Rule 4: Remember People In Systems

Not all messaging is created equal. It is highly contextual, dependent on audience, environment, medium, and messenger. For those trying to change the world – advocating for a cause greater than themselves and mobilizing others to move big ideas – these mission-driven organizers must follow a different set of rules. Each week, we will unveil our Nine Rules for Movement Messaging. We welcome you to share this with your colleagues and friends. By delivering one rule per week, it is our hope that as advocates and communicators, you can apply them to your own work one by one.

Humans think in story form. When humans are challenged with considering the implications of a social issue or policy, we default into the classic elements of a story. We look for the conflict in the story: What is the nature of the problem? We look for the resolution at the end: What is the goal we are aiming for? We look for the lesson or value at play: What ideals are involved? And most importantly, we look for the characters involved: Who are the people affected by this?

As social sector communicators, if we are not putting people front and center in our communications, not only will our audiences struggle to understand the nature of the systems we are seeking to change, they will fail to understand the human implications of the systemic flaws we address as advocates. Groundbreaking psychology research from the 1940s revealed how we as humans assign causality when prompted with nothing more than animated shapes on a screen. The subjects in the study developed entire story sequences that personified the shapes they saw, assigned human emotions and behaviors to the shapes, and filled in the blanks of the story they thought they were watching. Watch the animation for yourself and see how you react to it. If we don’t introduce our audiences to the characters in our story, they will do it themselves.

The systems, structures, and policies we advocate for and against are real, and so are the people that create, perpetuate, and disrupt them. Tell the stories of those people. When advocating for social policy change, include in your communication who will be affected, not just how the policy will change society. Use terms that conjure images of people, rather than abstract concepts or structures.

“Society” is not people. “Moms and dads” are.

A “population” is not human. “Students” are.

“The disadvantaged” are abstract. “People who struggle everyday to make ends meet” are real and tangible.

This is especially useful when communicating about contentious, controversial, or complex social problems. For years, advocates have struggled to communicate how policies that promote racial equity benefit more than just racial minorities. But look how the Stanford Social Innovation Review did it. In this article, they lead readers to these benefits by starting with a concrete example having nothing to do with race (curb cuts designed for people with disabilities) and told that story through the perspective of actual people. Author Angela Glover Blackwell wrote:

“Then a magnificent and unexpected thing happened. When the wall of exclusion came down, everybody benefited—not only people in wheelchairs. Parents pushing strollers headed straight for curb cuts. So did workers pushing heavy carts, business travelers wheeling luggage, even runners and skateboarders.”

Suddenly, talking about racial equity and the fatal flaw of zero-sum thinking is not so challenging. When we lead people to difficult subjects by putting these matters in human terms (rather than leading with difficult subjects in abstract terms), we set our audiences – and ourselves – up for success.

The Henry P. Kendall Foundation designed a prize program specifically for college and university dining service directors and the students they serve, taking a large and complex food system and presenting it in terms of people.