I have a longstanding theory that organisations that talk about ‘dissemination’ don’t understand communications. The classic example is the organisation that has a presence on all the social media channels, but responds to none of the comments. They aren’t very social.

When you communicate with your parents, your partner, your friends, you don’t disseminate information to them. You talk to them. You listen to them. You respond to what they are saying, and adjust what you are saying as a result.

Policy disseminators are like the megaphoners who shout at you outside train stations. You hear what they are saying, but you’d rather walk past. In today’s interview, Alex perfectly illustrates why one-way communication just puts people off.

Tom

P.S. the next cohort of our strategic policy communications course starts next week. Check out our website for more info and to sign up.

P.P.S. I’ll be in DC the first week of December and am thinking of hosting a Policy Unstuck dinner (where we take a theme from this series and use the interviews as conversation/debate prompts). Let me know if you’re interested here - if there are enough people then I will make it happen.

Policy Unstuck with Alex Evans. Interviewed, edited and titled by Tom Hashemi.

Far right groups are very good at welcoming people. With the Greens, you have to agree with them on every single thing or you’re dead to them. Whereas with the AfD, you just have to agree with one thing and you’re in. They’ve learned a really important lesson in that we’re in an epidemic of loneliness, and people are looking for belonging and for opportunities to connect. It breaks my heart every time you see big civil society organisations, and all they’re asking of people is basically: give us a fiver a month, sign this petition, now sod off until we need you. Whereas they could be creating little local groups with dense belonging, because that’s how every successful movement ever has changed the world.

It used to be that big environmental NGOs, like Friends of the Earth, had massive regional offices. They had to, because that’s how they recruited members and that’s what paid the bills. But talking to friends who’ve done jobs as CEOs in that sector, they observe that first NGOs discovered direct mail, and then they discovered social media, and suddenly those regional offices started to look like an expensive overhead.

It’s only recently that they’ve realised that doing it all online means that you’re playing on a field that is heavily tilted against you. The algorithms favour the content that is divisive or triggering, that outrages us or makes us feel scared. And if you’re trying to bring people together across divides, to build coalitions for breakthrough outcomes, that playing field does not work for you.

The number one poster child here is big mobilisation campaigns. I was a special adviser at the Department for International Development (DFID) during Make Poverty History, and those of us of a certain age all remember wearing white bands on our wrists, and going to things like Live 8. It was all about showing strength in numbers, and using that to get an already sympathetic government to deliver on things like developing world debt relief. And it really worked… at that time. The problem is that now it’s 20 years later, and NGOs keep trying to repeat that trick, but the political conditions have shifted.

Back around 2009, the shock value of dumping a million-signature petition on a prime minister’s desk just before a G8 was enormous. I remember Angela Merkel being absolutely stunned when this happened to her. But of course the shock value wears off, because lots of groups start doing this, and suddenly million-signature petitions are ten a penny. 

→ Alex speaks from experience: he was previously a campaign director at the petition-based campaigning organisation Avaaz. David Johnston (former Minister for Children) very much agreed with this from the ministerial perspective.

The direct action of the sort that Extinction Rebellion did so effectively to begin with is now deep into diminishing returns. It rapidly morphed into just annoying people as they found their daily commute yet again obstructed by someone who glued themselves to the road. Those sorts of very confrontational tactics, they play really well with people who already agree with you, people who are already convinced, but much less well at reaching the people who are engage-able. 

There’s an organisation I’m on the board for called Better Story, which does amazing work. I remember one of their team telling me that when they have conversations with people at far-right marches, like Unite the Kingdom, what they frequently find is two minutes of concentrated, vitriolic hate speech—Islamophobia, racism—almost as if the person is daring you to dismiss them as beyond the pale, as disgusting. 

But if they stay connected and stay listening, what they so often find on the other side of that is raw grief and pain. It’s stuff like: “I’m not a racist, but my daughter’s disabled, I can’t get the support I need, and no one cares.” Or: “I used to have a proper job, and I can’t get anything now, and it’s killing me.”

Anyone can show up and listen, hold space for grief, and do the hard, caring work that leads through to agency and hope. But they need to be supported by institutions that resource them to do that.

At Larger Us, we’re really interested in the power of conversations as part of a campaigning toolkit. Particularly the kind we call curious conversations, where you’re having conversations with people who have different values or outlooks to you, which are very much characterised by asking people about what they think and how they got there, rather than telling them what they should think. For lots of activists, this is reversing the habit of a lifetime. It’s not a silver bullet, but it is a really valuable part of campaign toolkits that’s been neglected for a long time, and it’s particularly good if you're trying to reach people outside of your base. 

When we’re talking to NGOs about curious conversations, often they will say to us, ‘Okay, but what’s the ask here? These conversations lead to an ask, right?’ 

Well, no. If you design the conversation so it leads to an ask—like come to this meeting or sign this petition—then the person at the other end of that conversation will realise perfectly well that it wasn’t really a conversation in the sense you and I would mean it. Rather, it was an activist performing a lot of empathetic nodding and looking like they were listening to soften the recipient up for the moment when they get hit with the direct debit form.

Thank you to the 149 of you who have referred colleagues to this newsletter. The views expressed in Policy Unstuck interviews are those of the interviewee, and do not necessarily represent Cast from Clay’s view. You can read our editorial guidelines for more information on the goals, process, and formatting of this series.