[email protected]
Just Add Water:
Building a 21st Century Progressive Grassroots Base
Everybody hates pop-up windows. Anyone who uses the Internet has experienced them, those annoying little boxes that pop up and interrupt whatever you�re doing to advertise things like the �NEW, EVEN SMALLER miniature camera!� The average individual is subjected to at least 3,000 marketing messages every day. Who wants one more, especially one so unexpected and unwelcome?
Why then is one of the queer community�s main strategies to �Get Out The Vote� to defeat anti-gay ballot initiatives so much like pop-up windows?
As I understand it, one aspect of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force�s grassroots strategy to motivate voters to defeat discriminatory ballot initiatives is to have LGBT people and Allies go DOOR-TO-DOOR, knocking on each door and trying to convince the voter who opens it to vote against anti-LGBT discrimination.
Although I've never gone door-to-door for anything other than the "Sales Leadership Club" when I was ten, it seems to me that the main difference between that kind of door-to-door canvassing and pop-up windows is that it�s much harder to close your door on a person without feeling rude than it is to click the little �X� in the corner of the pop-up screen on your computer!
Now, however annoying some of us may think it is to be on the receiving end, there is some very good thinking behind door-to-door canvassing. Perhaps the best thing about door-to-door canvassing is that it accomplishes something indescribably important. It lets voters meet LGBT and Ally people face-to-face. Someone who knows a same-gender-loving person is TWICE as likely to oppose anti-gay discrimination.(1) Putting a name and face to our issues makes a huge difference.
Another good thing about door-to-door canvassing is that contact with a human being offers a much higher chance of success in getting voters� questions and concerns thoroughly answered. Just mailing informative brochures to voters doesn�t give the voters a whole lot of chances to interact with your viewpoint and explore their own positions.
Going door-to-door also generates a subtler influence. When two people have the courage to go up to a stranger�s door to talk about sexual orientation and gender identity, they demonstrate the strength of their convictions in a unique display of bravery and faith. Whether the person being lobbied agrees with the canvassers or not, that prospect can�t help but recognize that those door-to-door folks have got guts, and that can make a positive impact on the most reticent prospect.
I know how brave door-to-door canvassers have to be, and I always try to be polite when people come to my door, whether it�s the Human Rights Campaign or Jehovah Witnesses. At the same time, even when I support their cause, having them show up at my house uninvited is an annoyance, not a motivation. Everyone else I�ve spoken to feels the same way: �I don�t appreciate people coming to my house.� �There�s never a good time to interrupt my privacy.� �All I ever think is �who does this person think they are and how soon are they leaving?�� Like pop-ups, door-to-door outreach is an irritation to many people, and not at all a motivator to helpful action at the polls. However, we could make voters� experience of it a lot less like pop-up windows.
Marketing guru Seth Godin calls tactics like pop-up windows �Interruption Marketing.� The marketer or their message is thrust into the consumer�s life whether they like it or not, interrupting whatever they�re doing. The goal of Interruption Marketing is to put the message in front of as many people as possible in hopes that some of them will absorb the message and buy the product (statistically only about 1-5%).
Human beings have a finite amount of attention to give and are already bombarded by so many demands for it that most people ignore the message, forget the cause and go back to dinner. Godin writes, �By constantly interrupting what we are doing at any given moment, the marketer who interrupts us not only fails at selling his product [or message or cause], but wastes our most coveted commodity, time.�
This cannot be our best thinking.
Fortunately there is a viable alternative, but it requires a more sophisticated, more effective, and, yes, potentially more expensive undertaking�Godin�s �Permission Marketing.� Permission Marketing focuses on getting individual consumers (in our case, possible voters) to �raise their hands� and ask to be informed. The people who ask to hear our message are much more likely to respond well to that message.
It works because both sides get something out of the exchange. Permission Marketing is effective because, as Godin writes in his book of the same name, it �encourages consumers to participate in a long-term, interactive marketing campaign in which they are rewarded in some way for paying attention to increasingly relevant messages.�
The idea of rewarding voters for their time spent listening to our messages may seem odd, or initially may even seem unethical, but the fact of the matter is, we will be vastly more successful if our messages are Anticipated, Personal and Relevant. That is, if people want to hear from us, if our message is directly related to each individual and if we�re talking about something that they want to know more about, people are more likely to pay attention and take the actions we (the cause marketers) want them (the prospective voters) to take.
At the very least, by using incentives to get permission to share information with voters, we would be able to do the kind of extensive grassroots voter education that we�ve been unable to achieve before. Most Americans just don�t know what�s happening, why, or how things could be better. Our citizens are currently not given all the information with which to make sound, proactive and sustainable decisions, and many of them assume that means there isn�t any more information. An effective Permission Marketing campaign could awaken the American voting public to all kinds of submerged possibilities. However, we cannot extract that much benefit just from going door-to-door.
Although it is Personal (at least, face-to-face contact is involved), door-to-door canvassing against LGBT discrimination is usually neither Anticipated nor necessarily Relevant.
When 20 volunteer canvassers from the Campaign for Affordable Rutgers Education canvassed Rutgers dormitories four nights per week during the fall semester of 1991 to demand a tuition freeze, they had an advantage our LGBT canvassers do not have. Every door they knocked on belonged to someone who would be directly, and adversely, affected if Rutgers enacted its plan to raise tuition.(2)
When we knock on a door, the odds are against the people within understanding how homophobia and anti-LGBT discrimination affect their lives. Impressing the interconnected impacts of discrimination on families and communities on prospects is a lot to expect from a few minutes on the stoop.
So how can we undertake Anticipated, Personal and Relevant Permission Marketing and still keep the strengths of door-to-door canvassing: putting a name and face to the issue, answering questions and concerns thoroughly and demonstrating the courage of our convictions?
An initial door-to-door interruption could be a very effective �incentive notification delivery system.� That�s just a long way of saying that we could go door-to-door just to hand-deliver information about the incentive (whether it�s a feel-good, altruistic incentive or a sweepstakes or some other material incentive).
The fact that the person is coming to my door to bring me something (free tickets to a picnic or concert, a chance at winning a new car, better education for my nephews, the opportunity to altruistically help others, etc.) instead of asking for something from me (sign their petition, put a sign in my yard, pledge my vote, etc.) may alleviate my and many people�s annoyance at the interruption.
When working from a database of registered voters, incentives can even be personalized with the individual�s name; that is, we can make the door-to-door visit even more Personal. If we let them know when we�re coming to their door to offer them the incentive, our visit may be Anticipated, and ideally the incentive will be something at least marginally Relevant to them. If the incentives were big enough, our door-to-door folks could become as highly Anticipated visitors as Ed McMahon!
So, at the same time that we begin our Permission Marketing grassroots campaign, we could retain the traditional strengths of door-to-door work�a personal touch that helps prospects identify issues with people, get any questions answered and feel the subtle influence of our courage. The difference is that instead of going right for a proposal on the doorstep, we just invite them on a date.
Godin suggests that Permission Marketing is a lot like dating. You don�t walk up to a stranger and propose (the old door-to-door model). Instead, you date. You generate interest and see each other on a regular basis; building a relationship over time that you hope will culminate in an �I do.� Godin outlines �Five Steps to Dating Your [Voter]�:
1. Offer the prospect an incentive to volunteer. If you expect a first date, you�d better offer something interesting enough to get a �Yes!� You have to provide a benefit for paying attention to a marketing message, whether it�s information, entertainment, a sweepstakes or outright payment. The incentive must be overt, obvious and clearly delivered. Remember that you cannot offer an incentive for a vote.
2. Using the attention offered by the prospect, offer a curriculum over time, teaching the consumer about your [cause or issue]. The first date is an opportunity to sell the second. Since the prospect has already volunteered to pay attention, the Permission Marketer is free to cut the crap�the pizzazz and sizzle of Interruption Marketing�and get down to educating the prospect over time.
3. Reinforce the incentive to guarantee that the prospect maintains the permission. Over time, incentives lose their motivational power. Your �date� may not want to go the same restaurant every time! The marketer can adjust the incentives offered and fine-tune them for each prospect.
4. Offer additional incentives to get even more permission from the [voter]. The goal is to get more and more permission over time. Permission to gather more data about each voter�s positions. Permission to discuss the reasons for those positions, helpful and unhelpful. Permission to not only educate about queer issues, but to train voters to become educators themselves. The range of permission available to the marketer is limited only by its relevance to the voter.
5. Over time, leverage the permission to change [voter] behavior toward [desired outcomes]. In other words, get your date to say, �I do.� Not until this point do you ask your prospect to act, whether that�s to donate money, to volunteer or to vote a certain way. Not until this point (usually) have you developed the trust (through regular Anticipated, Personal and Relevant communication) that can be leveraged into action.
With enough volunteers, donors and computer programs, a Permission Marketing campaign is able to �date� a lot of people at once. A permission marketer, for example, can interrupt all registered voters in a town with personally addressed, hand-delivered or mailed postcards offering them incentives to �raise their hands.� (The first contact is always an interruption to some degree, but its goal is not making the sale, marriage, but getting permission, courtship.)
Other advertising interruptions like billboards, bus stop benches and flyers can also be effective. After all, it�s said that someone has to see an ad three times before it sinks in and an individual only sees one out of nine ads! That means running an ad by each person 27 times! Frequency is important.
One of the most important things to remember about offering prospects opportunities to raise their hands is to measure the responses you get. Each type of initial contact should have a way to identify itself. In other words, the postcard given or mailed to registered voters should suggest a slightly different web page than the billboard downtown. The bus stop bench at the apartment complex should provide a different telephone number than the flyer handed out at the town�s Fourth of July barbeque. This way you can measure which tactics and mediums are effective in getting voter responses and which are less effective. It�s important to be flexible and to avoid clinging to tactics that are less effective in achieving the goal.
Naturally, different incentives will appeal to different voters, although chances to win prizes like money, vacation packages and cars are attractive to almost everybody. Try to offer a wide variety of available incentives so that you enroll in your permission-based curriculum a sample of voters that is wide as well as deep. Differentiate as much as possible. For example, you might offer 17 and 18 year-old possible voters at a youth center a different incentive than the voting residents of a retirement home. Be sure to consult with an attorney to make sure that prizes and other material incentives are legally delivered.
Decades of research by the Altruistic Personality and Prosocial Behavior Institute can help us understand which prospects may respond best to altruistic incentives instead of material ones. The Institute�s founder and director, Dr. Samuel P. Oliner, writes that altruism is �a behavior that is directed towards helping another; that involves some effort, energy, and sacrifice to the actor; that is accompanied by no external reward; and that is voluntary.�
The only ways to identify altruistic individuals by their social identification are membership in ecumenically inclusive religious or spiritual communities and organizations, and participation in selfless caring activities (volunteering to play with children with AIDS, for example). Less obvious indicators of altruism include empathic skills, internalized ethics of social responsibility and caring learned from primary caregivers, and a high degree of psychological health, including a high sense of self-esteem and efficacy. (3)
Whether offering an altruistic or a material incentive to get prospects� attention, your educational curriculum itself cannot just be a single, self-serving lecture on LGBT issues and the cruelty of the anti-gay ballot initiative if you expect the voter to maintain the permission. When designing a curriculum, keep in mind that many of those who respond to your incentive may disagree with your politics. You can avoid some unpleasantness by making the delivery of your message as individualized as possible.
For example, asking up front when voters respond to your ad for them to state their current positions on LGBT rights (if any) enables you to put them into an appropriate message group. Some people will need to hear directly from LGBT victims of discrimination and LGBT-affirming spiritual leaders from their faith tradition to change their minds, some will want to get more information about the ballot initiative and its impact on civil rights, and some who are already LGBT Allies will not need any convincing and will quickly deepen their permission.
Whether the curriculum is automated or delivered in person, every prospect will need the opportunity to participate and get any questions and concerns answered. Obviously your messengers, the deliverers of your curriculum, will have to be well prepared for anything, no matter if they�re recording a series of messages, meeting with three hundred voters in an auditorium or talking with two in a living room!
It�s also important to remember that your curriculum should stretch over time, and not be just a single event or discussion. Each chance to talk with the prospects that responded to your advertising is another �date,� another chance to go a little further, and each time, the incentive must be reinforced or raised. Over time, with reliable frequency, the majority of your prospects can turn into supportive voters. But once you have their support and the anti-LGBT ballot initiative is defeated, avoid making the mistake that so many grassroots movements make: dissolving the fledgling community created by all your hard work now that the battle is won.
If there are enough progressive groups and organizations in your area, creating a Permission Marketing Coalition might be the best way to go. That way, an immediate threat�for example, the anti-LGBT ballot initiative�can be a gateway to the ongoing edification of your local voters. Once you have the permission of those who already raised their hands, even after you have leveraged that permission into a vote against discrimination, you can begin the Permission Marketing process over again with a new issue or focus and newly reinforced incentives.
The prospect can choose the next message area to explore depending on their interests (and on the incentives offered). They may move deeper into LGBT issues or off into eco-efficiency, institutionalized racism, human and civil rights, eliminating the death penalty, prison reform, gun control, HIV/AIDS, education innovation, sustainable urban planning, economic disparity or another progressive issue put forth by a member of the Coalition. The important thing is your ability to continue the process of educating voters about the positive possibilities for our local communities to become wonderful places for everyone to live.
Of course, it also would help if the every member of the local Coalition could contribute financially to establishing and deepening permission. Ideally, a Coalition of like-minded national organizations would offer their financial support to bankroll a new national organization to assist progressive, grassroots Permission Marketing efforts�something along the lines of my husband�s and my proposed FUTURITY PROJECT, perhaps.
Formally established by the Coalition as a distinct nonprofit, this organization could direct seed money to grassroots campaigns as well as offer a Speakers' Bureau, Permission Marketing manuals and message-delivery templates for the variety of progressive issues presented by Coalition members. The organization could also coordinate the donation and dissemination of material (as opposed to altruistic) incentives, as well as monitoring and testing incentives� effectiveness for future reference.
Such campaigns would be vastly enhanced if established advertising and marketing companies stepped up to the plate to help with in-kind message-delivery design and advertising procurement assistance (hint, hint). Of course, this model should be tested on a small scale before launching nation-wide.
Obviously, you don�t need to wait for a Right-wing attack on your town to begin this permission-based educational process. In fact, you don�t even have to begin with a queer issue, especially if your area is facing another immediate threat, like toxic waste dumping or substandard schools. Depending on what issue is most immediately Relevant to potential voters in your community, it may be best to start with a non-queer issue, to begin building your permission base with something less complicated.
Whatever issue gets the permission ball rolling, the sooner you can get started, the more such threats we can avoid by having a fully informed voting public guarding the way to the fragile American holy of holies, our freedom, and fighting to clear a path to the Beloved Community.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Based on Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends, and Friends into Customers by Seth Godin, with permission, of course. Visit Seth Godin on the web at www.SethGodin.com. Be sure to buy and study his visionary books. To inquire about having Seth Godin speak at your organization�s meeting, conference or wedding, please contact David Evenchick [[email protected]] at Greater Talent Network Speaker's Bureau in New York.
For more about building coalitions, read Chapter 21 of The Nonprofit Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Start and Run Your Nonprofit Organization by Gary M. Grobman. Buy it directly from the publisher: White Hat Communications / P.O. Box 5390 / Harrisburg, PA 17110-0390 / 717.238.3787. Or online at www.socialworker.com/nonprofit/nphome.htm
To be put on The Futurity Project email list, send an email with "Subscribe" in the subject line to [email protected].
For more about how Permission Marketing can be used in local LGBT grassroots campaigns, including an expanded version of this column, visit Ko Imani�s website, www.geocities.com/newlgbtactivism/qp. Please email questions and comments to Ko at [email protected].
1 Source: Kaiser Family Foundation. Inside-OUT: A Report on the Experiences of Lesbians, Gays and Bisexuals in America and the Public�s Views on Issues and Policies Related to Sexual Orientation. November 2001 (conducted Feb.-Sept. 2000). http://www.kff.org.
2 From Campus Organizing Guide for Peace and Justice Groups, by Rich Cowan, et. al. ISBN 0-945210-04-3. Please feel free to redistribute this document at no charge provided that this notice is included in its entirety. Please obtain permission before republishing. � Copyright 1995 Center for Campus Organizing, Inc. For the completed 16-page guide, please send $2.50 to Center for Campus Organizing / Box 748 / Cambridge, MA 02142. Outside the USA the cost is $4. For info on memberships ($25/20/10), send e-mail to [email protected] or call 617-354-9363.
3 From Dr. Samuel Oliner�s essay �Ordinary Heroes� published in YES! Magazine, Winter 2001. Back issues can be ordered from www.yesmagazine.org. Visit the Altruistic Personality and Prosocial Behavior Institute online at http://www.humboldt.edu/~altruism/altru.htm.
[Click here to return to Queer Permission]
[Click here to return to FIRE IN THE LAKE BY KO IMANI]