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At the Lab, we are wrapping up field research projects with six great partner climate advocacy organizations. While I can’t wait to share what we’ve learned once they are complete, today I wanted to provide some of my reflections on best practices for field research I’ve learned from these tests and other projects. Think of these as extra dollops of advice on top of our core guidance on research and testing and Learning 101*.
Protests can affect public opinion, public discourse and voting behavior, but it’s less clear that protests directly influence policymaking. Specifically, impacts of protest on policy seems highly context dependent, on factors such as existing political structures and current public opinion. The effect sizes of protest on public opinion and voting behavior are somewhat small, yet quite significant in the realm of politics, with shifts of approximately 2-5% found via natural experiments. There is strong evidence that protest can be effective in North America and Western Europe, specifically within issues of civil rights, climate change, and social welfare. This resource argues that the evidence for protests inspiring short-term and medium-term change is much stronger than the evidence for long-term change—but that’s because of the difficulty of studying the direct effects of protests on long-term outcomes.
There are some key ways for movements to incorporate strategic visuals into actions, campaigns, and trainings. A cohesive visual strategy translates disconnected technical skills from visual storytelling crafts into a plan to meet our movements’ goals. One key is the “distribution” of movement visuals: at actions, then broadcast via social media and through news media coverage. You should be able to tell “the story” of any action in a couple visuals (that could be posted on social media as a narrative). A helpful timeline for action visuals includes, in order: preparing supplies; planning, training, artbuilds; seeing the community respond; doing the action; talking about how the action felt. Various types of actions that need strong visuals are: rallies, marches, sit-ins, banner drops, blockades, and hold outs. This resource also includes some tips on best moments of an action to photograph and lots of sample action photos.