Why awareness is stupid

But on the other, he feels guilty when he does it around his daughter. An effective motivational interview might identify these dueling factors and, ideally, lead to the first step of the office worker agreeing to only smoke at work, with the eventual goal being getting him to cease entirely. These principles can be applied to mass media like public-service announcements, too.

The ad has nothing to do with specific facts about the dangers of smoking — rather, it focuses on the emotionally loaded concepts of fatherhood and childhood fears. Another big focal point of successful behavioral interventions is social norms, which can be a powerful tool when wielded correctly.

Shepherd, the anti-bullying researcher, and her colleague Betsy Levy Paluck at Princeton who also co-authored the IRC review on gender-based violence , leverage them to tamp down on bullying.

They go into schools, map the social networks there, and identify who the most well-connected kids are. Then they provide those kids with training about how to step in to prevent bullying when they see it occurring. Why might this work better than simply relating grim statistics about bullying?

So Shepherd and Paluck attempt to disabuse students of that notion by getting highly regarded members of the community to step in and disrupt bullying when it takes place. Finally, in addition to often ignoring or misreading the impact of social norms and personal identity in shaping behavior, awareness-raising campaigns also do a poor job of addressing how the intersection of poverty and stress can lead people to make less than ideal decisions.

In the FAFSA study, for example, families who were informed of financial-aid opportunities and given assistance in filling out the forms had higher take-up rates, while those in the information-only group did not. But for overworked, low-income families, it can prove to be a deceptively formidable obstacle.

But Cerf had a problem. The book was banned in the United States and would be seized as soon as it came off the printing press, which would lose Cerf millions of dollars. And because of the ban, there were several pirated versions of the books floating around that threatened the original text.

They could also have printed the book in the face of the ban, which might have generated headlines. But that would have brought them no closer to getting the ban removed.

They chose a different path. To move the needle on the issues we care about the most, research and experience both show that we must define actionable and achievable calls to action. As expected, the man and his copy of Ulysses were detained at customs, and the case went to court in fall In his decision, United States v.

Their story provides a critical lesson for social change: When you are clear about your goal and find the right strategy, your target audience may be as narrow as a single person. It is particularly important to craft campaign messages, stories, and calls to action that do not threaten how an audience sees itself or its values. Research into how your target audience forms opinions and who influences them will also drive your communication strategy, directing you toward potential partnerships, messages, and stories.

For Cerf and Ernst, focusing on their audience meant identifying and swaying a single judge. A campaign that could have focused solely on getting kids to eat less instead looked at research on the underlying causes of obesity. The first lady started with policies that would ensure that kids got healthier meals at school.

Rather than promoting the health dangers of soda and sugar-sweetened beverages, she focused on getting kids to drink more water. Rather than vilifying the food industry, Obama worked with industry to reduce fat, sodium, and sugar in foods such as breakfast cereal and macaroni and cheese. It appears that the campaign is working. Just Say No supported programs like DARE, which brought police officers into schools to educate kids about the dangers of drugs.

Today the program is effective because it emphasizes helping kids role-play the kinds of conversations they might have when confronted with the opportunity to use drugs.

But in its original version, which was more focused on generating fear of the consequences of using drugs, evaluations showed that kids who went through the program were actually more likely to use drugs and alcohol as they got older, not less. Fortunately, external evaluation made it possible to course-correct the program. Telling people what you want them to do is critical, but an effective call to action is not just a restatement of an overarching goal.

The purpose of that campaign was to get residents to reduce their water use. Dozens of groups have tried and failed to get people to conserve water. In addition, the city of Denver created a context for success by replacing 10, public school toilets with more water-efficient ones and moving to tiered pricing to reward lower water use.

It requires having a theory of change—a methodology or road map for how you will achieve change that includes objectives, tactics, and evaluation— and knowing the issue well enough to know where change will have its greatest effect.

Tying a communications strategy to a theory of change helps ensure that your communications efforts are tied to overarching goals, not simply focused on promotion or awareness. Building a strong theory of change requires the same elements that a solid, action-oriented communications plan does: a clear goal, a clear understanding of what will be different and what will cause it to change, and an understanding of what will influence people to act.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott provides just such an example. Just before Christmas in , Robinson boarded a Montgomery, Ala. The bus was nearly empty, and Robinson chose one of the seats toward the middle of the bus—seats that were designated for white riders if the bus was full, but that blacks could use when the bus was empty.

As she sat, the driver came toward her with his arm raised. Humiliated, Robinson ran from the bus. Robinson never forgot the pain of that day. If Negroes did not patronize them, they could not possibly operate. More and more of our people are already arranging with neighbors and friends to ride to keep from being insulted and humiliated by bus drivers.

Identifying the right target audience and delivering a clear call to action that people will act on isn't dark magic. It requires having a theory of change. It seemed as though the moment arrived in spring when year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to surrender her bus seat, but Colvin swore at the police as she was arrested, and Robinson feared that the community would not rally around her.

Later that year, another young woman was arrested for the same offense, and still Robinson waited. But on Thursday, December 1, , when Rosa Parks quietly declined to give up her seat, Robinson knew the moment had come. Parks was highly regarded in Montgomery, and her long history in the civil rights movement had won her both credibility and affection. Robinson and her students made 50, copies of the flyer and stayed up most of the night cutting and bundling them.

The next morning, she and her students got the bundles into the hands of influential and well-connected blacks throughout the city.

The boycott on the following Monday was so successful that civil rights leaders voted to continue the boycott until a US Supreme Court case on the topic was decided. Robinson had a theory of change: She knew that a boycott would provide critical pressure because blacks made up 75 percent of bus riders, and that if she could get all of them to participate, the company would have to accede to their requests or suffer huge financial losses.

She also understood that the boycott had to have the right emotional impetus—one that would be powerful enough to sustain the protests for months. It was a theory of change that worked. Robinson intuited something else that research would bear out decades later. Successful public interest campaigns need a narrowly defined audience, clear calls to action, and a theory of change. But they also need one more thing—the right messenger. Arslan PDF. Atlanta, Georgia PDF.

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