Successful advocacy starts with having a crystal-clear vision of a target audience. It is essential to have a core focus on the audience and the alignment of the communication plan with the organization's goals. While it’s tempting to follow trends because everyone else is doing it, take a pause before you jump onto every possible platform. Try to methodically assess each channel to determine its potential value and compatibility with your organization's objectives. Approach engagement with a solid database awareness of what the organization wants to accomplish. In our increasingly connected world, adopting a multi-channel strategy is integral to reaching diverse audiences across multiple platforms. Creating a persona helps clarify the tone, tool, and outcome that the organization wants to achieve because you have a specific individual to aim for rather than a general group. Following best practices for your campaigns also means respecting your contacts and authorities that monitor communications.

To reach the feeds of those who don’t pay attention to political news, politicians or advocates need a viral message — one that will not just resonate, but spread organically among social networks. While low-engagement voters distrust social media influencers by a -50- point margin, they trust their family members and friends by a +64-point margin. It’s not always possible to create a viral moment, but it’s worth trying to be bold — in 2024, the campaign event voters heard the most about in October was Trump’s stunt at a McDonald’s drive-thru. Greg Landsman and Ro Khanna have racked up millions of views on their TikTok videos, which often feature them delivering straightforward descriptions of what is happening in Washington directly to their followers.

This guide offers parents and caregivers practical strategies to support children's mental health and resilience amid the challenges posed by climate change. Build a trusted circle of support around you — family, friends, neighbors, colleagues — to bolster your own resilience and expand the safety net for your child. Seek mental health support when needed to reduce stress and anxiety. Access community services to help with practical needs (e.g., financial support, housing, food assistance, etc.) to let you focus on supporting your child. For younger children: They need guidance on understanding climate change, managing fears, and finding hope. For older children (8+) and teens: They need you to listen without judgment, to have honest conversations about their worries, and support for taking action. Be open to meaningful conversations; listen to your child’s concerns. Avoid dismissing their worries — ask them to name their emotions, then acknowledge and validate them. Show empathy and offer reassurance to help them process their emotions.

We Make the Future’s Climate Cohort is laying the foundation for sustained movement-building, rooted in a multi-state, multiracial coalition of organizers and activists. Together, they are pushing forward on climate justice. Their climate narrative work seeks to expand how people understand the impact of climate disaster on everyday people and push back on those fossil fuel backed leaders who stand in the way. Together, they are creating an America where to protect air and water, share in economic prosperity, and build bridges across differences. Good jobs in clean industries, protecting our families’ and children’s health is something that unites all members. This page of resources includes videos and advocacy guides on topics such as post-disaster climate migration messaging, climate justice messaging, climate justice digital toolkits, and more.

Here are the 3 main elements of a communications strategy. First, audience analysis: Understanding the target audience is crucial. This involves identifying who the audience is, what their needs, preferences, and behaviors are, and where they can be reached. Audience analysis helps tailor messages and choose appropriate communication channels. Second, message development: crafting clear, concise, and compelling messages is essential. Messages should align with the organization’s goals and objectives while resonating with the target audience. It’s crucial to consider the tone, language, and content of the messages to ensure they effectively convey the desired information and evoke the intended response. Third, channel selection and implementation: choosing the right communication channels to reach the target audience is vital. This involves selecting from various channels such as email, websites, traditional media, events, or direct mail. The chosen channels should be appropriate for the audience and the message. Implementation involves executing the communication plan effectively across selected channels to ensure messages reach the intended recipients. This guide leads you through key questions to help design a communications strategy.

Building narrative power helps to achieve three important things: building a future where frontline narratives are dominant narratives; shifting who owns and run the narrative ‘means of production’; and making community-led policy change and culture change durable. To design narrative research, begin by understanding the narrative landscape within which an issue or dynamic is operating and assessing the collective capacity to drive narrative change; then test narrative interventions, like mini-campaigns. Employ advisors on our research projects is helpful to understand the nuance and complexity of a policy agenda or a lived-experience. Choosing research participants who are typically engaged in the issue area being explored is helpful (for example, organizers with a local organization managing volunteers, a policy advocate for a specific community or issue area, a lawyer who utilizes the legal system to highlight solutions for the challenges workers and migrants face, an artist who uses their craft to raise up voices and awareness). Moreover, interviews are key to understanding what is needed to build and hold a shared understanding of the narrative landscape in which these communities exist.

The narratives swirling around us right now are potent, messy, and constantly shifting—and that’s exactly why we need to make sense of them, together. This resource analyzed the narratives leading up to the 2024 election, focusing on economic issues, immigration, voting rights, race and gender justice. The mood and tone in election conversations were agitational, authoritative, urgent, concerned, informative, hopeful and empowering. Core values included equity, accountability, compassion, justice, empowerment, autonomy, integrity, community, safety and security. It is clear movement strategists, organizers and allied formations must: pool resources, invest the time and capacity together, expand reach, and tell better stories.

Polling 201: utilizing public opinion research in your communications ca

A new climate campaign is testing whether relentless civil disobedience can stop Citi from backing the fossil fuel industry. It is an experiment: Can sustained disruption play a major role in toppling support for the fossil fuel industry from a big bank like Citi? First of all, it’s about a wide range of constituencies being disruptive. Also, to sustain disruption, we need more people, period, which requires many recruitment methods. Specifically, this campaign has partnered with community-based organizations to activate existing membership bases, and with grassroots groups and NGOs small and large to send email blasts to recruit supporters into mass calls and meetings. The campaign has also hired campaign fellows and activated volunteers to phone, text bank and flier, sticker and put up posters. This campaign is an organizing project that seeks to recruit and empower many more people and groups to step into escalated risk and disruption.

Cats, cars, buildings and vehicles kill about 6,000 times more birds than wind turbines do. The biggest killer of birds in the U.S. by a long shot is domestic cats. After cats, building collisions due to glass (599 million bird deaths annually, on average) and vehicle collisions (214.5 million annually) pose the second and third biggest threats to birds. Poison kills an estimated 72 million birds each year, and collisions with electrical lines result in 25 million deaths annually. Then, way down at No. 9 on the list of threats to birds is wind turbines, which caused an average of 234,012 bird deaths annually. Audubon and other conservation groups have been working with wind energy companies to study bird deaths and other effects on wildlife, and through their bird-monitoring efforts, we’re learning more and more about how to keep birds safe around turbines. Sometimes, it’s as simple as changing the height of the wind turbine to avoid the altitudes birds migrate at and where they forage for food.