors and said, you know, would you put this sticker in your window? And it was about a particular issue. You know, it's aligned with if you're a homeowner and you care about your neighborhood.

So people went, yeah, you know what? That aligns. It's a small ask. I can do it. Then when they went back and asked these same people a few weeks later, if they could put a big sign in the front of their house, a large majority of people said yes because they'd already made a commitment to the small ask.

And so that's gotten through that first step, and this is where making it really [00:08:00] easy to begin with can be very helpful to just get people over the line in the door. So that's tip number three. Make it simple and easy for people to understand and to act on. Tip number four, this is like any other comms campaign.

You have to segment your audience because your messaging, your channels and your voices will be different for different audience segments. So for example, you might use TikTok and younger movie stars to reach young people versus Facebook or letterbox drops to reach older people. Uh, a good example of this is the marriage equality campaigns, and particularly like we saw in Australia, um.

We had a 2017 postal survey Island had a referendum and they didn't use the same message for everyone, so they used younger advocates to talk about rights to progressive people, but they used older, more conservative leaning messengers like grandparents [00:09:00] to talk about family and fairness. And the audience for that kind of messaging was to older demographics, and that's part of the reason those campaigns were so successful.

Is they didn't just try and apply a one size fits all. They really tailored that message and tapped into different values for different audience segments. So again, think about who am I talking to? What do I want them to, no feel do. You'll know I bang on about that all the time. And what's the best way to get that outcome with those specific audience segments?

Now, this is where doing a stakeholder map and stakeholder analysis right at the start of your advocacy strategy is so critical. You have to know who you're talking to, how you're going to reach them, what it is you're going to ask them for. Then you can start to create the strategies to get to them most effectively.

Okay, so that's tip number four. Segment your audience. And tip number five, make it personal and relatable. [00:10:00] You have to tap into people's values and sense of identity. If people cannot see themselves in the situation or as part of the solution, if they don't feel emotionally connected to the message, it becomes about others.

It is so much easier to turn away when it's, feels like it's not part of your community or it doesn't impact you in any way. I mean, we see a lot of this sort of in the storytelling that we see around advocacy, which is so, so important. Um, if you think about campaigns for funding, um, children who can't go to school, so they'll focus on one child and say, this is their story.

You know, if they didn't have the uniform, they didn't have the shoes, whatever it might be, you have to tap into what's called the identifiable victim effect. So. What this means basically is that people are more likely to act when it's helping a specific person rather than a really vague statistic. So basically when a named person is suffering, so you know those GoFundMe [00:11:00] pages that pop up and they're like, oh, here's Maryanne, and, uh, she is homeless with her five kids.

All she needs is $5,000 to help with X, Y, z. That type of campaign is much more likely to get a response and get a quick response and to get the money that that person needs versus a cause where we talk about X number of people, percentages of people are facing homelessness. Basically. It's the difference between a statistic and a story.

So why does this work? Well, there's a whole lot of research around this and again. One of the most, I guess, famous pieces of it shows that our brains cannot process large numbers. They just, when it, we talk about X number of thousand kilometers away from Earth where the Artemis spaceship went. If you put that more in terms of, you know, that's x number of times the length of Manhattan Island, that makes it more feasible for people to understand.[00:12:00]

And they, the researchers behind this who are Paul Slavic and Deborah Small, if you want to look them up, they coined this term called psychic numbing, which is basically our brains just shut down a bit when numbers get too big. So for example, if I used a statistic in my campaign that said 20 million people are at risk of starvation.

That's very overwhelming. It's very abstract. It's hard to feel what that number actually looks like, but it also as a potential donor, makes me feel like, well, what's my $5 donation going to do? Right? So I can't make a difference on something of that scale. But if you use tap into that identifiable victim effect, you can say, you know, here's Maryanne.

She's five years old and hasn't eaten a full meal in a week. You know, this feels very urgent. It feels very solvable, especially when it comes to children and families and people feel like, okay, well my $5 is going to make an immediate impact in the life of that child. Now, [00:13:00] why does this happen? Apart from the psychic numbing where we can't deal with big numbers, we also are social creatures by nature, so we empathise with an individual's feelings, their pain, their facial expressions, their history, their circumstances.

We can't feel for a statistic - that's really hard. It also feels like that if we are donating to an individual or a cause that is in the name of an individual, the success rate for us personally is much bigger than if we are donating to a huge cause. Because that just feels like it's a drop in the ocean.

So it really is important that you make these stories relatable, that you are using stories in the first place. Obviously storytelling is super, super important, but it relates to people's values, their sense of identity, all those sorts of things. What's interesting, actually, there was a a bit of a twist to this research is they found that yes, okay, you have this individual story [00:14:00] of little Maryanne who hasn't eaten in three days.

... but what they found is that if you add a second person to the story, or you include like one of those big statistics with the story, donations go down. So again, those big numbers or having more than one person makes it feel like it's out of our control. So go back to those individual stories that make it personal and relatable to people.

Okay, I've got a few bonus tips and hang on for these because at the end of today's episode, I do have a little present for you. So, bonus tip number one, create a coalition of the willing. So this is where you go to other funders, uh, similar organisations or individuals who are willing to add their voice to the campaign.

Right, so this makes the campaign bigger. It increases your chance of reach and resonance of getting your voice and your message in front of the people you need to get in front of simply because of the mass of numbers behind it. Um, some unlikely allies who are some of those sorts of people that [00:15:00] you can get on board?

Because that taps into that idea of surprise. Our brains love a bit of surprise, it captures our attention. So if you can get some people on board who people wouldn't necessarily expect to be aligned to your cause, that could work really well for you too. Tip number two, and it's more of a reminder, it can take a long time.

To get what you want. So you have to be in it for the long run. Keep finding opportunities that are relevant to your cause. So you know, you need to be making sure that your message is out there consistently in different ways with different audiences. None of this happens overnight. The flip side is, so don't try and retrofit your cause to an unrelated event or an unrelated other cause.

So for example, if you are wanting to increase funding for early learning. And where a purple day is coming up, you can't really shoehorn your issue into that day just because you know it's going to get some attention. People see [00:16:00] through that, so it has to be genuine. And bonus tip number three, build trusted relationships.

And that comes from making your communication really intentional. Just yelling all the time from the rooftops won't help. But if your key spokespeople are on the ground, meeting with stakeholders, listening to people who are impacted, telling those stories, building trust in your organisation and its cause you are much more likely to increase your chances of success.

And again, get your message heard. Okay, so just a quick recap of the five tips we covered in today's episode. And the first was focus on one clear, tangible goal. One thing that people will remember that they can get behind. Don't try and confuse it or overwhelm people with too many other issues. Tip number two, talk about the how.

So give them a plan, not just the what and the why. This is, again, making it easy for people. The step-by-step, here's what specifically [00:17:00] has to happen for this thing to be fixed or this cause to be addressed. Tip number three, make it simple and easy for people to understand and act on. So don't make it too temp technical or complex.

It might be as simple as click a button and you donate five bucks. Or, like I said, the a LS uh, ice bucket Challenge. Again, very simple thing to act on. So if you can make it easy, then you are much more likely to get your message heard. Tip number four was to segment your audience like any other comms campaign, making sure that you know who you're talking to, how you're going to reach them, what are the outcomes you want from those interactions, et cetera.

Tip number five is make it personal and relatable. So this is about tapping into people's values, their sense of identity, uh, getting that sense of empathy. Empathy is huge here. And like I said, it's tapping into that identifiable victim effect where focus on one person's story rather than telling big [00:18:00] statistics that people just cannot comprehend.

So I did say to you there was a bit of a, uh, present for you at the end of today's episode, and to help you out with putting all of this together, I do have a template that's a bit of a high level advocacy plan template. If you'd like that, just send me an email. Hello@Cuttlefish.group. Or if you're connected with me on LinkedIn, send me a message there and I'm more than happy to send that to you, no questions asked.

In the meantime, keep doing amazing things and bye for now.