Better outreach through empathy, in local government projects
Don't look now, but you're not diverse.
From the previous edition, which is also the first: Public involvement efforts for local government projects often barely motivate anyone. They often attract only around one or two people per thousand in a defined area such as a ZIP code, compared to three to four people per hundred for direct mail in the private sector. So they undermine inclusion, even though insiders seem to agree that equity and inclusion is “the most pressing issue.”
A big reason why (but not the only one): Although outreach and event content ostensibly is public, it ends up code-switched — gating out all but a predictable few who are the most fluent in wonk/geek-speak.
This edition is about busting down those gates through empathy.
Beware your superficial diversity
You’ve worked in or close to public involvement — whether at a local government, at one of its prime contractors, or at a specialized agency. Think about the people you typically work with: How many of them have backgrounds in policy, planning, engineering, poli-sci, enviro-sci or similar? Betcha it’s nearly all.
Nearly all your SMEs and contributors and reviewers and approvers are wonks and geeks who share deep but narrow affinities, outlooks and concerns — and thus a shared vocabulary that you reinforce for each other. Such a group lacks diversity even given superficial variety in race, gender and the like. You identify with that group because of your frequent interaction — but its members are far different from the public you need to involve.
Think outside the blocs
All your work-folks’ disciplines mostly deal with people as sets or blocs. But effective public-facing writing requires you to think of people as individuals with their own pressing agendas.
So how can you do that for people outside your tribe? How do you conjure empathy for them, person by person? One way is by using personas.
In marketing and advertising, it’s common to visualize and describe people like those you hope to reach — even to the extent of giving them names.
No need to take it as far as marketers do, but try this:
Start drawing on all your experience of the world apart from work. Think about people you’ve known outside of work: What takes up their time and attention, what do they like or hate, what worries them? Then:
Ask yourself who among the public will feel the effects of a project, both during construction and afterward. Maybe try Google Maps and Street View for clues.
Next ask yourself who among those people will benefit the most. What are their likely characteristics? (Say a school is in the project area. Will parents and their kids benefit?)
Do you have, or have you had, any characteristics in common with them? Do you know anyone who does? (Example: You’re not a parent, but a sibling or friend is.)
Hold that person in mind — even if it’s yourself, and even if it’s a past or future you — and start writing to that person about how the project would affect their typical day if they were in the project area, as if you were sending them a friendly heads-up by text or email.
Because you know and care about that person, it won’t feel right to distance them with wonk/geek language. You’ll naturally write in second-person point of view to “you,” rather than geeking out on impersonal aspects of “it” (the project as an end in itself) or on distant, othered, set/bloc, third-person descriptors (such as “bicyclists” or “pedestrians”). You’ll likely have to modify later, but it’s a great way to start.
Learn more about personas as used in marketing and advertising, from the Product Marketing Alliance.
Grasp the value
Now take it a step further. In marketing and advertising, and more subtly in journalism, you don’t just tell the public how and what. If you want to include and involve them, you need to harness enough empathy to infer and convey why they might care — what’s in it for them, or at least for their sense of justice or balance or progress. That’s often called the value proposition.
Let’s say a city is repaving and improving Elm Street this summer. You already started persona work, so you know:
The major public destination on Elm Street is an elementary school.
Parents and kids will be affected — especially those living in the tract homes within a quarter mile to the south and east.
You’re not a parent, but your older sibling is. What does your sibling worry about for your nephew or niece? What pressures does that drive?
If the project will give Elm Street contiguous sidewalks for the first time, maybe part of the value proposition is that upper-grade kids like your nephew or niece could safely walk to school on their own this fall. In turn, that might reduce chauffeuring duty and so relieve a little pressure for parents like your over-scheduled sibling.
But what if the project added not just sidewalks, but wider, traffic-separated, multi-use paths, like a midsize city in Clackamas County did? Then the benefits could extend further — a half mile or more.
Kids living further out could be expected to safely, independently ride their bikes or scooters to school.
Their parents could chauffeur or accompany younger kids by bike instead of car, reducing onerous car traffic at dropoff and pickup times — which could further reduce worry and pressure for all the school’s parents and all the school’s neighbors.
Heck, even you could dust off a bike and confidently go meet your nephew or niece at pickup time.
Would you really?
Once you grasp the project’s value in that social context, could it change how you write the outreach? Holding your sibling and your nephew or niece in mind and envisioning the effects, would you still so dispassionately describe the project as:
“
Re-designing the roadway to improve safety and connectivity for pedestrians, cyclists and motorists”?
Or so impenetrably as:
“…
improv[ing] safety throughout the corridor”?
If you let go of those work-tribe signifier words and instead wrote more empathetic outreach animated by the public’s social context, would it help motivate more of the affected public to get involved?
Why not give it a try? But maybe hold onto that draft, because next time will be about adding a call to action.
Wanna chat?
Substack just added a feature where every stack can have a chat, so I sprang for it. (It was free.) Feel free to respond to my prompts there, or introduce your own.
