When your job is to convince people to donate time or money, or to support a certain issue, you’re bound to come up against resistance. It can be disheartening because you truly believe in your cause. Often the people most aligned to your cause are the people with the fewest resources available to support it. If you need time, money, and effort from people who have never been affected by the issue at hand, you’ll have to find a way to make them understand why you do what you do.
You’re no doubt an expert about the problem you’re trying to solve: who is affected, how, and why. You’ve accumulated facts and statistics and an entire history of the issue. For you and other true believers, this is the information that motivates you. It’s tempting to hit the streets and paint a grim picture of what is happening right now and plead with people to help you. However, it can be more effective to paint a picture of a world where they already have. Giving people a hopeful idea of the future actually goes farther than painting a grim picture of today, regardless of how immediate and severe the need is.
Think about a world where this problem has already been solved and your job is obsolete. How would individuals benefit? How would society as a whole be better? How would people like your audience benefit?
Suppose you are trying to get people released from prison if their only crime is marijuana possession and they live in a state where it is now legal. You know that marijuana use is prevalent in society, that people of color and people with low incomes are disproportionately arrested even though they do not use marijuana at greater rates. You know low income families are suffering with parents in jail for something that upper class people are rarely prosecuted for. You can cite hundreds of statistics and passionately talk about how unfair it is. And you’re right. It is unfair. However, a lot of people simply won’t feel that it’s a priority even after they hear all of that.
On the other hand, if you can paint a picture of families reuniting, of children of incarcerated people suddenly having more opportunities and resources, of a less burdened legal system, of fewer tax dollars going to public defenders for trials over ridiculous charges, and of a justice system that is actually fair, you can start to persuade people that there is an opportunity to change the world for the better.
We are living in a time when everyone is emotionally exhausted. It isn’t fair and it isn’t right, but people don’t have the emotional bandwidth for dealing with everything that’s wrong with society. If you can paint a picture of how it can be better instead of just telling people what’s wrong, you have more of a chance of getting through. Everyone is tired of feeling helpless, and we already know the world is on fire. We need a reason to believe that our buckets of water are getting it under control.
If you can get people invested in a future where your issue has been resolved, and then draw a connection between their donation/effort/vote and that future being a reality, you’ll have a much better chance of changing hearts and minds than if you simply show the urgency of the need.
Substance and Style 