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You're listening to the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
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In today's episode, we share how to combat the right wing messaging that could be about to endanger your program's funding.
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So, stay tuned.
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If you want to have real and powerful influence over the money and policy decisions that impact your organization and the people you serve, then you're in the right place.
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I'm Cath Patrick, and I've helped dozens of progressive non profit leaders take their organizations to new and higher levels of impact and success by building powerful influence with the decision makers that matter.
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It is possible to get a critical mass of the money and policy decision makers in your world to be as invested in your success as you are, to have them seeking you out as an equal partner, Opportunities and resources to you.
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This podcast will help you do just that.
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Welcome to the nonprofit power podcast.
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Hey there, folks.
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Welcome to the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
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I'm so glad you're here for today's episode, because I don't know about you, but, this week is being challenging for me.
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It's already been pretty wild, and it's only Tuesday.
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I'm recording this the day after Inauguration Day, and the fire hose has started.
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It is abundantly clear from not only the rhetoric, but the initial actions of the Trump administration and the behavior of the Republican Congress that they're pretty hell bent on using their power to create maximum chaos and disrupt a lot of pieces of government.
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And with the potential creation of this Department of Government Efficiency, whatever that's supposed to be.
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There's nothing good that's going to come from that because it's not about any sort of efficiency.
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It is a barely veiled attack on pretty much the entire suite of government funded safety net programs, which has been a longstanding ambition of the right wing.
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This isn't new.
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What is new is the level of aggressiveness and the level of determination that seems to be accompanying this round.
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And so we've got our work cut out for us to anticipate what may be coming our way and to begin to immediately develop strategies to counter some of the potential damage that could be done.
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If you're like many direct service nonprofits, a chunk of your funding comes from government sources.
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And in a lot of cases that originates at the federal level.
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Even if you don't have federal funding, the ripple effects down through state and local funding could be substantial.
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So what I want to focus in on is the messaging piece of this problem, which I think is particularly important.
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You may have noticed that the right wing has been putting out a lot of very deceptive, but also very effective messaging around safety net programs and their relative merit.
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And you may also have noticed that there is nowhere near the amount of counter messaging happening from the left in general, and from progressive nonprofits in particular in the direct service space.
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So I want to talk about how we can begin to shift that.
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A very helpful place to start is to get some clear understanding of exactly what it is the right wing is doing with their messaging and why it's working so well.
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Mhm.
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A lot of the conversation following the most recent election was how could this have happened?
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It was so clear that the stuff that the Republicans wanted was so crazy and unreasonable.
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And here was all this good, wonderful stuff that the Dems were going to do.
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And how could anybody be confused about that?
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The painful reality is that the left's messaging wasn't as effective as the messaging on the right.
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And part of the reason for that is that, generally speaking, progressives are inclined to be very insistent on being truthful.
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And a lot of the right wing messaging is not anchored in accuracy or fact or truth.
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It is anchored in a desire to achieve a specific objective and an outcome.
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And they're quite willing to use deceptive messaging to do that.
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So, part of our challenge is how can we maintain principled, accurate, factual information that is also persuasive and engaging and begins to counter some really devastating right wing messaging that has now taken hold in the popular imagination and is being accepted as truth.
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And that has the potential to be very problematic, for any sort of government funding for safety net programs and the work that we do.
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If we're going to effectively counter the right wing messaging that is persistently and aggressively attacking any sort of safety net program funding, we have to understand what strategies the right wing is using that are being so effective.
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I think the most important thing to understand overall is that the rights messaging strategy is built around a fundamental reality, which is that most people walking around in the community don't really have any idea how most government funded programs work.
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Whether they're safety net programs, or funding for roads and bridges, or any other functions of government that are absolutely central to our daily lives, most folks really don't know how that all works.
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They don't know what the underlying policies and legislation are.
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They don't know how the funding works, and how it's distributed, and what it's being spent on.
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And generally, there's no reason for them to know that most of the time.
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I don't fault anybody for not knowing that necessarily.
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It's not something that the average person goes around thinking about, given all the other stuff on their plate and stuff they got to pay attention to.
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Why would the average citizen have knowledge of this?
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So I have no interest In blaming citizens for not having that information.
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I know people who get all worked up about that and are like, Well, they should know and that's their civic responsibility to understand that and yada yada.
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Well, maybe so.
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But the reality is that most folks walking around, Whatever their political stripe, Or whether they're completely apolitical and they're just trying to live their life.
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Most people do not walk around knowing that information.
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So what the right wing has been incredibly effective at is recognizing that.
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And in that they have seen an opportunity, which is that if people don't know, then the right gets to make up whatever story they want to.
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And as long as they make that story easy to understand and plausible, and connect it to stuff that feels true, it becomes much easier for them to plant in the average citizen's mind a particular interpretation or story about any number of things.
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About how government is bad in general.
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Government's only there to take stuff from you and not to help you.
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Government only helps undeserving others, it doesn't help people like you who are deserving.
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Government's just taking away your money in taxes and not doing anything for you.
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There's all sorts of basic story themes that have gone with right wing messaging for decades.
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It's one thing to make up the story that fits your narrative.
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But then the other thing that they have done very effectively is that they have broadcast that story everywhere all the time.
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They're using all available platforms, all available messaging tools, and they're just hitting people with it over and over and over again.
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And if you hear something often enough, you see it in your social media feed, you hear it on whichever news channel you watch, or however you're getting your information, if everywhere you turn, you're seeing a version of the same message, the same story, it starts to become part of your understanding of the world.
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Especially if you're not seeing or hearing the countervailing message and story.
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So we have an opportunity right now, and an imperative I believe, to make sure that our version of the story is what people hear most often, and what becomes part of background truth for people.
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The only way we're going to make that happen is if we are very intentional with our messaging and we are repetitive with our messaging.
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There's some things about the right wing playbook that are very distasteful and that we do not want to emulate at all.
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But there are other aspects that are quite smart and strategic and highly effective and that we would do well to emulate.
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One of the more horrible elements of their playbook is that they demonize and other the people who benefit from government programs, policies, and funding.
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They make them be not like good average citizens, they're other.
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They make up a story about how the people who are getting the help are the cause of everybody else's problems.
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And they go a step further and they connect that help that folks are getting to specific problems that people are having that resonate strongly with them, that the average audience member is likely experiencing.
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So for example, virtually everybody in America is struggling with housing costs, with grocery prices, with just those core elements of high cost of living.
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A lot of folks feel like they're not doing as well as they were doing in the past.
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And they're not wrong.
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But the causes of that are what are at issue.
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And what the right does is they say, oh, it has nothing to do with 40 years of right wing policies that have systematically eroded worker rights and worker power, have made the gap between the earnings of workers and the earnings of CEOs massively expand to the point where it's completely out of control.
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They don't want you to pay attention to any of that.
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They've been on a 40 year project to continuously shift wealth to the top 1 percent and to marginalize as much as possible everybody else.
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Their policies have been designed to do that.
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Their messaging, however, does not say that's what they're about.
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Because they know that won't sell.
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Their messaging is all about how, if you're struggling financially, if you're having a hard time making ends meet, if your family is struggling, it's the fault of those other people over there who are taking your jobs, who are living off the government dole, who are taking advantage of you in some way.
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They're to blame, those other people over there.
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And they've been quite effective with that.
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In part, because there has not been adequate counter messaging from our side.
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And it's way past time for that to change.
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The other thing they're very good at is characterizing this as a fairness issue.
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And saying, those others over there who are getting help, that's not fair, because you have the same problems.
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How come that other over there gets to have help with their housing expenses, and you don't, and you're struggling with high cost of housing too?
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How come they get help with food, and you don't, when you're struggling with high grocery prices?
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That's all unfair.
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And so you should be mad at them, and you should be mad at any program that helps those other people.
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Part of why that messaging is successful is that while of course there are narratives that counter that, those counter narratives are not as loud, they're not as persistent, they're not as ubiquitous.
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They might get said once in a while.
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And far too often, those of us on the left assume that everybody understands.
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Well, of course folks need help because these 10 reasons.
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Of course, everybody gets that.
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Well, no, they don't.
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And remember, they don't really understand how this stuff works in the first place.
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But when people are feeling burdened and stressed out and economically stressed in particular, and like they kind of remember a time when it wasn't so hard.
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There's a lot of frustration there.
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There's a lot of anxiety there.
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And when somebody comes along with a story that explains it all in a nice little package and says, Oh, all of your problems are the fault of those others over there.
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And to pour salt in the wound, they're getting help that you don't get.
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And that's really unfair.
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So those are pieces of the right wing playbook that we don't want to emulate.
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That kind of exploitative messaging.
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But what we do need is to be acutely aware of how it's designed, what strategy is behind it, and what it's intended to achieve.
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Let's look at some of the things they do that are highly effective and that we do want to emulate.
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They create simple connect the dots messaging that makes it really easy for people to latch on to the core message.
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It's easy to understand.
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It makes sense.
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It fits.
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And they go, yeah, that's right.
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They also broadcast that messaging far and wide and repeatedly.
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It's in people's faces all the time, no matter where they turn.
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And what makes all of this work so well is that they're capitalizing on the absence of clear messaging to the contrary.
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And that's where we come in.
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Because as nonprofit leaders, we are in a unique position to create a counter narrative and to make sure that people are hearing it all the time.
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But here's a challenge for all of us is that we've got to keep it simple.
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We've got to keep it clear.
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Simple, clear, connect the dots messaging that resonates for people, that connects to their own experience and understanding.
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That makes it easy for them to say, Oh, yes, I see that.
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I get that.
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Yeah, that, that does make sense.
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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Part of what we want is messaging that triggers empathy.
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And the thing about empathy, a real simple example.
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When disasters happen, and we've had a bunch of them very recently.
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Los Angeles fires, the devastating hurricane and flooding in North Carolina.
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When those kinds of things happen, it's really easy for the average person to go, oh man, that's terrible.
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That could have been me.
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There's an instant understanding catastrophic events don't pick one group of people over another.
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They just go after everybody.
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And so it's very simple.
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There are very few barriers to empathy in that situation.
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You can look at a person who's standing there in the shell of their burned out home, looking bewildered and devastated, or standing in the spot where their house used to be, that the water washed away.
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And they're clinging to their pets and each other, and just are completely shell shocked and trying to figure out what on earth they're going to do now.
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Most people can look at that and say, Oh my gosh, that's terrible.
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Those poor people, how can I help?
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And that's why in those kinds of settings, what you see are huge outpourings of donations and people stepping up to volunteer in any way they can.
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Because it immediately triggers empathy.
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It immediately resonates for people.
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Oh gosh, that could be me.
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I want to help.
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Those folks are just like me.
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I can't believe what they're going through.
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That's so terrible.
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So we need messaging that helps people have that same empathetic response to the people we help.
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And the good news is that at the community level, the average person, when they're not, you know, swimming in internet conspiracy theories and overdosing on Fox News, the average person just walking around living their life is pretty open and pretty inclined to help their neighbor.
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And we see it all the time.
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Neighbors help neighbors.
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Generally speaking, that is still a fairly strongly held value in most pockets of America.
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There are exceptions, of course, but generally speaking, that's still true.
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So we want to tap into that because we're fighting this battle on multiple fronts.
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We have to engage decision makers and help them understand.
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And we're probably talking about slightly different messaging, because obviously, policy makers, funders, other high level decision makers, have more information.
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They have a greater understanding of how these systems and programs and funding structures work.
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So, we're not having to help them understand that.
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But we do still have to help them understand all the other connections and engage them emotionally and have them invested in supporting the services.
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But with elected officials in particular and government officials in general, even if they're part of the administrative branch and they work for an agency, that's all sensitive.
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The in particular are highly sensitive to public opinion.
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and to where the mood of their constituents is.
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And if the mood of their constituents is such that they view all government funded assistance of any kind, any safety net programming, with suspicion and animosity and a general feeling that it's unfair and undeserved and it would be fine with them if it was done away with.
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That creates a permission structure for electeds to say, yeah, okay, why not?
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No, my constituents won't be mad at me if we get rid of that.
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Or, well, there might be some constituents who will be harmed, but they're not the ones who are the squeaky wheels and they're not going to raise a fuss and they're not going to organize against me and primary me.
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So that's a piece of why what the public thinks really matters.
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Now, we're used to thinking about building support in the community more in the terms of, well, we want general goodwill.
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We hope that some of them will become volunteers and donors.
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That would be nice, etc.
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this is something different.
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This is a battle for public opinion.
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And it really, really matters.
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Because if we continue to allow large swaths of the public to believe the right wing messaging that people who benefit from safety net programs are undeserving, it's unfair.
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They're taking something that they don't deserve.
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And in so doing, they are somehow taking something away from you.
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None of that is right, and we should just get rid of all that.
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And we'll paper it over.
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We'll call it efficiency, or getting rid of evil government that doesn't do anything nice for people anyway, and it's just a pain in your backside.
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If we don't counter that messaging, then it just makes it that much easier for the right wing to do whatever it wants, and to dismantle entire safety net systems.
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Or so reduce them as to render them ineffective.
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If public opinion is at best ambivalent about that and doesn't think it concerns them, and at worst says, yeah, that's exactly right.
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That's what you need to be doing.
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Stop all those unfair giveaways to those other people.
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Then, where's the pushback?
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Who's going to rally to our side?
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Who's going to say, wait, no, those neighbors need help.
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We need to make sure that there's support there for them.
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So, we have two sets of messaging to work on.
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But I want to call out how critical it is that we work on public opinion messaging.
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And that we do that in a specific way.
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We do that with some specific strategies in mind that are probably counter to how most of us are used to doing our messaging.
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And in fairness, when we're talking with decision makers, we don't generally have to explain how the whole system works.
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We have to explain how our stuff works, what our solution to the problem is, how that achieves the results that it does, etc.
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That's part of our messaging with decision makers.
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But the public opinion stuff is different.
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Because we have to start with the understanding that the average person has no idea how any of this stuff works.
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And we don't need them to understand every last detail.
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We don't need them to understand all the nuances of how, for example, Section 8 housing works, or how SNAP benefits work, how Affordable Care Act subsidies work, or how Medicaid works.
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They don't need to know all the nuance, all the detail.
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What they need to know is what's actually true about who benefits, and how that helps, and how it is something that's available for anyone who finds themselves in a set of circumstances where that's necessary.
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Just like the folks whose house has burned down.
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Nobody wants to be that person.
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Most especially the people whose house just burned down don't want to be that person.
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They would give anything for that not to have happened.
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They would give anything to just have their life back.
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And what we have to help people understand is that a lot of the circumstances that cause a need for a safety net service or set of programs are frequently beyond the person's control.
00:22:52.001 --> 00:22:56.392
They are nothing anybody would want or voluntarily seek.
00:22:57.268 --> 00:23:01.468
And then we can help people understand how, yeah, that actually could just as easily be you.
00:23:01.991 --> 00:23:04.152
Or someone you know, or someone in your family.
00:23:05.051 --> 00:23:10.402
In some coming episodes, we'll break down some of the pieces of how you actually do that.
00:23:10.412 --> 00:23:14.875
Examples of how you can craft messaging that will accomplish those objectives.
00:23:15.528 --> 00:23:24.115
But for today, what I wanted to do in this inaugural week, as the right wing and the Republicans broadcast exactly what they intend.
00:23:24.623 --> 00:23:31.843
Just to give us all a big heads up and say, we have some work to do that's going to feel really different than what we've had to do in the past.
00:23:32.202 --> 00:23:35.113
And our messaging is critical to that.
00:23:35.849 --> 00:23:50.897
In addition to continuing to engage decision makers and have them understand and be on board with and be fully invested in solving the problems that we solve and willing to invest in the solution that we've created.
00:23:51.561 --> 00:23:58.744
We continue to need to do that, but now we also need to get the public on board.
00:23:59.392 --> 00:24:08.325
And the ways that we're going to be doing that are going to be structured around some different principles because of where the audience is starting.
00:24:08.877 --> 00:24:21.127
We talk all the time about how, when you're crafting messaging for a given decision maker, you spend time learning who they are and what keeps them up at night and what are their problems and what are their priorities?
00:24:21.127 --> 00:24:23.018
What headaches are they trying to solve?
00:24:23.582 --> 00:24:29.454
When we're engaging in public opinion shaping messaging, it's the same principle.
00:24:30.035 --> 00:24:35.198
And just as with decision makers, we don't want to get into TMI syndrome.
00:24:35.198 --> 00:24:44.347
We don't want to be telling them a bunch of stuff they don't want to know or care about or are not yet interested in hearing because they haven't invested in the basic issue yet.
00:24:44.847 --> 00:24:46.688
We have to start with where people are.
00:24:47.188 --> 00:24:49.028
Just like we do with decision makers.
00:24:49.551 --> 00:24:50.902
We meet them where they are.
00:24:51.377 --> 00:25:03.287
We give them a way to understand the problems that we solve and the work that we do in a way that resonates for them, that triggers empathy, and that makes them say, yeah, that's important.
00:25:03.826 --> 00:25:05.707
I'm so glad you're doing that.
00:25:06.146 --> 00:25:06.777
Wow.
00:25:07.037 --> 00:25:08.656
Our neighbors really need you.
00:25:09.613 --> 00:25:18.686
And then part and parcel of that is the messaging that says, this work cannot and should not be supported by charitable donations alone.
00:25:19.326 --> 00:25:20.287
It's too important.
00:25:21.142 --> 00:25:28.011
It's too important for it to be subject to the random whims of whether somebody decides they want to contribute this week.
00:25:28.632 --> 00:25:30.501
We want that, we welcome that.
00:25:31.075 --> 00:25:34.518
And we do a lot of work to help the community invest.
00:25:35.152 --> 00:25:37.025
But, this stuff is too important.
00:25:37.035 --> 00:25:42.775
These needs are too critical and foundational to people's ability to survive and thrive.
00:25:43.315 --> 00:25:46.575
We need there to be support from government structures as well..
00:25:47.089 --> 00:25:51.063
At the city and county level, at the state level, and at the federal level.
00:25:51.609 --> 00:25:53.680
And here's why each of those are important.
00:25:53.839 --> 00:25:55.500
And here's how each of those fit together.
00:25:56.109 --> 00:26:03.236
There are ways to explain all of that, that resonate, that are simple, that are connect the dots easy.
00:26:03.653 --> 00:26:07.160
And that end with people saying, yeah, We need that.
00:26:07.563 --> 00:26:08.542
I'm for that.
00:26:09.472 --> 00:26:24.853
Having that public support is going to be so critical when inevitably we have to fight some very serious battles around federal policy, where there are going to be attempts to make massive cuts to a lot of federal programs.
00:26:25.583 --> 00:26:36.371
And in order to rally opposition, and to frankly make a stink, and make it be costly for decision makers to make those decisions, we've got to have public opinion on our side.
00:26:36.590 --> 00:26:38.651
And right now, we can't assume that we do.
00:26:39.384 --> 00:26:47.884
So, right away, what you can do right now is get with your team and start talking about that just from these general principles.
00:26:48.134 --> 00:26:50.865
And say, what are we currently doing that aligns with that?
00:26:51.461 --> 00:26:54.621
Are we doing anything that's unnecessarily complicating this?
00:26:55.134 --> 00:26:59.095
How frequently are we engaging the public in some kind of a way?
00:26:59.478 --> 00:27:00.867
What are we doing on our socials?
00:27:01.171 --> 00:27:05.015
What are we doing in local print and broadcast media?
00:27:05.335 --> 00:27:08.295
What are we doing in all the different avenues?
00:27:08.845 --> 00:27:10.265
What are we doing at local events?
00:27:10.335 --> 00:27:13.144
How visible are we and in what ways are we visible?
00:27:13.515 --> 00:27:24.845
And are we just building warm and fuzzy feelings about our organization, or are we building understanding and support for the work that we do and the problem we solve?
00:27:25.484 --> 00:27:26.884
We need all of the above.
00:27:27.664 --> 00:27:37.704
So begin that conversation with your team and start thinking about how you can integrate messaging that will build public support at a fundamental gut level.
00:27:38.424 --> 00:27:44.404
And at the same time be thinking about how you can leverage that as you engage your decision makers.
00:27:45.211 --> 00:27:47.980
That's plenty for this initial stage.
00:27:48.310 --> 00:27:56.028
In future episodes we're going to get into the details of how you can do different pieces of that to greatest effect with the least amount of effort.
00:27:56.942 --> 00:27:57.883
I wish you well.
00:27:58.202 --> 00:28:02.329
We've got a lot of work to do and we need to hang together on this.
00:28:02.666 --> 00:28:07.807
We're going to need one another's support in the coming months as we do this very important work.
00:28:08.599 --> 00:28:13.839
Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode, right here on the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
