Storytelling is in our DNA.
Dig through the speeches and writing of any great leader and you'll find stories of their childhood, family, community, people they've met on the road. Those stories aren't just there to show you how connected or down to earth this person is. Instead, stories contain centuries, even millenias old, lessons for how we make sense of the chaos around us. Ferris Jabr writes that...
...a story is really a way of thinking—perhaps the most powerful and versatile skill in the human cognitive repertoire. The world confronts the mind with myriad impressions, a profusion of other often perplexing beings, and an infinity of possible futures. The increasingly large brains of our ancestors, all the more attuned to the world’s complexity, needed a way to organize this overwhelming torrent of information, to pass the multiplicity of experience through a reverse prism and distill it into a single coherent sequence. Stories were the solution.
Jabr dives into the work of scientists using tactics borrowed from evolutionary biology to identify the markers of stories. Their work shows how common stories – think fables like Little Red Riding Hood – share themes that cross boundaries of geography and time but are connected by the problems societies faced trying to find food, survive weather, and develop social norms.
Narrow your audience. Have a greater impact.
Want to think much more precisely about your audience and how to engage them? Don’t think about how you reach everyone. Be very intentional about (and test) who your core audience is and what they need. Here’s a great look at how KPCC uses design thinking to support coverage of early childhood education in California. It’s an approach that could also help nonprofits looking to create engaging blog and social media content.
Experiments in texting.
Nonprofits looking to engage supporters through content should test text messaging – a medium with potential for far more than "take action" or fundraising. A local news outlet in Philadelphia experimented with text messaging to engage readers. For three weeks before the 2018 midterm election they answered reader questions and created stories based on the questions. They received far higher engagement on stories when people clicked through texts. One upside to text: it's far more accessible to people unlikely to see a website and email.
“Companies like Facebook are behaving like digital gangsters.”
That quote comes from the British Parliament's final report on disinformation and fake news. The report seems likely to result in little action by UK lawmakers who may be a bit occupied with Brexit at the moment. But the details of Facebook actions and call for change reflect an industry rapidly losing support from political leaders. That said, it's worth noting that everyone's corporate and political marketing relies on Facebook and other social platforms these days.
You can’t reduce people’s experience to a single number.
Jared Spool’s explanation of why Net Promoter Score is a useless metric is also good insight into why pageviews, clicks and other basic but commonly relied on digital communications metrics offer little connection to how well content is meeting user needs.
Help people build a better world
One of my goals this year is to invest in my ability to train others, be a stronger facilitator, and understand how people learn. Here's one place to do that ==> Beth Becker's Train the Trainer workshop is happening just before Netroots in Philadelphia this July.
Campaigning in a world of fear mongering and fake news.
That's the theme of Campaigning Forum 2019 happening in Oxford, UK, in early April. Are you going?
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Just one line. Ok. Two lines.
The Public Spaces Fellowship looks to support people with a track record of crafting public spaces that support civic engagement. | Knight Foundation
What fairy tales teach us about persuading people to take action. | Behavioral Scientist
Digital Beachheads: A Model for Progressive Outreach in Trump Country | Epolitics.com
There are still jobs for people with journalism skills. But are they journalism jobs? | Recode
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