What NGOs Can Learn From the Success of the Gay Marriage Movement

Note: The June 26 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in favour of gay marriage makes this post from April all the more germane.

An important goal for many non-profit groups is not just raising money, but changing attitudes about important issues.  

This is especially true about issues such as climate change, racism, the environment, or poverty.

Now and then, there are victories—opinions are changed. But much of the time, much discouragement of NGOs, progress is slow, or non-existent.

Why is that?

One reason is that most groups frame the issue in terms of arguments or abstract principles. They speak about rights, or throw out numbers and percentages.

Inside NGO offices, those things often make sense. But for average people, eyes glaze over.

Why? Because these things appeal to the head, not to the heart. And research shows that when it comes to changing behaviour, emotion—the heart—is more important.

One group that learned this are campaigners for gay marriage in the U.S.

In the early days of their fight, they focused on discrimination and about the rights of same-sex couples. They spoke about legal issues, health benefits, pensions.

And, for a long time, they were losing the battle.

They examined their strategy. Focus groups showed voters weren’t moved by arguments about rights and equality. They didn’t pay attention to complex legal arguments or health care policies.

So gay-marriage campaigners changed their approach. They began sharing human stories about everyday couples who want to show the world their love and commitment—people going to work, having picnics, playing sports, raising families.

As the group Freedom to Marry put it: “Over the past five years, Freedom to Marry and our partners have reshaped the national conversation on marriage around winning messages focused on love, commitment, and freedom, while highlighting the journey stories of people  in the ‘moveable middle.’

“This shift away from a focus on abstract rights and benefits has been crucial to the exponential growth in support for marriage.”

It’s working. Fifteen years ago about 25% of Americans supported gay marriage. Today, it is the majority, at 63%, 37 states permit gay marriage, and it is before the Supreme Court..

The success, on such a divisive and controversial issue, is nothing short of amazing.

Groups involved in other causes have noticed.

On the immigration issue, campaigners decided not to talk about policy, but about the pain that results when harsh immigration rules divide loving families. 

They have also promoted stories about “dreamers,” young migrants brought illegally to America as children, through no fault of their own, who now want a shot at the American dream.

For groups involved in changing public attitudes, having a good grasp of facts, figures and policies is important and a key to credibility.

But when it comes to changing minds, the best place to start is the heart.

And as the experience of the gay marriage movement shows, the best way to change hearts is to tell stories.

For more on this topic, see my post More on What Non-Profit Communicators can Learn from the Success of the Gay Marriage Movement.

Why Your Brain Wants To Help One Person, But Not Millions

Why do people sometimes give generously to one cause or need, but not to others?

For international relief and development groups, which address issues affecting millions or hundreds of millions of people, that’s an important question.

The temptation is to describe the enormity of the need. 

If people know that over 800 million people in the world don’t have enough to eat, surely they will respond—right?

Wrong. In fact, the opposite occurs.

That’s what psychologist Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon has found through his research on why people give. 

During the research, he told people about a young girl suffering from starvation and then measured how much they were willing to donate to help her.

He told another group about the starving little girl, but also noted the millions of others like her who are also suffering from starvation.

What did he find?

"People who were shown the statistics along with the information about the little girl gave about half as much money as those who just saw the little girl," he said.

On a rational level, this doesn’t make sense. 

You would think that talking about the hundreds of millions of people who are also hungry would bolster the argument by showing the seriousness of the situation.

The problem, Slovic says, is that the numbers de-motivate people.

By adding the statistics, people felt overwhelmed by the enormity of the need, “that nothing I can do will make a big difference," he says.

Slovic's research suggests that the way to combat this hopelessness is to focus only on one person. This gives people a sense that their intervention can, in fact, make a difference.

In academic circles, this is known as the “singularity effect,” or “compassion fade.”  

Through the singularity effect, people are more motivated to help a single person in need than millions of people.

It’s important to note that people don’t respond in a conscious way—they don’t deliberately decide not to help people because they hear about millions of people are in need.

This response occurs at an unconscious level; it’s what our brains automatically do.

Says Slovic: "As the numbers grow, we sort of lose the emotional connection to the people who are in need."

People who work for international NGOs deal with the big picture—that’s their job. 

But when it comes to eliciting response and donations, little pictures are better.

Apparently, that’s all our brains can handle.

Life and Communications, Unbundled

The good old days, when things were bundled and nobody complained.

Last month the Canadian Radio and Television Commission ordered Canada’s cable companies to unbundle their offerings—no more forcing consumers to pay packages of channels they don’t want in order to get the one they do want.

In so doing, the CRTC is finally catching up to the great unbundling that has been going on in society for a while now.

iTunes unbundled music; no more buying a CD of ten songs to get the one you want.

Digital photography unbundled the connection between the photographer and the camera store, eliminating the need to transfer photos from film to prints.

Online shopping is unbundling the shopping mall. There’s now no need to go to a central location to find a collection of stores when you can visit thousands of retailers using the Internet.

Online courses threaten to unbundle universities. By bundling all the professors and courses into one location, schools achieve an economy of scale. Today, Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) and Special Private Online Courses (SPOCs) remove the need to put everything that is offered in one place.

Unbundling is also happening in the world of communication to newspapers and magazines.

For centuries, the most economical way to share information was by bundling it into daily, weekly, bi-weekly or monthly packages called issues.

It was uneconomical to print an article, then mail it to subscribers. The costs were prohibitive, and would lead to financial ruin.

So publishers waited until they had enough articles, coupled them with advertising, and bundled them into an issue.

In other words, publications were not set up for the convenience of the readers, but for the publisher.

But the Internet has eliminated the constraint on distribution.

Today, if an article is finished, it can be released to the public immediately—online.

Making people wait a day, week or months to get information is a path to a different kind of ruin today—the ruin or irrelevance.

When people can Tweet or Facebook about events in real time, nobody needs a publication that promises to tell them tomorrow what happened yesterday.

For communicators accustomed to bundling material into packages, this is a scary time. But there’s no going back.

No longer does it make any sense to make readers wait until we're ready to share information. They're ready now.

The challenge is that not everybody is online, or wants to get their information that way.

At my place of employment, we navigate that challenge by still publishing a newsletter four times a year—it's a good way to serve that shrinking, but still very important (and very generous) group of people who prefer their information that way.

But before those articles land in a mailbox, they are all posted on our website and Tweeted and Facebooked out. 

It’s a middle path between the two worlds of print and online, and so far it seems to be working. But one day I know it will stop.

Just like the need for the bundling of many other things in the world today is coming to an end. 

My hometown newspaper, the Winnipeg Free Press (which I also write for), is experimenting with unbundling. It is instituting a unique paywall that lets reader pay for only the articles they want to read—sports, entertainment, horoscopes. You will create your own newspaper each day, in other words. Click here to learn more about the experiment.