Found 26 topics tagged ‘Advocacy 101’

The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that leads us to overestimate the knowledge of our audience. If you allow this curse to infect your writing, you may unwittingly leave supporters feeling confused an alienated. To...

Let’s be honest, this stuff is hard. Never in human history has there been a communication medium more competitive than the Internet. Never has our collective attention span been more fleeting. As much as...

SPOILER: it’s not good. Sure—you know you’re writing an email to 5,000 people. But your task is to make your reader feel like you’re writing only to them. When ‘broadcasting’ language slips into our writing,...

Cognitive biases are powerful mental distortions that affect the way we think and behave. They are so powerful that they can lead people to act against their own best interests. If you understand them, you can...

How can you keep vegans on board with lobbying efforts to incrementally improve welfare standards for systems they’ve chosen to boycott? Let’s apply common ground messaging theory to answer this question. Triggers: Ethical vegans recognize that cruelty...

I’m not saying don’t do heroic things. Keep that up! But when you’re telling your supporters a story of injustice, there’s only space for one hero—and it’s not you. Let me explain... Every story...