By Peter Gilheany, director, Forster Communications
Campaigning is the act of persuasion. How do we get people and organisations to do the thing we want them to do? It’s as true when flogging a product as when you’re campaigning about the climate crisis or social care or refugee rights or anything else.
With all due respect to selling stuff, the stakes are higher with those other issues. We need to use all the tools of persuasion that are available to us, and one that is fundamental is how we leverage experience.
Experience broadly splits into two types – learnt experience via expertise, data, evidence and forecasting, and the lived experience of those at the sharp end of the issue. Any organisation that wants to inspire audiences to take action on an issue needs to understand these types and employ them in the right blend.
When the blend is wrong, or there is no blend at all, then we are needlessly limiting the effectiveness of campaigns.
If you take the example of the climate crisis, learnt experience has ruled the roost until very recently, often through terrifying data or warnings from scientists. Lived experience has been visible but often dismissed or minimised, too often presented in a tokenistic way as an incidental proof point for a position on a specific issue or a box-ticking exercise on equity, diversity and inclusion. That treatment has come to the fore in the most recent COP. Nations in the Global South who are bearing the brunt of the climate crisis feel alienated and patronised by the Global North countries who have done the most to put the world in this precarious position in the first place.
The impacts of the climate crisis are increasing, its effects are being disproportionately felt by those in the Global South and it is untenable to run a campaign which doesn’t bring their experiences to the fore. It’s the right thing to do because it is, well, the right thing to do, and learnt experience isn’t anywhere near enough on its own to move the dial.
The other reason it is counter-productive to ignore lived experience is people with it aren’t just case studies or convenient proof points, they are often experts on the very issues we are seeking to engage audiences on.
For example, indigenous peoples comprise only around 6% of the global population but they protect 80% of our remaining biodiversity. We need their expertise and experience, and they must be given a platform to share it and have influence.
Tackling the climate crisis is a complex, multi-headed beast made even more complicated by needing to ensure the actions we take don’t exacerbate the other massive inter-related challenges we face globally, from public health to population movement. Lived experience can cut through all that complexity and provide powerful insights that are beyond the reach of learnt experience alone.
Relying solely on learnt experience through data and forecasting won’t inspire climate action on its own, otherwise we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in. The campaigns organisations create need to pull all the right head and heart levers to have real impact, and the only way to do that is through uniting these different forms of experience to a common end.
What’s true for the climate crisis is true for all the other massive challenges we face and that charities are campaigning and mobilising on. We held a series of events recently on how to unite lived and learnt experience in communications and campaigning, covering social justice, the climate crisis and international development. None of the speakers, including two charity CEOs, could envisage any success without cracking that particular nut.
- International development with Sally Copley, former Executive Director of Communications & External Affairs at the British Red Cross and Noshin Suleman, Assistant Director, Global Social Impact at EY: watch the recording and read insights from the conversation.
- Social justice with Minnie Rahman, CEO of Praxis, the charity for migrants and refugees: watch the recording and read insights from the conversation.
- Climate crisis with Rachael Orr and Noora Firaq, CEO and Deputy CEO of Climate Outreach: watch the recording and read insights from the conversation.
