Last week, I took a fellow eco-blogger to task for falling into the self-indulgent habit of trying to shock people into action with bad news alone.
The blogger ignored my provocation. He did not take the bait. Hellooooo?? No response. Deafening silence.
Oh well, a Water Words reader weighed in:
From my own point of view and experience, “alarm” and “outrage” have been grossly over-used in recent years, especially when it comes to the environment. Yes, there are some situations in which a person *should* react with both alarm and outrage, such as direct pipelines of raw sewage into a watershed. I think the stress should be on information and education, with a strong emphasis on doing something rational and effective with long-term positive effects.
Rational. That’s a word I have some views about. It’s a mighty fine line there between rational and clinical. And trying to cost-benefit-analyze everyday citizens into action with a boring presentation of scientific and policy facts is a failing of ours, too. You may get (some of) those everyday citizens to agree with you with this kind of approach (if they understand you), but most won’t DO anything.
A group of people I really respect, including Kristin Grimm at Spitfire Strategies and Marty Kearns at the Green Media Toolshed, recently spent some time deep-thinking this conundrum, and wrote a paper called Discovering the Activation Point. It’s way better than the usual self-serving self-published white paper that consulting firms all pump out these days, so I encourage you to read it.
If I was to summarize the report findings in a single phrase, it would be: agreement comes from the head, but action comes from the heart.
It is my own view that negative emotions get people’s attention, but these feelings are abundant. We all experience a glut of bad news as we go through our day. It is the opportunity to feel positive about doing something that makes some problems stand out from all the rest.
Everyday citizens want to feel positive, virtuous emotions like accomplishment, confidence, belonging, generosity, camaraderie, charity, resolve, frugality, etc… Opportunities to feel this way are rare, and if they can experience that by doing something about your problem, they will. So don’t make them guess — come right out and tell them how great they’ll feel, using words that work like:
Here are two brochures I picked up on a bike ride this weekend. One is pretty good, the other is even better. Take a look and ask yourself “what is the subtle difference that will make one of these pull more weight for the organization that published it?”
The first is for a bike ride. Sounds like fun. Cute logo.
The second is for a nonprofit organization.
What’s the difference? It’s the call to action. The second brochure has a very explicit request right up front: JOIN! If you see the brochure at all, you see the call to action.
The first brochure has a call to action, too: REGISTER! But to find that out, you have to pick up the brochure, open it, and read it. That’s three steps along the way where a potential registrant might get distracted, interrupted, or lose interest.
Sure, it’s a subtle difference. But when you put a brochure in front of thousands of people, slight improvements and minor mistakes add up and can mean the difference between dozens of new members that you do recruit… or don’t. And that’s worth a lot.
A while back, I highlighted a hard-hitting animation that the Gulf Restoration Network produced. Today, I’m happy to follow up and report that one of the corporations targeted in that video has blinked: Wal-Mart has announced it will stop selling cypress mulch harvested from Louisiana’s precious and dwindling coastal forests.
GRN wants you to know this a first step, not a total victory, but it’s still a job well done and a testament to what can happen when you communicate your issue in a clear and compelling manner.
Click here to visit their blog post announcing Wal Mart’s move. Drop ‘em an attaboy in the comment field. They earned it.
Here’s a nifty TV commercial and/or PSA (not sure which) about global warming. A few unfortunate words choices hold it back from achieving greatness.The black balloons make it come close. They provide a vivid and compelling illustration of how our various little energy uses add up. It’s terrific. “Save energy, and you’ll also save money,” the narrator intones. Nice. Like that. The closing tagline is: “You have the power to make a difference.” Right on.But it’s just a flat out mistake to use the term “climate change” in a piece like this when you could use “global warming” instead. It’s well established that everyday citizens respond to these terms quite differently. I know the chart below is hard to read — click to get to the full report — but it reports the results of polling around various terms, and basically finds that everday citizens report 25% more concern when asked about “global warming” than “climate change.” That’s a big difference!
Source: The Environmental Deficit: Survey on American Attitudes on the Environment, Global Strategy Group, 2004Finally, there’s not a single line in there about why you should care about either climate change OR global warming. Plenty of people out there in TV land need at least a little reminder of that for the rest of the PSA to make sense.
So here’s what I propose:
- First, replace the term “climate change” with “global warming” in every instance
- Second, replace the bland-sounding term “greenhouse gas” with the more attention-grabbing term “pollution that causes global warming”
- Finally, kick off the piece with a statement like “If we don’t stop global warming, future generations won’t be as safe as we are today.”
THEN the script will be as powerful as the visuals.
Thanks to Robert at watercrunch for forwarding me the tip!
