What to say to best connect with, persuade, motivate and inspire your audience.
Always remember the 5 essentials of successful cause communications – these need to inform all of your communications, so never lose sight of them.
Your campaign story
The ‘story’ of your campaign is the big picture that can inform every part of your communications. Stories have always been used to help us make sense of the world, and your campaign story can make sense of the issues, the characters and the journey.
Your communications need to feel relevant to your audience’s lives, so you need to tell stories that resonate for them. It’s an old journalistic adage, “Show, don’t tell.” Don’t list facts or rely on a rational argument, rather use case studies to tell the story of the people affected by the problem and how your solution has helped them.
Who is the hero the story revolves around? It’s almost certainly not you or your campaign. No one’s interested in how brilliant your organisation or campaign is. Instead, they care about how you can help them to be brilliant or how you can help the people they care about. So the hero needs to represent the person your campaign is helping, or the person your campaign is helping to help someone else.
Storytelling often demands an enemy, and media coverage particularly relishes some element of conflict. But you need to be very careful about who you frame as the enemy. If you want a government minister to make a certain decision or a business to change its practice, don’t set them up as the enemy. Give them a way out so they can make the right decision.
For your story to have tension and resolution, obstacles and quests, the enemy doesn’t need to be a person or other people. It could be loneliness, or cancer, or pollution, or fear of judgement.
The happy ending is a happy ending for your hero, but also needs to represent the vision of change your campaign or organisation. The story you’re telling might not always get that far, but it needs to be implied that if the story continued, that’s where the journey would end.
Message framing
Your audiences interpret messages about a particular issue through the lens of their existing beliefs and associations. Choosing the right framing for your messages means they will resonate with these values and emotions.
Problem, solution, benefit
Problem, solution, benefit (PSB) is an approach taken from marketing communications and it can be a great format for a press release, a tweet or a whole campaign strategy.
As well as giving a clear structure and argument to any comms, it forces you into seeing the issue from the point of view of your audience. It has to be their problem or need, or a problem they recognise and care about.
You must offer a solution, not just highlight the problem. And your solution needs to be believable and make sense.
Others might be offering a solution too – your unique selling point lives in the benefits. It’s through the benefits that you sell your solution. And these need to be benefits to your audience, or the people they care about.
Tone of voice
Keep your language simple and direct, avoid jargon at all costs.
Consider your brand identity when defining your voice and make sure your language reflects your values and ‘personality’. Are you knowledgeable and authoritative, or friendly and supportive, or fun and inspiring?
Reading and resources
- Winning the Story Wars, Sachs, J (2012). Tell the Truth, Part II: Basic Training (p166–p179)
- How to win campaigns, Rose, C (2010). Framing (p28–p31), Problem phase and solution phase (p162–164)