This session explores how Harmony Labs and Earth Alliance collaborated to identify and engage audiences missing from the climate conversation, blending together in one pilot project groundbreaking behavioral media research with influencer partnerships and media testing and iteration. Harmony Labs Executive Director Brian Waniewski shares key research findings and showcase how these findings informed an influencer media strategy to connect with untapped audiences, offering climate communicators new pathways for engaging diverse communities. (04:29–06:55) They created content with 60 creators through co-productions and a creators fund—rather than scripted ads—with two goals: engagement and transporting audiences toward awareness, pro-climate futures, and participation. (07:26–09:14) Using their Narrative Observatory, they tracked media behavior from half-million US panelists, mapping how people move through media and which values shape their consumption. (09:14–13:07) Identified a key overlooked group: the “If You Say So” audience—online, culture makers who avoid news—so they tailored content to their values (autonomy, fun), not traditional activist messaging.

Today Renaisi launches a new model for evaluating place-based systems change. Lily O’Flynn, Principal Consultant for Place-based Evaluation & Learning, describes the model and why it solves the problem of evaluating change in places for funders, commissioners, and practitioners.

Leading questions encourage a form of paradoxical thinking by leading individuals to perceive their own views as irrational, senseless, or exaggerated, examples of which can be found below (Hameiri et al., 2014, 2016; Swann et al., 1988). Leading questions are paradoxical in that they require participants to answer statements that are consistent with yet more extreme or senseless than their dearly held beliefs (Swann et al., 1988). The psychological mechanism underlying paradoxical thinking is based on three components: (1) Identity threat, in which individuals strive to distance themselves from the exaggerated and extreme attitudes presented to them by changing their own (Swann et al., 1988); (2) Surprise, in that the shock individuals experience when facing these extreme attitudes causes their deeply-rooted beliefs to be shaken, allowing new pieces of information to be absorbed (Hameiri et al., 2018); and (3) General disagreement, in that paradoxical messages are generally closer to the individual's beliefs (albeit being rather extreme) than completely contrary messages, thus provoking less resistance.

A lot of people would like to make the world better, but they don’t know how. This is a great tragedy.

How memes can work for causes

And the result is a new beta framework: INCITE — Inspiring Narrative Change Innovation through Tracking and Evaluation. This new learning and evaluation framework has been developed to equip the pop culture narrative change field — comprised of artists, values-aligned entertainment leaders and companies, movement leaders, cultural strategists, narrative researchers, philanthropic partners, and more — with a shared methodology to unearth learnings and track short and long-term impact, at both the individual and collective levels. This launch of the beta INCITE framework is the first step in a road testing process set to take place over 2024 to make it useful and usable by field members and funders alike.

Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.” Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.

Causal layered analysis, a theory and practice of organisational, social and civilisational change, seeks to transform the present and the future, through deconstructing and reconstructing reality at four levels. The levels are: the litany or day to day unquestioned views of reality, the systemic, the worldview/stakeholder perspective and the deepest, often unconscious, myths and metaphors. Problems are considered at all four levels and multiple worldviews and stakeholders are brought into to consider alternatives. By moving up and down layers and considering alternative perspectives, transformative policy and strategic solutions are created.

If we are to use behavioural science as a lens to understand behaviour, we need to make sure that our lens is not always ‘zoomed in’ on the individual and their immediate situation but that we also ‘zoom out,’ so that we can see the wider social, cultural, economic and political environment. When we do this, we can see more clearly how our responses and behaviours are not only the result of our individual psychology but are also socially, economically and historically situated. There is a nuanced balancing act between the individual and these wider ways in which our behaviour is shaped that will inevitably be a source of debate and disagreement.

In this short follow up post we explain how and why we combine systems thinking and behavioural approaches. We start by introducing the concepts of ‘systems’ and ‘systems thinking’ before explaining why Systems thinking is useful to combine with a behavioural approach.

Key opinion leaders - focused on medical

Fast forward to 2023, and there is a new zeitgeist around complexity and systems change. Depending on who you are, dear reader, I’m either late to the zeitgeist, or in the vanguard, but it basically boils down to this: We need to stop trying to design the solution, and instead design for the conditions that enable the emergence of many solutions. Fostering more, quality and trusted relationships is a critical enabler of that emergence. For the catalysers of complex system change (often government), that means starting to value relationships as a key outcome.

“Availability” — short for “availability heuristic or availability bias, a pervasive mental shortcut whereby the perceived likelihood of any given event is tied to the ease with which its occurrence can be brought to mind”. “Cascade” — short for “social cascades through which expressed perceptions trigger chains of individual responses that make these perceptions appear increasingly plausible through their rising availability in public discourse”. An availability cascade is what happens when a social cascade rips through a population based on a more or less arbitrary topic — whatever topic happens to be in front of people when the cascade starts.

This toolkit is a short guide to strategic communications, based on extensive research and building on the experience of activists and communicators from around the globe. It aims to provide a framework rather than a blueprint; helping you to ask the right questions rather than giving you the right answers. It’s designed to be helpful for anyone who communicates as part of their voluntary or paid work. It’s written with a focus on European LGBTI activists, but we hope it will be useful to others with a similar vision

plus Field Guide companion doc to this download on same page

Design for Belonging is a framework to support you to build greater belonging and reduce othering in your community. Includes toolkit, resources.

The UN Refugee Agency’s Project Unsung is a speculative storytelling project that brings together creative collaborators from around the world to help reimagine the humanitarian sector and promote narrative change and foresight in our work. The worlds produced through mediums such as non-fiction essays, science fiction, poetry, art and illustration, create visions for how we might radically reimagine our work with communities, our organizations, and our relationships to each other and the planet. The collection is framed across three overarching issues that we believe to be critical for building just futures: Nature (restoring and repairing the world by confronting climate change and ecological loss); Identity (fostering belonging, connection, and kinship); Power (reimaging and reconfiguring power dynamics and social transformation through decolonizing, localizing, and building solidarity across difference). The story of humanitarian innovation needs a new chapter. Join us in imagining better worlds.

In 2010, Colombia's defense minister contacted an ad agency to create an idea to demobilize FARC members, the oldest guerrilla army in Latin America. The agency, after spending over a year talking to nearly 100 of its members, learned two main things (1). -First, guerrilla members are ordinary men and women and not only guerrillas, a fact which is often forgotten after 60 years at war. -Secondly, they are more likely to demobilize during Christmas as it is a sensitive and emotional period. Based on these insights, they had a clever idea to put a Christmas tree in strategic walking paths in the middle of the jungle that would light up when someone passed by with a message promoting demobilization. The results? Three hundred thirty-one people who demobilized named this idea as one of the reasons to do so. Over the years, several campaigns from the same agency were quite successful, and overall, they were named in over 800 demobilizations. Causality, of course, cannot be established. Nevertheless, any measurable, non-violent efforts like this one are praised. Next time you think you have a difficult-to-reach customer, maybe think again!

“...Public health’s attempts at being apolitical push it further toward irrelevance. In truth, public health is inescapably political, not least because it has to make decisions in the face of rapidly evolving and contested evidence.“

Then our hero enters, and decides to coordinate and plan a persuasion campaign to get the rule changed. Here’s how I think this went down. He in advance arranges for various sources to give him a signal boost when the time comes, in various ways. He designs the message for a format that will have maximum reach and be maximally persuasive. This takes the form of an easy to tell physical story, that he pretends to have only discovered now. Since all actual public discourse now takes place on Twitter, it takes the form of a Twitter thread, which I will reproduce here in full.

Schwartz has spent much of his career emphasising the shared, universal nature of values and in one paper with Anat Bardi, he demonstrates that Benevolence, Universalism and Self-direction values are consistently rated most important to most people across different cultures. The answers he has just given map pretty neatly onto Self-direction and Benevolence (see Figure 1). Figure 1: Value structure across 68 countries – Public Interest Research Centre (2011) based on Schwartz (1992) The Schwartz model shows that values have neighbours and opposites, that values close together (e.g. Humble, Honest) tend to have similar importance to people, that values far away (e.g. Equality, Social Power) act more like a seesaw – as one rises in importance, the other falls. When you add to this that values connect to behaviour (that Universalism and Benevolence are associated with cooperation, sustainable behaviour, civic engagement and acceptance of diversity – that Achievement and Power are most emphatically not), and that values can be engaged, you have more than a model: you have an imperative for all the activists and campaigners scrabbling around for the messages and tactics that are going to change the world.

“This research shows that the reward system has an important function in helping behavior and if we want to increase the likelihood of pro-social behavior, we must reinforce a sense of belonging more than a sense of empathy.

The key in all this is crossing the chasm—performing the acts that allow the first shoots of that mainstream market to emerge. This is a do-or-die proposition for high-tech enterprises; hence it is logical that they be the crucible in which “chasm theory” is formed. But the principles can be generalized to other forms of marketing, so for the general reader who can bear with all the high-tech examples in this book, useful lessons may be learned.

summary of key points of book

Looking at hundreds of campaigns over the last century, Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact dynamics will depend on many factors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change. Overall, nonviolent campaigns were twice as likely to succeed as violent campaigns: they led to political change 53% of the time compared to 26% for the violent protests.

not really a lit review, but covers key behavior change concepts and how they can be applied to covid

This handbook has been compiled by Well Made Strategy (WMS) who have extensive professional experience developing impactful strategic communications across a range of sectors from security to financial inclusion, education, agriculture, health and governance. WMS helps individuals, organisations and networks harness the power of strategic communications to influence policy change, prepare for and anticipate crises, inform the national discourse, build will for social reform and nudge entire communities towards new ways of thinking and behaviours. We have developed this handbook to serve as a guide to strategic communications for those interested in using strategic communications but who may not have an in-depth understanding of the concept.

The purpose of this workbook is to provide a workspace for you to develop your own communications strategy by working through the various modules of the Strategic Communications for Social Change handbook. While the workbook is separate from the handbook, they are closely linked to each other.

It’s not that all change is bottom-up, but: long-lasting change usually is (here is why) it’s always worth asking yourself if what looks like a top-down change was initiated the bottom-up way. This phenomenon applies to many contexts: companies pivoting to what others (the bottom-up) proved working, managers promoting those employees who demonstrated deserving it, gatekeepers opening up once someone demonstrated having a (bottom-up) following. The top-down usually follows the bottom-up. More precisely, it goes as follows: The bottom-up initiates change, locally. If it sustains over time, the top-down formalizes it. The rest of the population adopts it, even if it lives far from who initiated point (1). The implication is: if you want change, do not live under the illusion that you need to wait for the top-down to give you the green light. The top-down will give you the green light once it is shown that your idea works (and it’s on you to show them).

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