C.A. Jacobs

aceadmiral:

chrysocollatown:

aceadmiral:

So I got a new job, finally! As a–wait for it–scholarship administrator! 😀 So now I get to learn about nonprofit administration and I get paid for it!

I have inherited the email of my predecessor, which itself was subscribed to the emails of several of her predecessors, so I am on approx. 2 million mailing lists. Most of them are useless, but sometimes the occasional good thing comes up–and one of them was this webinar from the Foundation Center called “Beyond Marriage Equality: What’s Next in Funding LGBTQ Issues?”

Now there’s a lot of interesting stuff in there if you have an hour and a half, but something in particular caught my attention and I’ve been mulling over if for the past few days. One of the gentlemen talked about how they completely failed with their messaging at the beginning of the marriage equality fight, and it turned out the best message was not what their constituency wanted them to say. He pointed out that it can be difficult straddling that line, where you’re fighting your own people to let you send out the most effective message.

You see, a couple of months ago my best friend asked my advice in a sticky situation: She’s bi. I’ve known this for about 15 years, because she told me. I assumed she had told her parents and her brother and the whole world knew this, especially because she doesn’t exactly hide it under a bushel. But then she tells me that she’s never told her brother, and she’s pretty sure her parents don’t know or forgot or what have you. And now… it’s kind of getting to be ridiculous.

My friends, I was flabbergasted, and caught completely off guard. But determined to be a good friend, I mulled it over, and about a week later, I had something: Instead of saying “I’m bi,” say, “This is the support I need from you.” She hasn’t changed; they haven’t changed. Her *needs* have changed. That’s the focus, with the added bonus of you telling them exactly how you want them to react so they don’t have to guess.

Why did it take me so long to think of this!? (Disclaimer: I don’t know if it works.) I’ll tell you why: I was thinking about what I wanted to say, not what they needed to hear to react the way I wanted them to. This is so simple and yet completely mind-blowing to me at the same time.

I’ve been seeing a lot in the past couple of weeks especially of messages going out from the asexual community that I’ve felt… unhappy about. Not angry or offended or anything, but kind of like, “this is not going to land the way they want it to land.”

I’m not super focused on visibility/awareness, as we all know. (Another point from the webinar: are you actually filling a need, or are you competing with another group already doing that thing for the same funding?) I think it might be good to examine, though, as we have more and more media interactions if our messages are about what we want to say or what we want them to hear.

…Of course, I have no idea how to do PR research like that. Someone? Help??

I also have no idea how to go about researching that, but if it helps you or anyone else, when doing visibility stuff i try to focus on sexual normativity (as in, the assumption of an universal sexuality and sex attraction) more than in specific labels or terminology that will fly over their heads…

Then again, i mostly talk with queer folks and health professionals, so maybe we could start thinking/talking about the informational needs of each public?

So to give a little more detail of the specific example they’re talking about: at first they were like, “we should be allowed to marry people because we’re people too!” This is the Correct argument, yeah? But it fell completely flat. Instead, they had to pivot from a focus on basic humanity/human rights to instead talking about love. All those slogans about, like, “love is love” or “love wins” were apparently the result of this recalibration. Additionally, doing things like having the straight ally or clergy sit next to a gay person–or maybe appear on their own!–and do all the talking is super patronizing but also super effective. Basically, the argument couldn’t be won on the merits; it had to be won through means marginalizing or patronizing to the actual constituency because that was the only way to speak to the muggle majority in a way they would hear it.

And, certainly, avoiding unfamiliar terminology is a Best Practice when dealing with muggles, but (and this is in response to @grison-in-space too) what they really drew into focus is that if you argue on the merits, often you will be too much of an affront to their status quo and you will lose. How, though, do you even come up with possible arguments other than the merits? Like, I get focus-grouping your stuff once you have it, but how do you even step outside of “I am a human please afford me basic dignity” long enough to figure what will actually get the Sharons of the world even to that one Fresh Prince gif? Unless maybe the alchemy of messaging groups includes being able to do this too…. idk, they’re likely to be straight, maybe it would be pretty easy for them 😛