The Seven Steps

Craft a dynamic campaign plan for each project to ensure conceptual alignment, and so that everyone understands how each other person and piece of work furthers the bigger picture. [Campaign Plan Guide]

Who is this for? Why do they need it? What precisely do we want them to do with it? Our audience is not everyone. As Seth Godin writes, trying to change public opinion directly is like dropping a few drops of purple dye into the ocean—the water stays the same color. But dropping purple dye into a swimming pool is different—the water will turn purple. Our core audience is the swimming pool. Who’s in the swimming pool? The decision-makers and media shapers who collectively have enough juice to change policy and political outcomes, and even, collectively, to reshape public opinion: Public officials, community leaders, reporters, and scholars. [Our Audience Philosophy]

In addition to your core audience, it often makes sense to engage cultural influencers (e.g. social media influencers, artists, writers, directors, producers, musicians, athletes, business leaders); professional associations; political organizations, think tanks, advocacy organizations, and political parties. Think: public forums, sharing on listservs, blog posts, social media engagement.

Don’t spam people. Get useful material into the hands of people who can’t wait to receive and share it because it solidifies their status as an informed insider. This also means curating information from publications to make your work more impactful for specific audience members by, for example, taking long articles or reports and pulling out the quotes or data that’s relevant to them.

First, demonstrate momentum by identifying examples of seemingly isolated stories, ideas, and policy wins and packaging them together. This increases salience and momentum, which drives toward adoption. Then, when concrete steps toward adoption occur, highlight those events while again placing them in a broader context by repackaging content, which further increases salience and momentum. The more salience and momentum for the policy, the more the core narrative is reinforced.

It’s often the passive, repetitive flow of information that increases the salience and importance of ideas, which shapes opinions and behaviors over time. Tell stories repeatedly and through different types of products—for example, original reporting, commentary, explainers, newsletters, podcasts, video, original polling, white papers, and scholarly articles. Take quotes, video clips, data, and takeaways from publications and share them through the channels and on the platforms where our core audience congregates. Package this coverage, and put it in the hands of the people who are best positioned to use it to create change. This work increases salience and support for the issue, shaping the context in which leaders make decisions.

You want decision-makers and media-shapers to feel how everyone, everywhere in their social sphere is talking about these issues. That’s why you should not only produce and disseminate your own content, but also partner with external media, researchers, and practitioners to illustrate that the momentum behind the policy is coming from everywhere, but also, nowhere in particular.