All of us working for social justice are seeking good answers to this question: how can we influence changes in attitudes toward values we hold dear, like love, community, family, freedom to be our best selves, and equal opportunity under the law?

The good news is that there is a way to tap into these values to increase acceptance of people who are part of an “out group.” The social science literature is clear: conversations in the context of friendship reduce prejudice. And it’s not just correlation; there is strong evidence that these interactions cause attitude change.

That’s the good news. The challenge is, these conversations aren’t always easy to have. They can be awkward, difficult, or risky. In the movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender equality, we have seen how difficult it is to engage people to have these conversations. As Matt Foreman of the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund says, it’s like we’re working toward equality with one hand tied behind our backs.

The Haas, Jr. Fund engaged LightBox Collaborative to research these thorny questions. Together we wondered: how can we motivate, engage, and support gay people in having these conversations with their straight friends and family? And what are the results of conversations, not just on the straight person’s attitude, but on the quality of the relationship and the gay person’s well-being?

We dove deep into these questions and learned enough to create a model mapping the conversation path toward greater acceptance and openness. Here are just a few of the highlights of what we learned about the journey:

Many gay people are no more motivated or influenced by appeals to rights and public policy than “movable middle” straight people are.

Instead, strong motivations for gay people to have these conversations include:

• Living openly and authentically
• Having better relationships with the straight people in their lives
• Concern for young people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning

The conversations may be easier than we thought. Not only are casual conversations about ordinary life as a gay person easier to have than conversations that make being gay a big deal—these casual conversations also work better at increasing understanding and acceptance.

We heard from gay people who have had these conversations that their relationships with the straight people in their lives are better than ever, and that the discomfort of potentially awkward conversations is well worth gaining greater well-being and the freedom to be yourself.

Holly Minch and I have just returned from Creating Change, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s annual organizing and skills-building conference for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community and their allies. While we were there we did a workshop on our research findings. What we heard back is that this line of research, learning, and strategy is necessary for creating the change we envision: a culture that is safe, welcoming, accepting, and fair for all people, including people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. Several people told us how meaningful it was to see themselves and their experiences reflected in a study like this.

A 90-minute workshop—or a 500 word blog post—just scratches the surface of this research. We are grateful for the enthusiastic feedback we heard at Creating Change, and we are looking forward to the next steps: taking what we’ve learned and turning it into tools and strategies for action. If you are interested in reading the full report, sign up to have our blog delivered to your inbox. We’ll be blogging about our findings when the report is released.

(Image courtesy Flickr user Chris Blakeley, Creative Commons)
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Cynthia Scheiderer is a LightBox Collaborator who has high hopes for many more courageous, authentic conversations.

Just as light needs to include a full spectrum in order to show the world around us in its true colors, an organization’s communication needs to include a full spectrum of messages in order to best illuminate its work. At LightBox Collaborative, we look for three types of messages in any organizational story: purpose, impact, and approach messages.

We’ve noticed that that while most nonprofits do a pretty good job with purpose messages and approach messages — talking about their mission and how they do their work — they often give short shrift to the vitally important impact messages.

It’s easy to understand how this happens. Purpose messages explain the problem the organization is in business to solve, the reason it exists; these messages describe the cause that inspires many of us to work at a nonprofit. Approach messages are about the work the staff is eyeball-deep in every day: the programs or services the nonprofit offers. These messages are easy for most of us in nonprofits to talk about.

Impact messages, though, are the ones that help you tell the most compelling story about your organization. Impact messages explain what your organization offers, not in terms of programs and services, but in terms of impact and results.

For example, perhaps your organization developed a new math curriculum aimed at helping kids from low-income families improve achievement and access to higher education — an important purpose. Maybe you came up with creative ways to recruit 50 volunteer math tutors from local colleges to help out — an effective approach.

But the best story is in the impact message: you provided tutoring for 200 students at a middle school and their math scores improved by an average of 20 percent. Individual students talk about enjoying math, and parents talk about how homework is getting done.

Impact messages can be a challenge to develop. They require that an organization find time to quantify and evaluate what it is doing. This also means listening carefully to your community to learn what people think about your work. The effort is worthwhile because impact messages help audiences understand why the work of the organization matters.

We recommend that nonprofit organizations work hard to develop compelling impact messages as part of a full spectrum of communication. Impact messages can be the beacons that enlighten your audiences about the difference you are making in the world.

(Image courtesy Flickr user Lauren Manning, Creative Commons)
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Cynthia Scheiderer is a LightBox Collaborator with a flair for crafting powerful impact messages.

If you whiled away your summer engrossed in guilty-pleasure books that turned your brain to mush, fear not! The folks at LightBox Collaborative have gathered our favorite messaging and strategic communications books to help you get your brain primed for the work ahead.

Here’s a sampling of what our wonky LightBox colleagues fess up to reading and re-reading this summer (tucked discreetly inside a dog-eared copy of People so we didn’t ruin anyone’s vacation with reminders of work):

• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. A study on memory, emotion and motivation, Made to Stick finds that making a story memorable depends on simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions, and stories. Their follow up, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, gives practical advice on engaging the rational mind and the emotional mind in creating change.
• Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steve Johnson is a fascinating tour of the flashes of brilliance and creative breakthroughs that take our society and culture to new heights, and the patterns that underlie these good ideas.
• Brandraising: How Nonprofits Raise Visibility and Money Through Smart Communications by Sarah Durham. Founder of the firm Big Duck, Durham says it is important to have an integrated marketing and fundraising plan based on a foundation of clear mission and relevant strategy. Fundraising, advocacy, and other nonprofit programs all can benefit from a clear organizational profile, a solid identity, and smart outreach.
• Straightforward: How To Mobilize Heterosexual Support for Gay Rights is written by law professors and husband-and-wife team Ian Ayres and Jennifer Brown and offers practical, makes the case for why straight people need to speak up and act for equality. Well-researched and practical, they focus on strategies that change incentives in favor of equality.
• The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World. Funny that there’s a paperback to give us lessons about blogging, SEO, and e-newsletters, but The Yahoo! Style Guide is available for most e-readers, too.
• Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate by George Lakoff. Another “classic,” this one from 2004, Lakoff’s book shows us that the winner is often the one who makes the rules, which in the case of communications is the one who chooses the language to define the terms and parameters of the debate.
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. It’s hard to believe that Malcom Gladwell’s definitive book on viral communication is already 11 years old. Yet today it sits at third on The New York Times bestseller list for paperback business books. The notion of the tipping point, mavens, connectors, and stickiness came from this classic, and some of us make a point to go back to it again and again. We wouldn’t be surprised to find copies of Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw on LightBoxers’ nightstands either.
• The Seth Godin collection. We worry about one of our colleagues needing serious chiropractic care one day because we suspect that she constantly lugs all 10 of Godin’s international bestsellers around — along with other smart books, the last five issues of The Economist, and who knows what else in the enormous satchel she carries! Godin’s Purple Cow is the easiest to spot among all of that material, and All Marketers Are Liars Tell Stories is a wonderful read about how authenticity is the best marketing of all.

What’s on your back-to-school reading list?

(Image courtesy Flickr user o5com, Creative Commons)
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Cynthia Scheiderer is a LightBox Collaborator with a flair for asking the right questions – and discovering answers that work.

There’s no doubt that social media can trip us up. Who hasn’t been too quick to hit “send” only to later wish to take back that email, tweet, or Facebook post?

Recently the American Red Cross demonstrated the right way to respond when something goes amiss after a staff member accidentally posted a personal tweet to the American Red Cross’ Twitter account.

In this case, the American Red Cross made handling the situation look easy. Less obvious was that social media didn’t always come easily to the American Red Cross — preparation and strategy planning was the secret to its seamless late-night response to a rogue tweet.

In 2009, Beth Kanter profiled the American Red Cross’ development of a social media strategy and its resulting handbook. Beth wrote:

“The American Red Cross initiated its social media strategy after Hurricane Katrina. The organization knew there were negative blog posts about its disaster relief efforts, but had no capacity to respond, let alone track.”

The American Red Cross has come a long way. In the spirit of transparency and sharing, it has made its short and sweet Online Communications Guidelines and Social Media Handbook available online.

The organization’s approach is to use common sense guidelines, not command-and-control policies and procedures. The list of “dos and don’ts” contains only one “don’t”: don’t reveal confidential information.

The “dos” include:

• Be transparent
• Be accurate
• Be considerate
• Be generous
• Respect work commitments

What’s striking is that these guidelines aren’t specific to social media. They are wise, common sense principles for all areas of our professional lives.

As we at the LightBox Collaborative work with nonprofit organizations and foundations on social media guidelines and strategies, we first ask to see any existing statement of values or code of conduct. Through our process, the organization often realizes that its existing guidelines are already as applicable to social media as any other communication, needing only minor additions and tweaks to cover social media situations.

Once organizations realize professional behavior will serve them well in social media, they can take a more positive, empowered approach — rather than one that is fear-based and tightly controlled. During research on social media and foundations I co-authored, many foundation communicators reported that once their organizations got started with social media, the fears about negative comments and loss of control never materialized.

As the American Red Cross demonstrated, common sense, humor, and transparency go a long way in social media. So does a healthy dose of preparation. Being thoughtful about strategy frees up our time and energy to be smart and creative with social media.

Now that’s something we can all follow, share, and like!

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Cynthia Scheiderer is a LightBox Collaborator with a flair for asking the right questions – and discovering answers that work.

(image courtesy Flickr user hufse, Creative Commons)