As part of ILGA-Europe’s programme in response to anti-LGBTI forces, we supported a number of LGBTI organisations in Europe to deepen the skills needed towards achieving change in the current landscape of rising anti-LGBTI and anti-gender forces.
Activating empathy is a gateway to new audiences
Throughout Europe and Central Asia in recent years, anti-LGBTI movements have mobilised against gender equality as well as sexual and reproductive health rights mainly employing fear-mongering approaches.
In an attempt to counter this, positive messaging accesses people’s emotional brains, and emotion drives moral reasoning. The right stories help our linear brains put things in an order that makes sense and activates empathy.
A shared vision of the world we hope to live in should serve as the foundation of effective communication. We use frames to communicate with others in a way that is consistent with firmly ingrained values and beliefs. These shape the lens through which we perceive and comprehend the world. Social movements need to create this unifying vision, strategy, and the tools required for effective communication while frequently functioning in firefighting mode.
The way we communicate is never neutral; it constantly appeals to people’s emotions, and belief systems, which influence how individuals perceive a topic.
Some research methodologies that you can consider to understand your landscape better include in-depth interviews, deep listening focus groups, online focus groups, language analysis and cognitive linguistics, narrative analysis and social media A/B testing.
The five-step process Gaynet followed, in their own words:
Italy’s Gaynet tested its campaign framing by holding focus group discussions and receiving feedback from its target audiences. They used these insights for the development of two future campaigns’ frames and messages, which led to “reaching and engaging allies and other new audiences”.
“Through our coaching sessions, we learned to change the focus from ourselves to our audience instead. A practical thing we continuously implemented at any stage of our communication work was to think about the impact on our potential audience, starting with the simple question: what would my mum, my uncle, my grandma understand?”
Step 1: Get your audience’s pulse using social media
First, we organised an audience analysis by sharing a questionnaire on our social media with three basic questions concerning the project topics: freedom of expression, gender identity, and education in school.
The idea was to investigate the level of understanding of these issues among three different clusters:
30 people were selected by a specific call for participants with the explicit purpose of helping in a communication project on these issues.
300 respondents were reached through Facebook & Instagram ads selected using key words that connected to LGBTI advocacy.
200 respondents were selected in the same way but using keywords belonging to different issues.
Step 2: Segment Your ‘Moveable Middle’ With Personas
To persuade people to view your issue in a way that aligns with your goals, you need to understand that those who can be influenced often have different perspectives to choose from. Your job is to convince them to adopt the perspective that supports your objectives.
The results from our focus group discussion gave us the chance to further segment specific target groups, (namely our ‘moveable middle’ for each campaign) by drawing four-to-five personas for each topic – imagining the kinds of people who the message is targeted at and profiling them. These helped a lot in producing the first campaign frame.
We proceeded by holding two specific online focus groups of ten people through an open call for participants. We asked what they were able to understand from the graphics and texts we created, what their feelings were, what came to their minds and then, after explaining the campaign purpose, whether they thought we were going in the right direction to achieve our goal.
Step 3: Tweak Your Messaging And Make It Make Sense
For our campaign to include homophobia as a hate crime in Italian law, the focus group’s feedback completely changed our framework. We started from the idea to compare racism and homophobia, but we withdrew that.
The message was confusing and had overlapping stories and identities, rather than being a good metaphor. So, we produced a new frame starting from the original idea: not making a new law but complementing the existing one by including homophobia as a hate crime.
Step 4: Bring Your Own Elephant Into The Room
Saying “x isn’t true” in response to something just serves to confirm the person’s initial view. It follows that campaigns shouldn’t set out to directly address the opponent, but campaigners find this to be exceedingly challenging in reality.
We were then helped by ILGA-Europe’s coaches to change and refine our frame: the idea of “completing a wall” – our initial graphic was about placing the last brick on a wall but it was too connected with the idea of the wall itself, which subconsciously also means separation and barriers. Instead, we moved towards the idea of completing a heart-shaped jigsaw.
“A law for hate crimes exists: let’s complete it! #lawoftheheart” – one of the graphics GayNet used to campaign for the inclusion of homophobia and transphobia in the ‘Zan law’ on hate crimes.
Step 5: Fail To Succeed But Test
Testing was a very helpful part. We also used the “ask a friend” method to collect feedback on the final campaign visual. Furthermore, the people we involved were the first “early adopters” of our campaign and they helped us to spread it in the first campaign phases.
For the “Sexual education in school” campaign, we texted the draft to a stakeholder focus group, involving teachers and parents. The feedback was very good and helped us in adjusting the copy.
One of Gaynet’s graphic for their campaign on sex education in schools: “Let’s not throw them into the sea without teaching them how to swim! Yes to sex and love education in schools.”
Step 6: Monitor your messages
Finally, evaluate your messages after the messages have gone live and monitor them to measure your impact. You should receive insightful feedback at each of the stages explained above to help you improve your communication.
Here are 5 more things you can do to respond to the anti-gender discourse.
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