Seven Lessons of Public Engagement

Engaging the public in sharing your vision and becoming a force for change is critical to the success of your work. We use the words public engagement purposefully rather than public awareness because we see awareness as a first step, but nonetheless a step that leads to action.

How do you engage the public in action? Families and Work Institute has articulated these seven lessons of public engagement based on a seminar we hosted with the Carnegie Corporation of New York several years ago. This seminar brought together the architects of effective public awareness and engagement campaigns such as child abuse prevention, environmental protection, smoking cessation,drug abuse prevention and others with leading communications and media experts to share the lessons learned. Here are the lessons learned:

Lesson 1: See your effort in stages from changing awareness to changing behavior to engaging people in action

Social and business change takes time and requires a long-term strategy that unfolds in stages, but contains the seeds of each new stage in the preceding one. This process begins with raising awareness and then moves to changing behaviors, culminating over time with engaging some people in social action.

It is important to understand how the public frames your issue, before attempting to bring about change so that these efforts can be targeted for maximum effectiveness. Without this knowledge, change efforts can inadvertently use language or promote issues that trigger unnecessary opposition or backlash.

A number of groups have conducted research on how the public sees early childhood issues, including the Berkeley Media Studies Group (http://www.bmsg.org/) and The Frameworks Institute (http://www.frameworksinstitute.org/) Their research may be very useful to you as you try to understand how your community members understand early childhood issues.

It is not enough to focus on changing attitudes. Change efforts must be ready when people say, “I get it. What do you want me to do?” In other words, there is a need for very concrete action steps.

Here we have found several ancillary lessons.

• Unexpected messages have stopping power. They cause people to take in information they might have missed precisely because they are unexpected and therefore get people’s attention.
• Spell out the costs of not taking action as well as the benefits of change. People do not change their opinions or their actions unless the benefits of the change outweigh the costs of staying the same. Businesses call this kind of cost/benefit analysis “making a business case.”
• Project into the future. It is easier to move beyond everyday realities and opinions when people are cast in an unknown future. This frees them up to think about the present in new ways.
• There should be different messages for different groups. One size does not fit all.

In any change effort, it is essential to define who can make change happen and who influences those decision makers, targeting both the decision makers and those who influence them. Typically this includes the media, public policy makers, business, professionals, and people (citizens, families, and/or employees).

Hearing messages from the usual messengers (e.g. an advocate talking about the importance of his or her advocacy issue) is predictable and easy to dismiss as self-interest. Hearing messages from unexpected messengers creates increased interest and excitement.

Lesson 7: Take advantages of opportunities as they arise.

Over the course of a change effort, many unexpected opportunities arise, such as the release of a study or an event that captures the public’s attention. It is critical to take advantages of opportunities that have already engaged the public or key constituencies to show how this relates to the change effort.