ECF Nicky Hawkins - Equally Ours
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Talking to ourselves? Thinking differently to persuade a broader audience in challenging times.
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ECF Nicky Hawkins - Equally Ours
- 1. Nicky Hawkins Equality and Diversity Forum and Catsnake
- 2. GIFS
- 3. How do we feel about facts?
- 6. Snapshot of our first attempt
- 7. • “We have a long history and tradition of support for human rights in this country and Winston Churchill’s Government helped draw up the rights that the Human Rights Act and the European Court protect.” • “There are relatively few human rights cases involving illegal immigrants but they are blown out of all proportion by politicians and the media.”
- 11. JAAGOFoundationisaregisterednon-proftorganization.Establishedin2007,weworkinlowincomecountriestoimprovelivingenvironmentsandsocialconditions. Thelivesofinnocentchildrenareplaguedbystarvationanddisease.Theyhavenofood, cleanwaterortoilets.Theirsituationisdesperate. Thereisnoonetheretohelpthem—theirlivesareinyourhands.Withyourhelp,wecanprovide cleanwaterandfoodtostopthemdying. Pleasedonatebeforeit’stoolate. Livingconditionsareimprovingaroundtheworld, but over onebillionpeoplestill liveinpoverty. Youcansaveachild’slife or TEXT“give”to76492todonatewithyoursmartphoneDONATENOW Can we avoid crisis language? JAAGOFoundationisaregisterednon-proftorganization.Establishedin2007,weworkinlowincomecountriestoimprovelivingenvironmentsandsocialconditions. Familiesinpoorcountriesworkhardtoprovidethesamethingsfortheirchildrenaswedo.Weallwanttobeable tolookafterourselvesandourfamilies. Amadi’sparentswanthimtogrowuphappy,healthyandgotoschool.Amadi,likesomanyotherchildren,wantsto beadoctorwhenhe’solder. Pleasedonateandtogetherwecaneducatethenextteacher,farmerordoctor. Livingconditionsareimprovingaroundtheworld, but over onebillionpeoplestill liveinpoverty. or TEXT“give”to76492todonatewithyoursmartphoneDONATENOW All of ussharingalittlemorecanmakeabigdifference
- 12. Their conclusions • There is no statistical difference in the average donation amounts between the two appeals • Traditional appeal – The traditional appeal made people feel guilty and angry which made them more likely to donate – But, it also made people feel repulsed and less hopeful and therefore less likely to donate – It also lowers hope, which made people feel less agency —i.e. they personally can do something to help people in poor countries • Alternative appeal – Made people feel more hopeful which was positively related to donating and agency • Three emotions are correlated with donations – pity, anger and hope – There are different modes of getting people to donate more • Agency is driven by hope, which was increased by the alternative appeal, but reduced by the traditional appeal – This is evidence for the collateral damage of appealing to people’s pity, guilt, and anger
Editor's Notes
- It’s a real pleasure to be here in this beautiful spot, talking to you all today. I’m going to share with you some thoughts, ideas and some bits of research and then hear from you. But before I did that I wanted to tell you a little bit about me and how I’ve come to be fanatical about evidence-based communications. Firstly there’s the fact that I’ve spent 15 years working in communications for different organisations. I’ve learnt a lot but have often felt that our communications approaches were limiting us. I’ve spent the last 3 years attempting to introduce an evidence base to how we talk about human rights and equality. I also work with Catsnake – brilliant storytellers who challenge me to think very differently about how to convey a message. But when I was considering what it is, day to day, that has really informed the perspective I bring to this, I realised that it’s my other role that’s had most impact on me. And my other role looks a lot like this…
- But our day to day reality feels much more like this. CLICK. When interviewed afterwards, Professor Kelly said: “my real life punched through” And when we think about how many more people were interested in his brilliant, chaotic real life, than in his dry, expert, factual persona, I think there’s a lesson here. He didn’t go viral for his views on South Korea.
- There’s been an awful lot of talk about the post fact world we live in and the limitations of facts recently. We’re all becoming more aware of the need to speak to people’s values and emotions. There’s been an awful lot on this in relation to Brexit and Trump in particular so I won’t rehash it. And before I talk about some of the facts we work with, I wanted to pause and have a think about how we feel about that. Because how we feel is really important. I don’t know about you but I like to process everything through the medium of dated British comedy, so I thought I’d share a clip by Stewart Lee on exactly this issue.
- This is obviously an extreme, probably made up scenario, shared to be funny, not to reveal a wider truth. But I think it does reveal a wider truth – we can feel really uncomfortable with people who we feel disregard‘facts. We can see “post-truth” something that affects ‘other people’ who are stupid and probably racist. I think we miss out on a lot of we see the world in this way.
- A lot of things have changed in the past year or so, but the research I’m about to share was carried out before that over in a few bursts in 2012, 2014 and 2015. A group of UK charities recognised that there was a growing issue around narrative and public perception here. This is where we began. CLICK. Our research showed how successfully politicians and the media had influenced public opinion. People felt human rights had gone too far, there was a strong association with ‘undeserving” groups, particularly with terrorists and criminals. The media reporting on cases like Abu Hamza and Abu Quatadar and the political rhetoric on the Human Rights Act had combined to create a powerfully toxic narrative. We segmented the population based on people’s views and found there was a large conflicted group – around 40% - who are open to both negative and positive human rights messages but largely hear the negatives. Very few people in this group see human rights as relevant to their own lives. And this matters. It matters because public opinion has been used by politicians as the key justification for backwards steps on human rights laws. Previous Justice Secretary Michael Gove said “human rights have a bad name in the public square. They have become associated with unmeritorious individuals pursuing claims through the courts that don’t command public sympathy”. In other words, legal changes are necessary to give the public the perception that something is being done.
- But when we tried to speak to the persuadable 40 per cent, we really struggled to get it right. We tested both arguments used by organisations to defend human rights and attempts to talk in a new way to build relevance. Our research was all about identifying the extent to which messages made people feel more positive about human rights, not just whether they agreed with them. CLICK. It didn’t go very well. I’m not expecting you to be able to read this, I just wanted to show you all the red. Most of what we tested pretty much bombed, some of it actively creating a worse impression of human rights. And this is with people who are open to hearing positive messages – we’ve screen out the people who will never care and the people who will never agree with us. And part of what was happening was that we were throwing facts at the situation.
- Facts like: “We have a long history and tradition of support for human rights in this country and Winston Churchill’s Government helped draw up the rights that the Human Rights Act and the European Court protect.” This is such favourite of human rights defenders but it doesn’t do anything for public audiences, even those are positive about human rights. The other thing we tried was some gentle mythbusting. CLICK “There are relatively few human rights cases involving illegal immigrants but they are blown out of all proportion by politicians and the media.” In our focus groups, where we were able to provide more detail, some of our facts actually made people really angry. They certainly didn’t change anyone’s mind. In the next stages of our research we managed to craft more messages that worked for our persuadable audience. We took seriously what people were telling us and worked harder to frame rights in a way that made them connect and feel relevant. We made a film with Age UK to bring some of this to life which I will show now.
- The film performed well and had a good reach. But we still struggled to get this new way of approaching human rights communications to be adopted widely. For the very factual world of human rights experts and lawyers, our evidence and facts didn’t feel right. Last year changed that. A different story is playing out and it’s shifting things. Many more organistions and people are recognising the limitations of facts. Before I move on from human rights in the UK, I wanted to share one last nugget. I returned to this first piece of research recently – partly in the face of Brexit and thinking about what it means for human rights. After Brexit the big battle will most likely be around the UK’s membership of the European Court of Human Rights – an institution that’s separate to the EU but is often confused with it, for obvious reasons. I was reminded that only 8% of people in the UK know that the European Court of Human Rights is separate to the EU. So we’re gearing to protect something most people will believe they’re already rid of. This made me wonder where else, when we campaign, we’re talking to an extremely small subset of people.
- Quite often, it seems. This headline sums up the often huge gap between expert and public understanding. And it’s not just us in the UK/ 43 percent of Americans believe that if we’d reduce global warming if we stopped punching holes in the ozone layer with rockets. On some of the most important issues of our time, we’re often a whole world away from mainstream public opinion and understanding. On which note, time for some more dated comedy..
- That was Loadsamoney. A reaction to and comment on 1980’s capitalism. He was massive. I was very very young (very young) but I remember him being all over the place and everyone using the catchphrase. He was totally extreme and felt to the left like a grotesque manifestation of everything that was wrong with the world. Only that’s not how other people saw it. The Sun newspaper took it on as a celebration of Thatcherism, a brilliant illustration of working class people getting rich. Thatcher herself even used it with pride, saying in Parliament “we’ve got a Loadsamoney economy”. Harry Enfield, the creator of Loadsamoney, held up a mirror, thinking it would show what he saw. He wanted to convey his truth about what Thatcher’s policies were doing to Britain. But people saw what they wanted to see and he ended up making the opposite point to the one he intended. When he realised he was making things worse he killed off Loadsamoney by throwing him under a van.
- Back to this century and something more hopeful, When I did the ECF webinar with Duane and others a couple of weeks back, I used the example of Live Aid to show how crisis language can make problems seem insurmountable and have a challenging impact on attitudes in the long term. It’s a lesson that emerges through research on a wide range of issues – the more stridently you articulate a problem, the less likely many people are to believe it can be solved. One of the participants in the webinar made the excellent point that fundraising needs can often take organisations towards crisis language because it can be very effective in encouraging donations. So I spoke to our friends at Dev Comms Lab. They run the Aid Attitudes Tracker and have a large body of research on all of this. They shared with me an experiment they ran recently to address this issue. They wanted to look into the unintended consequences of traditional crisis focused appeals, and the emotional and fundraising potential of alternatives that convey hope and agency. These are the stimuli they used.
- These were the conclusions of the research. The two appeals generated the same amount of money. The emotional responses were very different. READ THROUGH What this says to me is that, in some contexts, crisis language can ‘work’ but there are consequences. The issue of agency is so critical and it’s something we should all be seeking to convey. I’ve seen it time and time again in focus groups and interviews - we want to get across just how critical something is but our language either closes people down immediately or conveys a sense that the problem is too big to solve. Even if we follow up a crisis statement with a solution, the damage is done. There’s loads of evidence out there on this point but this particular experiment is brand new and, I think, quite helpful.
- I’m very aware that strategic comms is one of those things that means different things to different people, and to different organisations. Not everyone has the ability to take a big step back and tackle the bigger picture. Being highly targeted about who we’re talking to and what we want them to do is good, but we need to think about what are we saying to everyone else. Or, more importantly, what is everyone else hearing? If the last year has taught us anything, it should be that public opinion matters and that we need to tell the stories that appeal to a broader audience. I wanted to finish with one of my own stories. Last autumn we heard about Kumbuka the gorilla escaping his enclosure at London zoo. “There was no danger!” zoo staff were keen to point out. I didn’t feel hugely reassured. I go the zoo a lot with my daughters and I don’t think they’d fare too well in an encounter with Kumbuka. A week later, we heard that Kumbuka had downed 5 litres of undiluted blackcurrant squash during his bid for escape. What said to me and my three year old was Funny Not scary It felt immediately reassuring. If all he was doing was drinking squash, we don’t need to worry. This is all about how I felt – I didn’t read the report into his escape, we just laughed and I felt reassured. We all do this, all the time – we hear snapshots and rely on our emotional responses and gut instincts to guide us. I believe we need to do a much better job of crafting stories and messages that work with this reality – and I’d love to hear from all of you about your experiences and thoughts.