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As the election edges closer, we took a moment to look to the days after November 5 and identify ways to help nonprofit leaders navigate what will likely be tricky terrain.
Amy McIsaac of Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement joined The Commons in Conversation to talk about a resource guide she put together looking at how words commonly used in the nonprofit world — terms like “civic,” “democracy,” and “diversity” — land with different audiences. The analysis, she said, aims to help organizations be “better stewards of these words so that they can unite and bridge us and our communities and not perpetuate further division.”
I spoke with Amy on LinkedIn; free registration is required to watch. You also can watch a recording of the interview on the Chronicle’s YouTube channel. Below is an A.I-generated transcript of the conversation, lightly edited for clarity.
Words That Unite and Divide
DREW: We’re just six days away from that election, but we’re going to be talking today about the days after the election and how nonprofit leaders can navigate what’s likely to be some pretty tense times.
For that conversation, I’m really excited to have Amy McIsaac on board with us. She’s been studying how the language of nonprofits can serve both to bring people together but also to deepen divides in the country. I wrote a story about a new report from Amy’s research last week, and that research is just fascinating. I hope you’ll look into it.
But in the meantime, I want to welcome Amy and thank her for being with us.
AMY: Hi, Drew, thanks so much for having me.
Let me tell you a little bit about Amy. She is managing director for learning and experimentation with Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement, which is commonly known as PACE. She’s a proud alum of both Providence College — Go, Friars! — and AmeriCorps. And she’s worked with several nonprofits on community engagement and community service.
Most important for this conversation, Amy leads an effort at PACE called the Civic Language Perceptions Project. Amy, can you start us off by talking a little bit about PACE and the project itself?
AMY: Definitely. At PACE, we call ourselves a philanthropic laboratory for grant makers who are in some way thinking about how their investments can strengthen American democracy and civic life. We have about 80 members — foundations of many different sizes and focus areas in regional areas. And again, the thread that connects them is their dedication and investment in democracy.
About five years ago, we were hearing from our members that they were feeling a disconnect between the words they were using and saying around democracy and civic engagement work — words like “democracy,” like “civic engagement,” but also “racial equity,” “community,” “patriotism,” “belonging.” And they were trying to understand how the words they may be using are actually falling on the ears of a variety of communities and Americans at large.
And so we took that on as a kind of service to our members — to understand that at a very high level. And then over the past five years, we’ve kind of deepened our learning as we’ve gone through. That research informs the resource guide you referenced; it’s drawn from a nationally representative survey that was in the field in November of 2023.
And so that that gave us a view into American voters’ perceptions of some key terms that all of us who work in the nonprofit sector use and what their relationships are to those words at the latest pulse that we have.
DREW: You’ve been doing this for a good five years now. And in our conversations you talked about how it’s important to pull it together just before the election. So why put this piece together now, this resource guide for folks?
AMY: The resource guide that we launched two weeks ago is called “How to Talk Bridge-y.” We usually get a little side smile when we say that, because it’s like, “What are you saying?” It’s a word we made up. And honestly, it’s not a real word; it’s not in the dictionary. But we think it probably should be, because every time we say a word, it’s sending signals. This is the microcurrency that we’re trading in every day. We love and are big supporters and big amplifiers of our members’ work in the field in pluralism and social cohesion and bridge-building efforts.
And we were wondering just where we do we go to find out how we just talk bridge-y. We have these big macroefforts at play, but what about some of the microefforts that could also be doing a lot to help us bridge?
And so we released our data from that March 2023 survey in January, and we spent the last many months just looking at that data from every possible angle — 500 data visualizations, 25 or 30 presentations on it, each time going into the data to look through a different inquiry. So when we came to the end of the summer, we were like: What do we do? How do we coalesce all this into something that might be useful for the field?
Cognizant that the election was on the horizon, it felt like the missing piece that we have detected in the ecosystem and where we detect people are coming to this research is try to understand how they can be better stewards of these words such that they can unite and bridge us and our communities and not perpetuate further division. So that was why we kind of really distilled all the analysis with that lens.
DREW: There are some surprises in there. You looked at 21 words. And I’d love for you to explain how you ranked them to determine how a word is likely to bring people together, and how likely is a word to pull us apart? Talk about how you did that.
AMY: What you’re seeing on the screen here a chart that’s our distillation of the bridging of strengths of the civic terms. These are the 21 terms that we surveyed. We had a question on our survey that asked respondents to tell us if they thought a word brings people together a lot or drives people apart a lot. And all the gradations in between, so we could really understand where people were on that spectrum.
But that didn’t feel like enough to understand the bridging strengths, the perceptions that people feel. This word drives people apart. That felt like an input, but not the fullness. We also thought it was important that people generally agree that they liked the word, so we looked at the net positivity of each of the words. So positivity minus negativity.
So you’re really understanding the true warmth toward that word and then the range. So we looked at nine different demographics and we said, how far apart are liberals and conservatives on this word? How far apart are male and females on this word? And if there was a small range, if they generally agreed they liked the word, that scored higher for us.
So it’s this combination of people generally agreeing that they like the word and they do not perceive the word to be driving people apart — that gets us a combination of bridging strength. The words at the top — “community service,” “belonging,” “liberty,” and “freedom.” Those are five words with the most bridging strength.
Those are the ones if you’re asking me which words do we lean on, which words bring people together, I would point you in the direction of those five. I think it’s really important. People have pointed out, even to us as we’ve been out on the road with this work, that those are words people have somewhat of a firsthand experience with. There’s very little jargon there. People really understand “community” because probably they have lived in some version of a community.
Now at the bottom, there are five: patriotism, diversity, republic, racial equity and social justice. Those have the least bridging strength.
Now, we are very careful to say right away: “Do not throw these words out all because they’re not reflecting high bridging strength.” That does not mean that these are words that we should hit “control+alt+delete” and remove. These are words that have importance in our civic language. Really, we see it as an invitation to go a level deeper and to understand what are the signals those terms are sending and where there may be some surprises about the areas where we might be able to lean into them.
DREW: Let’s start there. You mentioned the word jargon, and there are words you studied that I think a lot of folks in the nonprofit world understand intuitively, like “civic.” But your findings demonstrate that those words don’t really have those strong signals that you want. So talk about some words that might be a little more vague.
AMY: So certainly one of the things our research found in 2021 is that Americans were telling us they don’t have a relationship with “civic” as an adjective. And, you know, in the same report that I shared, if you counted how many times I used “civic,” you would have been appalled. Right? It’s the currency of our field in many ways — “civic health,” “civic infrastructure,” “civic engagement,” “civil society.” There’s just “civic duty.” There are just so many ways that pops up.
But Americans kind of see it as not for them. They can’t really associate particular people or groups of people as using that word. And so it felt like a really clear finding for us, particularly back to our membership, to say if we’re going to lean on the word “civic,” we need to know that it’s within our own circles of professional, you know, orbits that we have. If we’re trying to connect to communities and connect to grantees, we should be thinking of something else.
And, you know, one of the reasons we picked “community” as a word to survey in this round of research was because that was a curiosity. Is it better if we replace “civic” with the word “community” to be higher in bridge-yness and to really connect with communities.
And you see the story here: Community is a strong bridge-y term. And so we think that’s a really positive lesson for our field. Where you may have otherwise said “civic” you might start to replace it with “community.” That will just increase the likelihood that more than our echo chamber in the field will really connect and gravitate to it.
DREW: You all did a little bit of demographic research looking at the audiences and how words were received. You looked at whether someone lives in a rural or urban area. You looked at their age, you looked at their ideology. How did that play out? Talk about a word that might have landed really well with a certain audience, but not with another audience.
AMY: After we looked at our original bridge-y strength index, we were like: “Wow, there’s way more to the story than this. How do we get under the hood a little bit deeper to understand what are the signals the terms are sending?”
And so we focused on the three areas that we get asked a lot about: Is this term going to signal liberal or conservative? Does this term signal to younger people or older people? And does this term to signal to urban or rural folks? And we looked at two inputs. We looked at the positivity of the word with these groups, and their sense of ownership of that word.
And the question in the survey was, “Do you feel like this word is meant for you or somebody else?” And so if there was alignment there, we were able to say, this is signaling “strong liberal,” or this is signaling “weak liberal” or “strong conservative,” “weak conservative.”
One thing I will say is that 80 percent of the terms indicate some openness to bridging, either because they themselves have bridging strength in one of these categories or because the signals either older or younger, urban or rural, conservative or liberal aren’t strong. Which means there’s some potential for movement there.
There are two words here I want to draw attention to. One is “community.” In every category we looked at, it had bridging strength, as it was not really owned by any particular group or overly loved by a particular group.
This, of course, is a further confirmation that “community” is a really great place for our field to hang. The other word — and my colleague Siri Erickson calls this word our “unicorn” — is “democracy.” if you look here, democracy is the only word on this graph that has a strong liberal signal and a strong signal to older people. In almost all other cases, we were seeing liberal in younger or conservative in older. But in this case it’s a strong liberal and a strong older — it’s very bridge-y.
And so it just complicates the narrative on this word. I think I’m in a lot of circles where people are like, “I guess I should stop saying ‘democracy.’” And I would say, “Well, hold up. There’s a lot more that we need to consider as a field before we make any sort of decisions like that. I think this graph really demonstrates that.
DREW: Why are folks thinking they should give up on “democracy” and not use it?
Amy: The most common reason that I hear from folks is that they feel like it signals too liberal. They’re trying to really create space where there can be a diversity of political persuasion and political identity, and that has become a bit of a bellwether for conservatives to say, “That’s not a space for me.” We experience versions of that as well.
I understand that the word is very complicated right now, but I think we need to think really hard as a field before we do any sort of movement away from it.
DREW: What would you suggest? There is a huge field of pro-democracy people in the nonprofit world. You can’t stop talking about democracy. So what’s your advice to those folks? You’re not going to strip it out. You’re not going to alt+delete, as you said. Well, what can you do?
AMY: I think it’s really important that we think about some of the meta narratives that are feeding our current sense of democracy and what that could be. So I actually would point to a partner that we’ve been working with, the Metropolitan Group, doing some really interesting pro-democracy narrative work looking at 19 countries and now turning their attention here in the United States.
And one of the things that they’ve really taught us — we’ve learned alongside of them — is the power of “freedom.” “Freedom” being the superpower of democracy. It’s really hard to convince that authoritarians can deliver freedom for folks. And so you can stay close to the word “freedom.” And you saw that in our graphs, too, right?
Like freedom has high bridge-yness. Freedom is a complicated word, right? It is freedom to freedom of, freedom from, freedom to … There’s a lot more to the sentence. But the word “freedom,” if you say it, people stay in the game, they stay in the conversation. And so just tactically, no matter what side of the aisle you’re on or whom you’re trying to appeal to, if you say “freedom,” you’re going to do well in the next couple of weeks.
DREW: What is some of your advice using your research to folks as they go forward? What are your tips for them to navigate this tense time?
AMY: We have four lessons in the resource guide, and I won’t go through them here because I know time is precious. Go ahead and check out the guide. But I would say that there are two mindsets that I would appeal to folks to have right now. At PACE, we’ve been talking a lot about Bear Prep, which is our own internal lingo. We all know that when you go for a hike, if you come to a bear, you’re supposed to stay calm, stay still, and back away slowly.
But of course, when you meet the bear on the trail, what do you do? You scream right away. Right? We’re about to meet the bear next week, guys. And so I think the ability that we have to go back to our training both to be informed and then know where to go when we feel that emotional rise of like, “I’ve got to scream and run away.”
This resource is data informed. It’s really sitting on data from Americans themselves and allows us to help you understand it and apply it. So I would just say slow down. Let’s not have any bear moments next week. Come back to this resource if it’s helpful to you.
And then the other mindset that I think is really important is this: It’s going to be really critical that we think about what people need to hear next week, not what we feel like we need to say. And that kind of goes back to: How do we think about the emotional check of next week and the emotional intensity of next week with how we’re actually building the democratic culture that we will need long term?
I’m thinking a lot about how I can I be the right ancestor next week for the future generations. What do I need to say for five generations down the road? Not, “I’m having a reaction and here’s my post on Instagram.” So I encourage others to do the same. What does it really mean to be a steward of democracy next week for both the short term and long term?
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