This article is the third of a new series called “Looking Ahead: the Future of Communications for Good,” produced in collaboration with the Communications Network. Look for additional pieces every other Wednesday, and add your thoughts in the comments. Read the first one from Cecile Richards on storytelling and the second one from Andy Burness on forging genuine human connections.
As the Communications Network celebrates its 40th anniversary, it is collaborating with the Chronicle to figure out what’s coming next.
When college students who need financial aid don’t know how to get it or children eligible to get food benefits don’t receive them, it’s imperative to enlist these people and their communities in solving the problem. Top-down solutions (from, say, a think tank based in D.C.) alone can’t lead to change.
The wonky phrase for a better way forward is what my New America colleague Tara McGuinness and I have dubbed “the new practice of public problem-solving.” It’s an approach that is more open, adaptable, experimental, and data-focused than traditional policy making. The goal is to focus on the people whom policies and solutions are intended to serve.
Communication is essential to every stage of success in public problem-solving because it’s crucial to find out from the people who face a problem what they really need. It’s important not to begin with assumptions. Built for Zero, for instance, an organization that has ended homelessness in nine communities across the United States and is on its way to doing so in 60 more, does not start out by assuming that the problem to be solved is the absence of homes. Instead, it achieves success by engaging homeless people themselves in the process of figuring out solutions.
This focus on asking people what they need to thrive flowed from lessons Built for Zero learned during its campaign to build 100,000 homes to shelter the chronically homeless. Communities were required to host a Registry Week in which trained volunteers conducted a blitz to learn the names of every homeless person in the area and collect information to help them receive appropriate services. An assessment report showed demonstrable results and benefits for the communities that adopted this highly personalized approach. This part of communication was essentially good listening, engaging volunteers to do all they could to understand the needs of those for whom programs are designed.
Evolving Through Experimentation
Step two in the new practice is to assume that solutions to public problems do not spring fully formed from the foreheads of public-policy researchers but evolve through repeated experimentation. Those experiments take place on the ground in local communities, driven by government or social entrepreneurs. The trick is how to find solutions in the experimental stage and help them spread.
To find them, the communication tools are pretty basic and smaller in scale: newsletters, email groups, curated events, columns in specialized publications. These tools can help crowdsource experiments suggested by established groups of activists and organizers, social entrepreneurs, foundations, local and state government experts, and academics.
Of course, communication experts dedicated to social change need to get comfortable with data-enabled feedback. Dashboards, data-visualization tools, and information loops of every description are the necessary communication consoles of successful change-makers. We often focus far too much on advertising and media campaigns and not enough on the communication channels that are essential in the earliest stages of promoting change. We need to invest in the flow of numbers and proxy variables as much as in streams of words and pictures to a wider public.
Traditional Communications
The last step of the new practice is designing for-scale solutions, and here more traditional forms of communication truly are essential. When leaders in Tacoma, Wash., worked to improve the graduation rate in their schools (labeled “dropout factories” in a 2010 article in USA Today), they reinforced their coalition-based approach by building a website dedicated to the effort. At graduatetacoma.org, you can find all you need to know about the effort and how to join it, including the organizations that participated, stories of success, ways to get involved, and contact information.
Equally relevant is the need for communication to knit together loose horizontal networks of like-minded entities of similar status. Nannerl Keohane, former president of Duke, describes leading a university with lots of different schools headed by powerful and independent-minded deans as captaining a flotilla. The goal is to ensure that everyone sails in the same direction and reaches a common destination, though each boat has its own captain with an idea of the best route.
To take just one example, the coalition of advocacy organizations, companies, and associations that work on net neutrality requires constant communication among members. Organizations stay in touch in formal and informal ways to sustain awareness of events in Congress, the courts, and the FCC. Holding the partners together requires constant engagement.
These networks, coalitions, or alliances are an easier way to spread ideas and solutions than building a large centralized organization. But this approach requires assigning the right staff to drive and manage the collaboration and create effective channels of communication that people actually use. I cannot stress enough the importance of having the human element here; no matter how elegant or efficient a system is, busy humans cannot be convinced to use it without another human in the driver’s seat.
Treat Inside and Outside Messages With Care
Public problem-solving requires many kinds of communication to work. People seeking to design solutions to problems need to understand how to listen as much as they talk, often with people of very different backgrounds. Experimentation requires both human and data communication, requiring the same attention to internal communication — such as feedback loops — as the kind of external messaging necessary for widespread impact.” And in an increasingly horizontal world, using communication to keep that flotilla sailing in the same direction is more relevant than broadcasting from the bridge of a supertanker.
We live in a communication-obsessed world, with ever more ways of “getting our message out,” but it means we are bombarded as well by other people’s messages. In a world in which “going viral” is now the ultimate communication goal, you can net millions of readers, viewers, or listeners overnight, but you can also get dropped as quickly as you are picked up. And yet we are often not talking enough to the person in the next cubicle or office. Customized communication — carefully designed and implemented — is indispensable to successful social change.
Anne-Marie Slaughter is chief executive of the New America Foundation.
