Who is the audience?
As people who strive for a just world, we criticise the injustices of our world a lot, but we also have ideas and visions on how, for example, rent, climate or health policy should change. Formulating these ideas for the public is what we call press work.
Key messages
In order to be able to answer press enquiries, it helps to formulate key messages – i.e. sentences that summarise your message in a nutshell. However, it is worth considering in advance who the audience for your message should be and how you can reach this audience effectively.
As you may have already seen, you can also find an introduction to the Big We messages on our website. In order to make your messages “connectable”, we would like to show you the social analysis of the concept and what you can draw from it for your core messages:
Target groups
The concept is based on three target groups. There is “our base“, i.e. people who may not be active but who share our goals and are on our side. On the other hand, there are “our opponents”, i.e. those who are completely against us and reject and fight against everything we believe in and stand for – mostly neoliberals and right-wingers. The largest group are “the persuadables“, which are a lot of people who are undecided, who share some progressive beliefs but are also influenced by some reactionary ideas.
In order to rally people beyond our own base behind our messages, we need to consider how to adapt our messages in terms of language, comprehensibility, technical terms, facts and premises – we still want to address our base.
A tip here: Formulate your message in such a way that even a schoolchild can understand it!
Changing the view.
The persuadable may hold reactionary opinions, but they are not consciously ideologically committed to those opinions, as our opponents are. Most people usually have a set of contradictory beliefs that are shaped in part by the dominant messages they hear around them, and their opinions change as those messages change.
That is why it is so important to consider how we talk about demands, actions, etc., so that the view on certain topics and thus the opinion changes. In “press speak”, the way in which you describe an issue is called framing.
Very important: Don’t repeat your opponent’s messages. This leads to them being heard over and over again. Instead, think about how you can change their perspective with your words, sentences and key messages.
Message testing
Slogans, claims, brands and images for political campaigns are usually developed by a small team. These people often have common convictions, live in the same places and have similar identities and lifestyles. In other words, they think and feel similarly. And a campaign is almost always created under time pressure.
We don’t have or we don’t take the time we would need to think about who exactly we want to say what to, how the recipients of our messages think and feel, what we want to achieve in this group – and therefore what our message should look and sound like.
Because our messages are often based on assumptions, we don’t know whether people would actually agree with them.
That’s why we have put together a guide to testing messages here.
Communicate politically:
- The list of general resources can be found here.
- here you can find more resources on Wort.wechsel
- Do you need press & talk show training? Have a look at the Aktivist*innenagentur
- Do you need help with your public relations work and don’t know what to do, or do you want to use the Big-We-Messages model? Write us a message!