Entries Tagged 'communication' ↓

In You Don’t Have to Do It Alone, the authors share the following story:

Julie [one of the co-authors] once received an invitation to a garden party at Buckingham Palace hosted by the Queen of England. Yes, that Queen of England. Julie had to sign a receipt when the invitation was delivered. The envelope was stamped front and back with “Lord Chamberlain Buckingham Palace.” It was addressed in beautifully handwritten calligraphic script. The message on the card itself was embossed in gold. It began with the words, “The Lord Chamberlain is commanded to invite . . . ”

Talk about a special invitation. Julie still has it. The Queen, and the Lord Chamberlain, could be sure she would attend.

How different is that from the mass email “could anybody help with . . .”

This over-the-top invitation makes a point that you and I can learn from, even if we don’t have a Lord Chamberlain to command.

Your best chance of getting somebody to say “yes” is to make sure that the ask feels special to them.

There are many ways to do that: a personal phone call, a specially-printed invitation, a phone call from a big-wig. Even just personalizing your email so they know you wrote to them and not to fifty people at once.

You may not have gold-embossed stationary, but you can still make someone feel special.

And when you make someone feel special, they are more likely to say “yes.”

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bonus observation: Did you notice the specific, compelling details in the description of the invitation? Wasn’t that more impressive than a bland “Julie received an invitation from the Queen of England”? When writing, these kinds of concrete details help paint a vivid picture in your reader’s mind. It’s worth recording them.

“Overall we’re very satisfied with your work…”

Even when this statement is true, it sounds hollow and vague.

But the critiques that follow it are always specific, and often painful to hear.

I know, I often use variations of this line myself.

But when it’s used on me, I realize how it comes off as an empty platitude.

How should you respond?

One way is to avoid giving criticism or corrective feedback. There are some who advocate this path. They say you’ll get farther with only praise than you ever would with only criticism.

If you look through my blog posts, you’ll see I’m far too opinionated for that approach to work for me.

There is another alternative, though. You can make your praise just as specific as your criticism.

Instead of saying “you did a good job chairing that meeting (followed by the inevitable “but…”),” you can say, “I thought you did an excellent job giving the group time for informal discussion and then gently bringing us back on topic.”

Yes, it takes more thought to pick out specific examples of what to praise, but it’s much more meaningful for the person who hears it.

And if we want their continued support, we owe them this extra work.

And we especially owe it to them if we’re going to offer corrective feedback.

Here’s one of my favorite quotes on nonprofit marketing:

“Activists are great at creating broccoli strategies; we are fantastic as pushing out a product or a service that people should need because it’s good for them.”

That’s from Momentum: Ignititing Social Change in the Connected Age by Allison Fine.

I’ll pass on the cafeteria-style, frozen, re-heated, overcooked, bland-with-a-sour-taste mass market broccoli. I don’t care how good it is for me, I won’t eat it.

But if you offer me some fresh, locally-grown broccoli with a balsamic reduction sauce, then you’ll have me coming back for seconds.

It reminds me of a point that Peter Brinkerhoff. It was something like this:

Nonprofit services are all about needs. Marketing is all about wants. As any of you who know someone who has gone through the steps knows, they needed help long before they wanted help.

If we want to build a movement for a better world, we won’t get there by chiding people for not eating their broccoli or for scolding people for not caring about the issues we think they care about.

We’ll get there by understanding what they like and providing them with things they want to learn about and get involved in.

The first rule of community organizing is to meet people where they Not where you are or where you want them to be. Where they are.

And most people are completely overwhelmed with the world they live in.

Every brain cell is overwhelmed with getting the kids to soccer practice, worrying about retirement, wondering about dinner, feeling guilty over not exercising, trying to remember to take the car in for an oil change, hoping their mother doesn’t move in with them, looking forward to a weekend off and an endless stream of other thoughts.

They don’t have time to think.

At least, not about something that seems extraneous to them. It’s not that their stupid. Their brains are just full.

And this 24/7 always-on, media-overload, hyper-connected world just exacerbates that.

You can’t solve this problem for people, so you have to work with it.

As a community organizer, that means you need to:

• Stop being condescending. I’m not going to demean anybody for not thinking about the SOA/WHINSEC, Complex Transformation, or dry versus liquid malt extract. After all, I don’t want them to criticize me for not thinking about developments in auto industry or the plight of abandoned rabbits.
• Give people bite-sized pieces of information. Now that we’re not beating each-other up over not thinking about everything, our next job is to make it easy for people to approach the issue. Yes, this requires some oversimplifications. No, we don’t get to prove how smart we are by going into all the intricacies. Yes, it will make it easier for someone else to listen to us.
• Be agonizingly clear what you want people to think and to do. We can organize people without overwhelming them. I ask you to write a letter to promote human rights in Latin America by closing the SOA/WHINSEC without subjecting you to a lecture on the last 60 years of U.S. intervention in Latin America, that doesn’t mean
• Look for long-term relationships. In gardening, a slow drip of water is more effective than dumping a pail of water on your plants all at once. Likewise, in organizing, we’re asking people to take a series of steps to learn more and do more about an issue. Look at the big picture. In this long walk we will take together, there will be time for the in-depth discussion of why Kissinger has changed his perspective on nuclear disarmament. We’ll get there. Today, let’s just start with “Tell Senator Levin not to build new nukes. These could blow up the world, and it’s not worth the risk.”

In a discussion of What’s the Matter with Kansas in my Progressive Book Group, somebody said,

My worry is that the Democrats will take the wrong lessons from the Republican victories, that they will start simplifying issues and playing to emotions and value.

Which, for me, are exactly the lessons that progressives should be learning.

Respect the entire person, not just their brain

Many progressives fear that when we simplify, when we appeal to emotions, and when we evoke moral values that we are disrespecting people by not appealing to their intellect.

I take the opposite view. We respect our audience when we acknowledge the complexity that they already face and when we deal with them as complete people: head, heart, and spirit.

The beauty of simplification

Most people I know these days are overwhelmed by the complexity of the world. The challenges of balancing work, family, leisure, friends, faith, and community are formidable, especially after you add in the information overload that the Internet brings us.

In this situation, you respect someone by recognizing that they may not have much energy left to think about your issue. If you can’t make it easy, they will tune you out. They have too much on your mind. That’s their reality–get over it.

You have two options: respect that they are overwhelmed, simplify your message, and reach your audience OR insist that they give you more attention that they can spare, disregard the stress that their overwhelmed life gives them, and then complain when they don’t pay attention.

Appeal to emotions

Emotions are important.

Emotions are powerful.

I’m more attached to my emotions than I am to my thoughts. My love for my wife, my anger at the war, my hope for fixing health care in Michigan; all these are more important to me than my thoughts about the relative merits of single-payer versus insurance mandates for covering the uninsured.

Respect this emotional part of me and the others in your audience…speak to our hearts.

Express your values.

Joe Reilly and bumper stickers proclaim “if you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything.”

Values, like emotions, are powerful. If you ignore them, you ignore a crucial part of your audience…and of yourself.

Stand for something. Speak your values. Appeal to the values of others.

The complete picture

None of this is to denigrate the role of the intellect in communication. Yes, we need the facts, the arguments. We need to respect people’s brains as well. I’m not calling to jettison rationality in favor of a euphoric emotionalism.

I’m calling on progressives to respect our audiences in their entirety.

Respect the craziness of their lives.

Respect their heart and their emotions.

Respect their soul and their values.

And yes, respect their head and their intellect.

Respect them completely. Listen to them completely.

And then they may choose to listen to you and respect you.

Photo by http://flickr.com/photos/gaetanlee/

Lately I’ve started listening to famous speeches on my MP3 player as I work out.

While I’m running, I’ll listen to A Time to Break the Silence or Eisenhower’s farewell address. And if I’m not running too hard, I’ll even try to talk along with the speech.

It’s amazing how slow many of them are.

Of course, one of the most common mistake people make in public speaking is to talk too fast. We get nervous. We confuse speed with enthusiasm. Or maybe we just want to get it over with.

What’s the result? Our audience never has time to let our words sink in, and our mile-a-minute talk fest leaves them slightly dazed.

Listening to, and especially speaking along with, famous speeches has helped me become a better speaker. It has taught me just how much I can slow down in my delivery. It has helped me learn how to vary my cadence, my volume, and my tone for dramatic affect.

Try it. You not only get to hear some of the most powerful words of our day, you also get to become a better communicator yourself.

(Bonus hint: If you’re looking for speeches to listen to, check out American Rhetoric and their Top 100 Speeches.) 

Patrick Hanlon caps his seven assets in Primal Branding with “the leader.”

I expected that he would proclaim the need for a single, charismatic leader: a Bill Gates, a Steve Jobs, a Jack Welsch.

He lists those, but he also lists more subdued leaders, leaders who base their leadership on their ability to listen, to have vision, to manage multiple skills.

Tomes have been written on leadership, and Hanlon doesn’t dig too deep. He does even give an example of non-traditional leadership such as at the advertising group Mother that has eliminated the role of account executive.

And that’s an important note: just like a brand can have more than one sacred word or more than one icon, it can also have more than one leader.

Indeed, we want many leaders. Our job is to cultivate, train, and empower people to be leaders.

And when we nurture leaders, we give followers and not-yet-leaders something they can connect to, which is what Primal Branding is about.

(For more of my thoughts on primal branding, visit the table of contexts post, photo: National Archives)

Do you know what it means to carmelize, deglaze, and saute?

Do you know what it means to keep a stack, stand aside, or block?

Do you know what it means to hit the wall or do a fartlek?

Which is larger at Starbucks, a tall or grande? (I don’t know this one.)

In Primal Branding, Patrick Hanlon talks identifies sacred words as one of the key assets that a company, product, organization, or movement needs to have adherents that believe in it.

As with many of his concepts, Hanlon doesn’t really explain it. After all, it’s primal, not rational. But observation does bear it out. Anything that people dedicate a lot of time or attention to develops its own language.

And once it has that language, those sacred words help to distinguish the insiders from the outsiders.

Hanlon hasn’t convinced me that you need to go out and try to create sacred words. In fact, he describes how they develop naturally in community. Nobody planned for people who attend the TED conference to start calling themselves TEDsters.

If you’re an organizer, though, who is committed to building an accessible community, you need to find ways to welcome people in so that they learn the sacred words.

At ICPJ, for example, we need to make sure people know what we’re talking about when we say REJ, LATF, or DWG.

Sacred words maintain an in-group, and that’s okay, so long as there’s no lock on the door that makes it impossible for new folks to get in.

(For more of my thoughts on primal branding, visit the table of contexts post, photo by _fabrizio_)

Primal Branding is about building a loyal following of believers in your cause, your product, your movement, your brand.

And to have believers, you have to have unbelievers.

At least, that’s what Patrick Hanlon asserts.

If your a coffee-head and Roos Roast fan, the unbelievers are those poor, misguided Folgers drinkers.

When I was in high school in Crando, there was a constant back and forth between the Ford people and the Chevy people.

One of my dad’s pet theories is that we will only have peace on earth after there is contact aliens.

For there to be a “we,” there needs to be a “they.”

Even Barak Obama, with his calls for unity and a new type of politics, creates a “they” by criticizing the old way of politics (and by extension those who practice it).

Many brands, movements, and religions have used us/them differences to create a strong following, and I think that’s okay.

There is a danger, however, in going on to create us/them divisions. I believe that King’s method of saying we disagree with the segregationists and resist them, but we do not hate them, is a much better method than Malcolm X’s lesson that the enemy is the white man.

(For more of my thoughts on primal branding, visit the table of contexts post)

Patrick Hanlon takes a broad view of ritual. He sees any repeated process, whether it’s settling an insurance claim, getting married, or using an ATM as a ritual.

So what does this have to do with Primal Branding and making an emotional connection with your audience?

If you take a thought approach to these many repeated interactions, you have the ability to create a powerful, positive, and remarkable experience for your audience.

Here are some examples:

• Aveda salons have made their “welcome the customer” ritual include giving them herbal tea and a scalp massage,
• Progressive Insurance has made their “accident claim response” ritual involve sending an agent to the accident scene to write a check on the spot,
• Lego made their “welcome toy professionals” ritual that reminded the adults what life is like for kids from birth through adolescence.

I can fully see how these rituals would make the customers build stronger connections to the companies.

What does this mean for a community organizer?

Think about some of the rituals you have with your members, volunteers, and activists:

• What are your rituals for thanking volunteers? For thanking donors?
• What are your rituals for welcoming new members?
• What are your rituals for starting meetings? For ending meetings?
• What are your rituals for starting presentations?

How can you make these experience special and pleasant for people?

Here are a few ways to implement this that come to mind for ICPJ:

• Begin all our events with something for spiritual grounding. We often do this already. It can be tricky, since “interfaith” isn’t a religion, but offering something to ground our events in a sense that peacemaking is a spiritual act is a way to make a meaningful ritual.
• Enthusiastically welcome new members. How can we create a process where new people immediately feel warmly welcomed, connected to the community, and invited to get more involved?

What are your rituals? How can you make them more positive for your audience?

(For more of my thoughts on primal branding, visit the table of contexts post, photo by ionushi)