Rule 9: Play The Long Game

Our instinct is to play to the here and now. Speak to your audience’s immediate hopes, fears, and ambitions. We see it now, in the midst of the pandemic, in corporate television commercials. Political ads, even in the 1960s, play on fear and outrage. It is natural to want to meet people where they are; but when we do that in the social sector, we can run the risk of forgetting where we are going and costing ourselves long-term progress. At this moment, when it feels like we have lost so much ground to a public narrative turned so completely away from our own causes and missions, it helps to remind ourselves that we serve a different purpose than corporations and campaigns. Theirs is about short-term behavior change. Ours is the long game.

Social advocates often feel compelled to satisfy short-term needs, just like right now. We need money contributed to our efforts, volunteers in the door, legislative wins, and media stories placed. These are legitimate needs, and often – like now – circumstances can make them difficult to achieve. It can be a natural inclination to ease back into the old, reliable strategies of leaning into destabilizing emotions: fear, anger, guilt, outrage. After all, they work, right? If you get your base fired up about the latest injustice, they are bound to click the link and contribute. But it turns out those short-term wins can come at the expense of long-term goals.

Psychology researchers have studied the effects of fear-based appeals for some time. In 2015, researchers conducted a meta-analysis of sixty-years of fear-based message research and the effects on behavior, concluding that “there are no identified circumstances under which [fear appeals] backfire and lead to undesirable outcomes.” None of the studies that were analyzed, however, focused on long-term behavior change. When researchers examined the long-term effects of fear-based appeals, such as the effects of fear-inducing arguments on HIV prevention, they found that while “fear inducing arguments increased perceptions of risk at the immediate follow-up,” they also “decreased knowledge and condom use,” and “the effects on perceived risk and knowledge decreased over time.” The study found that when counseling and testing were employed, subjects were less afraid and more informed, leading to increased preventative behavior.

In short, fear-based appeals did their job in the immediate, but the effect didn’t last. Instead, when health advocates employed a strategy that combined messaging with actions individuals could take to improve health outcomes, those individuals were more likely to take those actions, increase their knowledge about the subject, and take preventative steps in the long-term.

Social sector advocates can learn from these findings. Playing to the primitive emotions of our audiences may be appealing, especially when research demonstrates the immediate effectiveness of these appeals on things like fundraising and voting. But when long-term behavior change is examined, the true effect of fear-inducing messages is revealed. If advocates want to create lasting change in their audiences, they cannot ignore the impact of solutions-oriented communication.

Read how Food Solutions New England advocates for specific steps individuals and organizations can take to fulfill their mission.