In Case You Missed It: This month’s ICYMI was written by Andy Goodman in December 2006, as he sat down with communications expert Kristen Grimm to discuss the gap between caring and doing.
The Activation Point: Why You Need to Find It
Even when your target audience is informed and concerned, they can remain stuck in neutral. Learn how to find their activation point, however, and you can shift them into drive when you need them most.
Kristen Grimm’s personal activation point was a phone call. “I remember being on a conference call with a nonprofit when someone said their issue was polling really well, so they were sure their audience was ready to act.” As president of Spitfire Strategies, a communications firm with extensive experience in public interest campaigns, Grimm was not so sure, and she had heard that kind of optimistic prediction once too often.
“I kept seeing this big disconnect between what people say they care about and what they’re ready to do,” Grimm says. So, with backing from three foundations and advice from a panel of communication experts, Grimm set out to study this frustrating gap between caring and doing. The result is Discovering the Activation Point: Smart Strategies to Make People Act.
In November, as the new study was being readied for publication, I asked Grimm what readers could expect to learn from her research. Her answers are inside along with an excerpt from Chapter II, “Testing the Temperature.”
Goodman: So let’s start with the obvious question – what is the “activation point”?
Grimm: The activation point occurs when the right people at the right time are persuaded to take an action that leads to measurable social change.
What’s the difference between an activation point and a tipping point?
With a tipping point, the social change is going to happen because people are already moving in this direction. The activation point is the architecture for getting to the tipping point. It’s what starts people moving in the right direction.
You talk a good deal about persuasion in the study. Do some nonprofits consider this a dirty word?
Persuasion has become mixed up in some people’s minds as manipulation, and there’s a big difference. Manipulation usually implies lying and convincing people to act against their own interests. Persuasion is very different, and we wanted to give some very specific advice about how to do it. If knowledge alone were enough to inspire action, the world would already be a better place, but that’s not what we’re seeing. You have to plan for persuasion.
Who can benefit from reading this study?
Nonprofits and the foundations that support them. But keep in mind we’re talking about issues that people know a lot about and say they care about. If your issue is one with low knowledge or a lot of “swing voters,” you may not be at a place where you’ll be able to use this.
And the obvious last question: how does someone get a copy?
You can download a PDF version at www.communicationsleadership.org.
The following is an excerpt from Discovering the Activation Point: Smart Strategies to Make People Act, published by the Communications Leadership Institute and Spitfire Strategies with support from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Open Society Institute, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Our research demonstrated that hope is a powerful incentive for bringing a person to an activation point. The stronger the hope, the more likely the action. A sense of possibility enhances one’s desire to help. In fact, hope is a critical concept — among the most frequently named in conversations about emotions.
Not surprisingly, hope emerges when a person feels in control, while hopelessness arises when people feel no control over adverse outcomes. Any successful call to action must build upon a sense of possibility. The audience target must believe it can make a difference and expect a positive outcome. Albert Bandura, a renowned social-learning psychologist at Stanford University, suggests that organizers initially structure situations “to bring success; don’t prematurely put them in situations where they are likely to fail.” Disease groups trigger this sense of hope when they talk about someday finding a cure.
The Living Wage campaign uses hope as an activation point. In Florida in 2003, a broad coalition of labor unions, community organizations, churches, senior citizen groups and others set out to offer a living-wage referendum to voters to raise the state’s minimum wage to $6.15 an hour. They made it clear that raising the minimum wage would help everyone. They called the campaign Floridians for All. They faced considerable and well-funded opposition from the powerful restaurant and tourism industries. But the campaign tapped hope for economic improvement for low-income families, and hope for success at the ballot box to move the effort forward. The minimum wage measures won in every county in Florida, even the most conservative.
On the other hand, some rhetoric is devoid of hope. The Institute for Public Policy Research in the U.K. tracked rhetoric around global climate change and found one pervasive pessimistic model described as follows in the Warm Words report:
“Climate change is most commonly constructed through the alarmist repertoire— as awesome, terrible, immense and beyond human control. It employs a quasi-religious register of death and doom, and it uses language of acceleration and irreversibility. It contains an implicit counsel of despair — ‘The problem is just too big for us to take on.’ Its sensationalism and connection with the unreality of Hollywood films also distances people from the issue. In this awesome form, alarmism might even become secretly thrilling — effectively a form of ‘climate porn.’ It also positions climate change as yet another apocalyptic construction that is perhaps a figment of our cultural imaginations, further undermining its ability to help bring about action.”
The problem with this model of rhetoric is that it emphasizes that the problem is too big to solve. People can either panic or dismiss the problem. Very few say to themselves,“I will be the one to fix this insurmountable challenge.” Instilling hope means showing audience targets that change is possible. Optimism is a critical component of persuasion.