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Communications

Five Good Ideas on how to use persuasive messaging for advocacy

Published on October 28, 2024

Also available on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Every day, non-profit leaders must advocate for their causes in an increasingly polarized environment. They need to reach multiple audiences with multiple interests, usually with minimal support and resources. How can we develop messages that are sharp, compelling, and actually persuade audiences to act? In this Five Good Ideas session, Sarada Peri – a communication strategist and former speechwriter for President Barack Obama – shared concrete tools to improve your communication and become a more effective advocate.

Session handout

Five Good Ideas

  1. Say one thing
  2. Know your audience
  3. Speak from their values, not yours
  4. Tell a story
  5. Write and speak like a human

Resources

Transcript

This transcript was lightly edited for length and clarity.

Elizabeth McIsaac: Every day as non-profit leaders we must advocate for our causes in an increasingly polarized environment. We need to reach multiple audiences with multiple interests, usually with minimal support and resources. How we develop messages that are sharp, compelling and actually persuasive to our audiences is the challenge in front of us.

We’re lucky today to have Sarada Peri join us to share some concrete tools to improve our communications and become more effective at what we do. Sarada is a communications expert who can present her story and ideas with conviction. As some of you’ll know, she was special assistant to the president and senior speechwriter for President Barack Obama and now runs her own company, Peri Communications. There she helps C-suite executives, non-profit leaders, philanthropists and celebrities with speech writing, speech delivery, message strategy and more.

I’ve met Sarada and heard her speak a few times. Every time I’m left with new ideas and feel excited about the work that we do and how we can do it better. So Sarada, thank you so much for joining us today.

Sarada Peri: Thank you for having me and for the kind introduction, Elizabeth. Great to be with you.

Elizabeth McIsaac: Well, it’s great to have you back. You’ve been to Toronto, you know our environment, and so I’m really excited to have you talk to us about the work that we’re doing and the challenges that we face.

In your experience, we as organizations have so many messages we want to get out there. We’re trying to convince people of many different things. Do we say too much?

Sarada Peri: Yes. That would be my first one good idea.

So here’s what happens, and I’ll use my experience at the White House as an example, but honestly I think that when I tell you this story, it will sound familiar to all of you in whatever environment you’re in.

I was a speechwriter for President Obama, as Elizabeth mentioned, and the speech writing office was part of a broader communications office, but we were a little bit in our own world. And here’s the process for writing speeches in the White House, at least in the Obama White House. Here’s what would happen. The chief speechwriter, who was a member of the senior staff, would get the general schedule of what was happening over the next few days, weeks, months, et cetera. We would have a speech team meeting a few times a week. He would assign out speeches based on people’s, how much time they had, interest, et cetera.

Let’s just say I get assigned a speech and it’s on trade policy and it’s being delivered in Germany. And so what I would do is I would talk to the policy people in the White House who had the expertise on that issue. They would give me the sort of, “Here’s what we want to say,” the message. Generally speaking, I would work on a draft using previous trade policy speeches that the president had given. If it was a really big speech or a different kind of topic or something like that, we might meet with the president ahead of time. But by the time I got there, it was year six and we had a pretty well-oiled machine and would know what he would want to say.

So then I would work on the draft the day before the speech, so just the day before the speech was to be delivered. The speechwriter would then send the draft out to a list, and this list was about, I don’t know, 150 people on this list. Everybody from the chief of staff and the national security adviser to the lawyers and the fact checkers and then policy people. You might add on policy people who are relevant to that particular topic.

You would send this email out around 10:00 a.m. and you would say, “Hello. Here is a draft of remarks that the president is giving tomorrow. I tried to do X, Y, Z in this speech. The purpose of the speech is this. Please send me your edits by 3:00 p.m.” Send the email.

At 5:00 p.m. the edits would start rolling in and the edits would be coming from all corners. Sometimes people who had nothing to do with this speech who didn’t even have any expertise, but were giving you their ideas of wordsmithing.

But you were also getting email responses from the policy people who might have more ideas or the lawyers who are telling you that you are going to get thrown in jail if you say this. And so you’re sort of adjudicating all these edits.

Were any of those edits ever, “Please cut this paragraph”? Nope. They were always, “Please add more.” And this is what I call the “Christmas tree problem,” which is you have this beautiful Christmas tree and people keep coming around and adding more ornaments and more ornaments all over your tree until the whole thing just topples over from its own weight.

A message that has everything loaded up on it is completely devoid of meaning. Put it another way. I always think that a message that can be kind of about anything ends up being about everything and then ends up being about nothing. So your job, even if you are not a communicator in your organization or for your issue, even if you are on the policy side or whatever else side you might be, your job is to put on your communications hat and eliminate the clutter of a speech.

And you can always understand why your team wants you to add more. The policy folks have been working endlessly on the detailed program of this new trade policy and they want to make sure that you’ve got section B, sub bullet four, and they think that that’s really important to add. But is that actually going to advance your purpose?

In fact, what is your purpose? Is your purpose to describe the program, describe the policy? Or is your purpose to make people care about it enough to keep listening? So you have to think about what your goal really here is and then make some decisions about what you’re going to include and you’re not going to be able to include everything. And then your job is to go back to those people and say, “Here’s why we’re not going to include that, but here’s what we are trying to do,” which we can talk about more in Q&A if you’d like.

What are some questions that I can ask myself to get to the one thing, the one thing I want to say?  What is my purpose? In everything you do, you should start with “What is my purpose?” Before I send an email to the staff, what is my purpose? Before I write a letter to ex-congressperson or members of Parliament for you guys, whatever it is, what is my purpose? Why am I doing this? Because that will help you identify if you are trying to describe a policy. If you are just trying to stand on a rooftop and yell and scold them for their bad decision or a self-righteous statement, or is it actually trying to move the needle on something to persuade people? You need to identify your purpose.

If my audience walks away remembering one thing that I said, because they will only remember one thing, or if they read this email and they remember one thing, what would it be? What is the one thing that you want them to think or believe or feel or do after they receive the message you’re giving them?

If the newspaper were to write a headline about this piece of communication, what would that headline be? And then try to write your message in a sentence. 10 words. Can you actually boil it down to something? I’m not saying that that’s going to ultimately be your message, but you ought to be able to put down the one thing that you’re going to say in a pretty pithy statement. If you can’t, then you are trying to say too much. People’s brains do not take in that much information and they will not walk away feeling persuaded if you give them too much.

One way to reframe it for yourself, my last point on this, is the question ultimately that you’re trying to answer, I think, is what is the one thing that I, my organization, can uniquely say. What is the one thing that, where do we add value on this subject? A lot of us are advocating in a space, a giant space. We’re all doing climate or we’re all doing homelessness or whatever it might be. Where do we add value? What is one thing I can say? And then say that thing.

Especially when we’re giving speeches, I think that the impulse is to sort of, let’s just say we’ve been asked to give remarks at a conference or something like that, and the first thing we kind of subconsciously go to is, what’s going to make me sound smart? What’s going to make me sound really smart or funny or cool, to use an uncool word, as opposed to, what is the one thing I can say? What is my truth that will actually be useful in this situation? And all that comes down to, what am I trying to achieve here? What’s my goal?

The next point I would make and why I think this ends up being really hard is what I call the “Carly Simon problem.” I bet you think this message is about you. We too often try to persuade using arguments that we find persuasive as opposed to what our audience finds persuasive, and the reason we do that is because we don’t know our audience.

So my second good idea is to know your audience. And when I say that, I realize that I’m actually saying know your audiences, because today we have many audiences and you all know this better than I do, but it’s not just the stakeholders that you’re trying to reach. It’s not just your funders, the policy folks, constituents, your peer organizations, but it’s also the internet and just a wide range of audiences that you need to think about.

But you do need to think about them. You need to know them.  I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but I do think what I’m telling you is stuff you know but that we don’t then apply to our work in this context.

People bring their own perceptions, their own data, their own emotional responses, their own story of how they see the world to everything we do. And I think what tends to happen is that rather than take the time to think deeply and maybe do some inquiry and be curious about where people are coming from, we just have a way of talking about our issues.

Especially if you were in a field of other folks who talk about the same issues, we kind of all talk about it the same way. We kind of make the same arguments.  As you might know, America is about to have an election, and political arguments just kind of all sound the same. Stale language that people outside of Washington don’t use and it’s not persuasive.

So you need to think about who they are, and the way I think about it is this: Let’s just say we work together. I need you to have a report ready for a 10:00 a.m. meeting, and we need to go to this 10:00 a.m. meeting. I might say to you, “Hey, can you have that report ready by 10:00 a.m.?” And you’ll say yes, and then we’ll be good, and you’ll show up to the meeting and you’ll have the report and it’s 10:00 a.m.

If I need my five-year-old to get dressed and ready to leave the house for a 10:00 a.m. appointment, it will involve a very different approach. There will be psychological jiu-jitsu. There will be stickers. I have literally danced around my living room with a pineapple on my head in order to get my five-year-old to brush his teeth so we could leave the house as a persuasive tool because I know my audience.

We do this all the time in our regular lives. How you calibrate, how you talk to a colleague, a new person, a stranger in the coffee shop, your mother-in-law. I mean, we calibrate all the time.

It’s not that you’re becoming someone different. You were just thinking about, how is what I need to say to them, how will it be best received? So why don’t we do that in our advocacy? That is what we need to be thinking about.

I will just put out there, and I’ll be curious what people think about this, but I think sometimes we don’t do that especially in the advocacy space because we are worried that we are selling ourselves out. If we temper our message in any way or recalibrate it to reach different audiences, we think that we are in some way not being true to our values, and I just fundamentally reject that notion. I think that there might be times where that’s the case, but in general, changing and colouring and contextualizing your message, shading it slightly differently for different audiences to be more persuasive does not mean you are selling yourself out. If anything, it means you are trying to reach more people. So think about your audience.

Elizabeth McIsaac: Before we leave audience, do we as a sector do enough work to understand our audience well? Because I think that sometimes there’s a very shorthand to a very superficial understanding that if you sit here on the ideological spectrum, this is who you are in your totality. Do you feel that we need to, as a practice, do more work thinking that through?

Sarada Peri: I mean, from my experience with the nonprofit world, that’s certainly true, and I think my experience in politics, it is definitely true that I think they try, but I don’t know if we do a good enough job.

I’d be curious in the nonprofit sector, is some of it just… It’s a resource intensive endeavour. It could be to sort of really get to know constituents and stakeholders to really understand where people are coming from. But it does seem to me, and you would know better than anyone, but it does seem to me that putting on our curiosity hat without actually advocating, so spending more time in the inquiry curiosity space where you are not letting yourself make any assumptions about what people believe is I think uncomfortable because we have the urge to advocate. We have the urge to say, “But no, this is what I think. This is what we want to be doing.” And if there is a way for nonprofits to spend more time in that space, I suspect you would get more buy-in.

This was actually the entire theory of the case of the Obama campaign in 2008. I was not a part of it, but the whole model of deep canvassing, if you’ve heard of it, was to get into communities, embed organizers into communities, and then just have conversations with people. They were knocking on doors just learning about them. They would not say the words Barack Obama. They just were trying to understand what they were about.

And so yes, to the extent that that’s possible, most of the problems we’re solving, it’s a long game anyway, so let’s take the time to do that. But I think that’s a great question, Elizabeth. I think it’s really true.

Let me just close this part out and transition with some questions that you can ask yourself. Again, just big picture questions. So to learn about your audience, who are they?

First of all, who are your audiences and how would you rank your audiences in terms of priority? How would you prioritize them in a world of, who really needs to hear what message and who needs to hear it first? Thinking really strategically about that.

What are their incentives? Because we all know that everybody’s incentives are very different, and you need to be really brutally honest with yourself about what people’s incentives are. What do they care about? What are their values? What are they carrying with them emotionally, historically, psychologically, intellectually? What are they bringing? Because that stuff is really important and very often is overlooked, and it has huge implications, I think, for how these conversations go.

Then how do I consider other people’s perspectives? This would be my third good idea. I don’t know if it’s good or not. But I think it’s about speaking, taking the time to speak from their values, not your values. And it goes back to what I said about, I bet you think the song is about you. It is very easy for us to communicate in language and values that makes sense to us. If I am a data-driven thinker, then I’m going to present my arguments with lots of data that works for me and it may not work for you. And I feel like if we can take the time to understand the values, the sort of really deep-rooted values of our audience, then we can potentially shade what we’re saying and our messages to match their values.

Let me give you a more concrete example. I’m sure many of you have heard of something called moral foundations theory, which was developed by a group of social psychologists, primarily Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham. They were interested in figuring out why different cultures all kind of build themselves around different kinds of moral systems, but with a lot of similarities across them.

What they figured out is that as human beings, we all have a set of intuitive ethics. We just sort of internally understand, have an ethical sense of what’s right or wrong, and those intuitive ethics allow us to construct systems in our minds and then different cultures and societies sort of build virtues and narratives and institutions upon these foundational systems of ethics. And that’s how we end up with kind of a diverse set of moral beliefs around the world.

The original framework identified five moral foundations that people rely on. Care, which underlies things like kindness and gentleness. Fairness, which is related to justice and rights. Loyalty, which is related to patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. Authority, where people really value leadership and followership and deference to sort of prestigious authority. And then purity, which means self-discipline, spirituality, pull myself up by the bootstraps, that kind of thing.

They figured out over the course of research that people who identify as politically liberal create their morality on the care foundation and the fairness foundation, while people who identify as conservative tend to rely more on the loyalty, authority, and purity foundations.

It’s interesting when you think about it from that perspective, right? Because then I wonder, can I then construct my argument to meet the values of the audience that I’m talking to? So let’s use an example like gun safety. In America, you might know that we have a scourge of gun violence and very few safety laws. It’s a little bit crazy. Well, from my perspective, my politically liberal perspective, I think that’s insane. And so if I’m talking to somebody who is liberal on gun safety, I might say, “We should care about people’s safety.” Like this is not fair that we should have all this gun violence, and some people have guns and they’re shooting schools up. That might be persuasive to liberals, but it might not be persuasive to conservatives.

What if I’m talking about gun safety laws to a conservative audience and instead of using the care or fairness argument, I use the authority argument and I say, “Unfettered gun use and gun access undermines law enforcement. It makes law enforcement less safe. It hinders their authority over communities to keep communities safe.” Well, maybe that might be a little bit more persuasive to them than the care argument that we typically make because that’s speaking to their values.

You can do this on any issue. If you want to persuade people on same-sex marriage, instead of talking about fairness, it’s not fair that gay Americans couldn’t have access to marriage. You might use a loyalty foundation. Same-sex couples are patriotic Americans. Or use the sort of more traditional framework. They want families just like everyone else. And in fact, we found in the sort of rise of support for gay marriage that that actually worked.

Again, I’m not saying that you have to change your perspective on things or change what your message is, but can you reframe your message for certain audiences based on their values as opposed to your values? And you will hear people say they just fundamentally won’t do that, because again, it makes them feel like they’re selling out their values or something, and it’s not. I don’t think it is. I mean, you could do that, but then you will be bereft of progress and you’ll be sitting on your island of self-righteousness having made no difference at all. So that’s what people can do. But I would argue that this is sort of a relatively painless way of having conversations with people who might not agree with you, but who might come to a place where they would agree with you.

So that is my good idea number, I forget what number we’re on, three, maybe?

Elizabeth McIsaac: That’s three.

Sarada Peri: Okay. All right. And actually, I should have framed this up top, but I think these ideas are all about how can we become more persuasive? Right? How can we just become more persuasive, compelling messengers as opposed to people who just kind of loudly parrot the viewpoint of our organization without actually making progress? So just thinking more strategically about how to make progress.

So far we’ve got say one thing, know your audience, and speak from their values, not yours. And then the fourth one, which I think is maybe one of the more important ones and that people know is important but don’t necessarily do well is tell a story.

I think the ability of an organization to tell stories about their work and why it’s important is actually kind of a superpower for nonprofits, especially in advocacy organizations, and there’s sort of a couple of different ways you can think about telling stories.

There’s the stories, plural, that you tell about the work that you’re doing, about the examples of why what you’re doing have an effect on people’s lives and are improving society, individual stories that are really important. And I think the danger there, especially for more charitable organizations, is to veer towards what I call tragedy porn, where you’re telling a lot of sob stories to the point where people feel helpless and hopeless and don’t act. There’s no pivot to something that makes people feel like they can make a difference.

As you think about using storytelling in your organizations, depending on what your organization does, being mindful of the need to tell a story that invests people, makes people feel like this story has salience in their own lives, that they should care about it, that they are invested in the success of the character, the organization, but also isn’t just a downward spiral into despair, but at some point comes back up to make people feel like they can do something about this problem.

That’s one kind of the stories of your work. But then I think there’s a bigger story to tell, which is the story of the organization that brings together the mission, the values, the objectives, and then paints a picture of something bigger that can excite people to make people feel like they’re part of a bigger project.

I think what’s valuable about story in both of these contexts is that, first of all, we know that stories are memorable and we know that they are how we see the world from when we are children. I mean, from the paintings in caves from tens of thousands of years ago, to the fact that every child knows once upon a time and every child is constantly telling and retelling stories. Every society does. We know that just stories are how we see the world. We can try as we might to make it something else. Honestly, ultimately, most people see the world in stories, and so we know that that’s a way of being memorable.

But what I love about storytelling in the context of advocacy work is that you don’t have to assume that everybody shares your perceptions. When you’re talking to multiple audiences, what stories allow you to do is create multiple entry points for people with different perspectives to enter. You can create different characters that different people might relate to. Different audiences might relate to different people when you’re constructing a story, and that gives all these entry points for people who might, again, not necessarily agree with your take, but can find their way in to start a conversation. Stories give you room to do that and a way to connect emotionally with people, to get them and then keep moving forward.

It’s not an easy thing to do, and I think in a world of a lot of cynicism, it’s hard, but it is extremely worth trying and retrying and doing trial and error. I do not have, “Here is what you do.” There’s lots of books about storytelling that will say, “Do A, B, Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. Blah, blah, blah.” Who knows?

You could try all of these things and see what works for you, see what works in your context for your audiences, but storytelling is really something that organizations ought to invest in. And I will just offer, because I really want to leave time for questions. I just want to offer one additional thought on storytelling, and we’re happy to go into it more in Q&A.

One way to think about how to construct this sort of bigger story is that first thing about the setup. We know the stories have beginning, middle, and end, a character, conflict, structure, right? Momentum.

But think about what the setup of the story is, and one way to do that is to say, what is the status quo? What is the problem that I am trying to solve? So we don’t have enough housing in Toronto. I’m just making something up. That is the problem. That is the—

Elizabeth McIsaac: It’s true.

Sarada Peri: Yeah, we don’t have enough housing everywhere. That is the status quo, the problem I’m trying to solve, the world as it is. And then you need to lay out what your solution to that problem is, what you’re proposing and what could be if we implemented your solution, the world as it should be.

You’ve got the world as it is and the world as it should be, and you want to make that gap as wide as possible in certain contexts, especially for safe funders, between the undesirable status quo and the incredible future you’re proposing because you want people to reject the status quo so thoroughly to say, “We absolutely cannot stand for this. We have to go for this.”

Throughout the story, you are making the status quo as unappealing as possible in order to make your solution not just desirable, but kind of obvious. So when you think about stories, try to frame it in that way of, again, what am I trying to achieve and what will allow me to create that gap to get people to really buy into what I’m offering them?

Final idea, and this sounds ridiculous, but it’s for some reason not something people do as much as they should, and the final good idea is to write and speak like a human being. So there are times, very often when we speak in the language of our industries, it’s just acceptable to speak in a language and a manner that most normal people don’t understand, and that doesn’t resonate at all with them because it’s almost technical in a way, and some people want to be sort of deliberately opaque.

So in diplomacy or financial markets or in the U.S., our federal reserve chairman famously sort of speaks in a way that’s very obscure and people have to kind of divine, read the tea leaves what he means. You know, incomprehensible gobbledygook purposely. But okay, that’s fine.

But for the rest of us, I would urge you to think about communications on a kind of curve. If it’s like a bell curve and up here you’ve got your values, freedom, justice, equality, love, and then on the other sort of plane, the other end of the curve is details, the bloody knife, the tattered flag, the tear-stained cheek, and then in the middle is jargon, and jargon is where meaning goes to die. Jargon is innovating technologies to accelerate transformational synergies. It’s collateral damage. Employee reduction activities. You fall into this and you land into the pit of alligators. Your job as a communicator is to traverse between values and details, kind of jump back and forth between them, building a bridge over jargon and never falling into it.

Now, somebody will say, “But what if I’m only speaking and communicating with people in my field? Can I use jargon then?” You can, but you can do better by not using jargon. Even your colleagues deserve better language than leveraging synergies and whatever industry language your industry uses. Because no matter who you are, that language sounds like nothing. It does not mean anything to people, and it’s not how you actually talk to people.

I’ll go through a few techniques or tips to sort of avoid and do. One, let’s avoid tepid language. Try to get rid of the cliches. Think outside of the box, at the end of the day, low-hanging fruit, inflection point. Bleh.

Filler. Can you eliminate filler from your writing and your speaking? So things like, “This policy serves to create a new policy.” This policy serves to create. That’s like three things you don’t need to say. We are committed to ensuring, to helping to ensure that nobody ever speaks clearly. We built this initiative in order to reduce unemployment. No. Just say the thing that you want to say. Say it clearly.

You don’t need to couch your language, and I think that a lot of times we do that in order to protect ourselves. We don’t know if this initiative is actually going to work. We don’t want to make any promises, so we’ll just say, “We created this initiative to serve, to start to do something, maybe.” No. This initiative will create more jobs. Own it. Stand by it. Like, “We’re going to work really hard to create more jobs,” as opposed to “Maybe, I don’t know.” And then I think that it’s actually a way of developing trust with your audience, to be a little bit more straightforward.

Avoid the passive voice. Mistakes were made. No, someone made the fricking mistake. Name who made the mistake. And if you can’t name who made the mistake, then don’t talk about the mistake. But you should probably name who made the mistake because people smell bullshit a mile away and they don’t like liars. When you make a mistake, own it. That’s a whole crisis communications thing.

Connect to what people actually care about. So instead of talking about programs, talk about people. Don’t just describe the, “We’re going to build X number of homes that meet energy efficient standards and fall under this program, and subsection C.” “We are going to put X number of families into homes near schools where kids can get their education safely.” Talk about people, not programs.

Instead of talking about inputs, talk about outcomes. So instead of, “We’ll invest $20 million in AI powered pedagogical tools,” “Using this new app that the Department of Education is creating, students are going to play individualized games to help them improve their long division.” Be specific. Talk about what the outcome will be, not the input. People don’t typically care about inputs.

A sentence has a subject and a verb, and the rest is mostly noise. I’m just going to be honest with you. Can you get rid of your adverbs and come up with a better verb? Can you get rid of your adjectives and come up with a better noun? I mean, you don’t have to, but wouldn’t that be nice? People want you to be very, very clear. Let’s see. I want to just… Okay, let me just give you a few things. You guys are not going to like this, but—

Elizabeth McIsaac: Someone in the chat is saying their inner English major is screaming, but they agree completely.

Sarada Peri: Use straightforward words. Don’t say utilize, say use.

Yeah, academia does make you lousy writers. It’s so true. I’m seeing that in the chat. You need to unlearn all that stuff. When I became a speech writer, I felt like I really had to unlearn everything I learned in college, which was interesting.

Instead of saying bandwidth, say availability. Instead of saying double click, say go deeper. What is a core competency? I have no idea. Are you talking about strengths? Are you talking about abilities? Are you talking about skills? Why do we say interdependent when we can just say connected. What is a freaking paradigm shift? I don’t know. Do we just mean a big change? What is with this thing of using nouns as verbs and verbs as nouns? Let’s architect a solve? No. The word solution already exists. We don’t have to say, “Let’s find a solve.” You can say, “Let’s find a solution.”

The word impact, this is very controversial, but I hate the word impact. I think impact should only be used if an asteroid is hitting the Earth. Impact what? Like effect? Is it changing? Is it improving? Is it making it worse? Impact is a very generic word that doesn’t actually tell you what’s going on.

My big piece of advice for you as you go forth in life is anything you’re writing, anything, an email, a text, a speech, a memo. Can you, after you’re done, cut it by 15%? Just cut it by 15%. Go through really quickly. The next email you send, just really quickly, go through, cut five words. See if you can do it. Fun exercise. It will always, always, always, cutting makes your writing stronger. Okay. I’m going to stop because I want to take questions.

Elizabeth McIsaac: That was fantastic.

Sarada Peri: Okay.

Elizabeth McIsaac: I want to go back to your very first one where you said, “Say one thing.” And that’s a hard thing for all of us to do because a lot of us are advocating on and working through complex issues, systemic work, and in systemic work, there’s all kinds of intersecting elements and pieces, and we never feel that we can tell the story really simply. And I think you’ve covered some of this. We complicated ourselves because we’re in the thick of it.

Do you have good examples where super complex things can be simplified? I mean, you’ve given us some examples as we’ve gone through, but just that challenge that we have, that we almost feel that by demonstrating how complex it is, we’re proving the point of how hard it is to solve. How do we break that?

Sarada Peri: Two thoughts on this. One is, especially when multiple challenges are kind of converging into something, it’s not that you have to say one thing and one sentence and you’re done with your whole message. It is, what do all of those complex challenges together add up to? Is it one idea about how we can lift more children out of poverty if we do this change, whatever it is, and then you can explain all the interconnected areas.

But what I’m saying is that it all needs to add up to one idea people can walk away with. So what they walk away with isn’t, “Oh my gosh. There’s so many holes in the system and the whole thing is leaking. We’re all drowning. Screw it. I’m just going to go eat a pizza and watch a movie.” Or is it, “Oh, all of that is connected to that one thing”? Or, “All of that leads up to this one idea. If we can unlock that, that seems like all these other things might get better.”

I realize that I’m not giving you a concrete example, but I think that’s the way to think about it. And then the way to actually do it, do the work… This is where I think storytelling is really, really valuable. So I sometimes use this example when I do storytelling workshops. Basically you take a systemic problem, like something in the child welfare system where systems aren’t talking to each other and you tell a story about that and you use the story to illustrate all the different ways that these different challenges connect. But the beauty about a story is that you don’t need to explain in great policy detail that they cut funding for this particular social service, and so the foster kid isn’t getting it. You can just assert that as part of the story and people will get the idea.

Going through and looking at different advocacy organizations that are successful and that tell stories well is really worth doing. The only other thing I would add to this is that in 1933, president Franklin Roosevelt took office at the height of the Great Depression, and it was a very complicated financial issue. The Great Depression is a complicated financial crisis, and he gave his first fireside address and he is explaining the banking crisis to everybody in America—because back then all you did was listen to the radio—in very simple, straightforward terms that people could understand. Of course, he wasn’t mentioning every single thing about the financial crisis and what was happening abroad and the interest rate. He wasn’t doing that. He was just explaining it in terms people could understand and get initial buy-in.

And sometimes that is actually the hard part, finding a way to explain it in a way that somebody, that anybody can understand. At the White House, I would go to the economics team whenever I had to write an economic policy and say, “Okay. We’re in a bar. I’ve had two drinks. Now, explain this labour role to me. How would you explain it to me then? Right? How would you explain it to a fifth grader?” Not that they were dumbing it down, but that they were breaking it down to its simplest parts to give me context so that I can understand it. There’s a whole world of how to do this stuff and it’s not easy.

One last thought on this is eliminating your assumption that they need to know every single thing, every single challenge. Not at the first bite. Imagine these things are conversations where the first thing you do is just the first thing you do, not the last.

Elizabeth McIsaac: So you’re scaffolding it.

Sarada Peri: Yeah, exactly.

Elizabeth McIsaac: You’re not giving them everything in one go.

Sarada Peri: Exactly.

Elizabeth McIsaac: You talked about making it human, and we’ve talked about the systemic part of it. Now, a lot of people in the sector are actually first experience. They are individual advocates. They have experienced it themselves. Is there a way to incorporate personal story in your advocacy?

Sarada Peri: I absolutely think there is. I’m sure you all know that.

Elizabeth McIsaac: Is it effective? Is it the right way to go?

Sarada Peri: Depends on your audience, depends on your purpose. Again, what is your purpose? Go back to that.

I think there are a lot of traps with first-person advocacy. First of all, it can make it sound like it’s all about you. It can make it sound like it’s an individual problem. And the way first-person advocacy is done can elicit pity or sympathy as opposed to buy-in and advocacy. And it is valuable insofar as it adds up to something bigger. What does this story tell you? What it does do though is establish your credibility, so that you know firsthand exactly what happens here, but you also know firsthand the way out.

And so I think that is the pivot that works and can be effective. Again, you just have to decide, is this the moment? Is this the right audience? Is this going to achieve my purpose? But certainly there is room for it.

There’s a really interesting book called Against Empathy by Paul Bloom, and I highly recommend you all read it, but it pushes back against the role of empathy in conversation and advocacy and everything because it can sometimes be a zero-sum game. Anyway, I encourage you all to read it, but certainly there’s a role for it.

Elizabeth McIsaac: But with caution. With caution.

Sarada Peri: With caution and not as catharsis. This is what it really comes down to. Whether it’s first-person advocacy or just advocating in general, there is an element of saying our piece that is cathartic and not persuasive and not with a purpose, and that’s fine. That’s fine if that’s what you want to do, but that’s not going to achieve your goal.

Elizabeth McIsaac: We’re all tempted to test out what we’re doing, test our messaging. Is there a way to do that? Can you test if your message is going to land? When is it too soon? Are there practices around that?

Sarada Peri: In politics, they test messages. So we’ve got pollsters who will literally test in a focus group. Here are eight messages that are directed towards this rank. Which ones do you think are the most effective? Which ones would persuade you to vote for this person versus that person? Which one do you think is most effective? Which one gives the speaker more credibility? So there is that, and I think there’s some evidence to suggest that that can be useful. And to the extent that nonprofits can do that, I think it is. And certainly larger nonprofits, especially the kinds that are raising money for charitable organizations, they do this to figure out, “Okay, well, what’s going to be the most persuasive thing to get people to actually give money?” But yeah, I think if you can test it, test messages, then it’s worth doing.

It can also be as simple as testing out on people. If you’re not some giant nonprofit with a huge budget for a pollster, can you workshop your messages with people in your life and say, “Does this actually land?” I think we don’t do that enough. We don’t actually just, again, talk as humans to other people and say, “This is the thing I’m working on. What do you think of this?” We don’t, and I think that we might actually be surprised by what we find, especially when you talk to people outside of your sector to get their take on whether this resonates with people outside the sector who don’t care. Especially people who have no stake in this, who do not care, who are not paying attention to your issue. Is the thing you’re telling them, does that make them interested in your issue? Because salience is the first piece.

Elizabeth McIsaac: Or are they quietly walking away from you at the party?

Sarada Peri: Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

Elizabeth McIsaac: A couple of people in couple of different places had said, “What’s your opinion on AI for communications?” Just a quick reaction, please.

Sarada Peri: I mean, it’s here. That’s life. This is life. And I think it can be a really useful tool for sure. So I have used it for things like just getting a research question started, ideas for an anecdote or a story or a research angle to get titles. I’ve heard people use it for titles for books and things like that, which is an interesting way of doing it.

But if you actually ask it to write, the free available versions, if they’re not large language models that have been built specifically for you, so far they sound like ChatGPT.

But can it be a great starting point to just get some ideas out? Sure. And I think, because it is so good at synthesizing… Well, it’s not so good. It’s pretty okay at synthesizing and summarizing, helping you sort of hone down your argument.

What’s also really interesting is that it will tell you what you’re focusing on. In other words, whatever you put in the prompt, it will spit back an exact simulation and reformulation of that, and so it tells you what you are missing or what you’re emphasizing, and maybe you didn’t mean to emphasize that, which is an interesting way of thinking about it.

Also—fact check. Oh my gosh, it is full of nonsense, so don’t take it as the gospel. Make sure you check your facts with actual verifiable sources because they’re pulling all kinds of crap from the internet.

Elizabeth McIsaac: You talked about liking facts and evidence, that that’s what you’re drawn to, but we live in a world that is polarized. Not everyone has the same fact base. Do you have advice on navigating through a world where some people don’t acknowledge the fact base or have different fact bases? As you are trying to speak to different audiences that may not share that, do you go to facts or do you go to and try to appeal to value?

Sarada Peri: I think you start with values. And I think that going back to your earlier question of getting to know your audiences. I think there’s also a space to not do anything, but first just have conversations where you’re mostly just listening and where you’re mostly trying to understand their worldview. “So this fact, you don’t actually think this is true. Say more about that. What have you heard and where do you get your information?” And in a really genuinely curious, open, non-judgmental way, just trying to understand the worldview that they have.

I would not say I’m particularly skilled at this, but my husband actually works in the space of negotiations and difficult conversations and conflict management, and he’s very skilled at this. He could just sit down with people and not say very much at all, and then by the end of it, understand their worldview so that he can then start to build an argument that could potentially be persuasive.

So I think to the extent that that’s possible, great, but you have to find some kind of shared common ground first. So values and stories to me seem like the easiest way to do that versus going to facts that people are just going to disagree with.

Elizabeth McIsaac: There are a couple of questions around building alliances and building a bigger tent. So climate justice with social justice, with Indigenous issues and so forth. Is that a Christmas tree effect by trying to build a larger and larger audience, or is that different? Is that about building a larger community of interest in your issue?

Sarada Peri: I can just tell you that as what I find as a consumer of that. As a consumer of that, I find it alienating because it makes me feel as though if I am not on board with all of the things under this giant tent, then I can’t be a part of this, and I think that the initial impulse was to build a bigger tent and to connect all these issues, because of course, in a lot of ways, many of these issues are connected. But if one of them doesn’t resonate with me, or if one of these groups does something that I don’t really totally, I’m not on board with, then suddenly it’s hard to be involved in this big tent piece.

I also think that it can kind of dilute a little bit. We were joking about this, but there was a poster for some protests in D.C. It was, “No war. No nuclear weapons. Abortion rights. Free Palestine.” And it’s like, what? Okay. Okay. And it’s like, well, if I don’t align myself with all of these things for whatever reason, then this is not for me. So I would just be mindful.

Elizabeth McIsaac: As we talk about persuasive writing, how do you begin? Where’s your number one best practice in creating that persuasion?

Sarada Peri: Well, I think my number one best practice is what is my purpose? It’s just always asking myself, what is the goal of this thing, and really spending the time to do that.

And then I would add my second: What works for me after I’ve done that piece, and this is as somebody who operates on deadlines, right? This is my job is to write persuasive things for people, so I have to move quickly. I don’t have time to sit in a coffee shop and wait for inspiration, and so structure is really helpful to impose an amount of discipline. So I sometimes use something called Monroe’s Motivated Sequence, which is a persuasive argument structure, and just as a mental tool, as a mental model to remind myself. Problem, solution, visualization, call to action.

Just create a structure for yourself that you can then, you can just start putting things into buckets, start going, and then you can edit. But for me, getting everything down, even if it feels like junk, and I would never show it to anyone, getting it out of my brain and onto paper without self-editing, because self-editing can kill your creativity before it’s even down. So suspend your judgment, get it all down, try to put it into a structure, and then you can edit, spend more time editing.

Elizabeth McIsaac: So this is going to sound like complete heresy. Some people feel that they’re better when they just speak extemporaneously.

Sarada Peri: They’re wrong.

Elizabeth McIsaac: As a speech writer.

Sarada Peri: They’re wrong. Nobody is good extemporaneously. I’m sorry, they’re not. Churchill spent hours and hours and days on his speeches. I mean, it is very hard to be somebody who is an excellent extemporaneous speaker. I’m not going to say nobody. There are some people who are. They’re usually people who are also very good debaters.

It’s a very specific skill. But what speaking extemporaneously also means is that you probably haven’t done the work on the audience. So Mrs. Obama is a phenomenal speaker. I don’t think anybody would doubt that even if they disagree with her. She writes every one of her speeches and practices every one of her speeches, and she says that she does it because it shows respect for her audience, that she has put some thought, real thought into every word so that it means something to them, as opposed to just flying off the seat of my pants and speaking for 27 minutes, like Bill Clinton.

It’s so undisciplined and so disrespectful to your audience as opposed to really thinking about what you want them to take away. Sometimes we have to speak extemporaneously. Sometimes we’ve been asked at a wedding or whatever, “Oh, get up and say something.” Sure. But I think practice is better. Preparation is really the key. Preparation is probably the difference between good speakers and bad speakers, honestly.

Elizabeth McIsaac: And for someone who has never given a speech, but this is the role they’re stepping into, what advice do you have for them?

Sarada Peri: Buy my colleague’s book. Say It Well. My colleague, Terry Szuplat, just came out with an excellent book. It’s for normal people who just have to speak sometimes, and it’s so, so good and so practical. Get it. It’s great. Highly recommend.

Elizabeth McIsaac: Because we’re not all Obama. In fact, none of us is.

Sarada Peri: Exactly, and you don’t want to be. Nobody else should try to be Barack Obama. People hire me and they want to sound… Like, “No, you don’t want to sound like Barack Obama. You want to sound like the best version of yourself.” And maybe the best version of yourself isn’t in speeches. Maybe what you’re really better at is town halls or small group conversations or whatever. As a leader, you get to make those decisions. But anyway, Say It Well by Terry Szuplat.

Elizabeth McIsaac: Sarada, I am so grateful that you took the time. I know that you’re still a busy democrat, so I hope that you’re busy doing the thing that we all want you to be doing. I really appreciate this. Your experience and your thoughtfulness on how to craft a great message, on how to deliver a great message, is so welcomed, and we appreciate it. Thank you for taking the time.

Sarada Peri: Yeah. Happy to be here. Thank you for having me. Always great to be with you guys.