PERSUASION (no, not the Jane Austen novel)

YOU NEED TO GET BETTER AT PERSUASION. PRACTICALLY GUARANTEED. It figures into grant applications, advocacy/outreach (obviously), teaching and training, management and leadership, and just general Getting Things Done.

I SAY THIS AS ONE WHO STARTED OUT REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY CRITICALLY BAD AT IT. And it damaged my career. And delayed some changes I wanted to see in the world. I got better at it. (I’m still getting better at it.) So can you. Trust me, it’ll help.

if you know lots about marketing or communications or rhetoric via education and/or experience, feel free to ignore me. you know way more about this than I do! no, seriously, tell me where I screwed up. I’m just going on personal experience here.

EXAMPLES •I’m using Nina Simon’s theory-of-change work for the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History as a positive example. •Seriously, she and the rest of MAH’s people are amazing persuaders. •If you haven’t checked their stuff out, do so. It’s fun stuff! •It’s in the syllabus under the Theory of Change assignment.

EXAMPLES •I’m using the open access movement as a (mostly negative) example here. •It has SIGNALLY and OFTEN failed to persuade its target audiences to change their behavior. •It has lost friends and alienated people. Me included. •I love open access. I loathe much of the open-access movement. •You can do better. We all can. •I grant you, it’s not a high bar. •We’ll see more about open access later in the course, so don’t worry if you’re not already familiar with it.

WHY PEOPLE DO WHAT YOU WANT (THE EXTREMELY ABBREVIATED VERSION) •Because you hold power over them •(as I do over you, at least for purposes of this class) •Because you’re offering a return that they want •Because they think you’re nifty •Because they think what you want is nifty •Or useful to them, or beneficial to them, or whatever; even in the absence of a straight-up trade, they like it. •Because there’s nothing and no one preventing them from doing what you want.

A PERSUASIVE ACT… … convinces your target audience of one (ideally more) of those “because”s without alienating them (or, ideally, anyone else).

STEP 1: WHO IS YOUR AUDIENCE? •“Everybody!” or similar vagueness is the wrong answer. •You can’t tailor a single message to “everybody.” •If you really need to reach “everybody,” you need to do what marketing folks call “segmentation.” Find your top three audiences and tailor a separate approach to each. •Design tool: personas •Alan Cooper, The Inmates are Running the Asylum (terrible ableist title, sorry) •Come up with a few characters emblematic of populations you’re trying to reach. Name each one. Find a photo for each one. Describe them and their mindsets clearly and specifically. •Now you can envision them as your audience, try to anticipate their reactions, as you develop your persuasion campaign.

WHERE YOU’RE PRIVILEGED, LISTEN UP: YOU ARE LIABLE TO MESS THIS UP BAD. •White? Male? Straight? Well-off? Educated? Able-bodied? •(If you tick any of those boxes, and you do, this means you.) •You have a tendency to assume your whole audience is like you, thinks like you. You’re almost certainly wrong. •The fix, unsurprisingly, is listening to and soliciting feedback from people who are not like you. •Understand that you are asking a favor from such people, and behave accordingly. You have no room to demand, okay? •At minimum, you need to be mindful of homophily (potential or actual) at all times. Plenty of campaigns founder on this. •Rethinking your personas a bit? Good.

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE REMEMBER THAT NOT EVERYBODY IS AN INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL. I cannot even begin to tell you how many information-related persuasion initiatives I have personally seen founder on this. If only a librarian could love it, everyone not a librarian will hate it.

it’s about empathy really. getting out of your own head, into the heads of people who aren’t you and may not even be anything LIKE you. we’re not as good at it as we think we are. the more privileged we are, the less good we are at it. (there’s research on this.) but we can train ourselves to do it, e.g. with personas.

ONE UNIVERSAL, THOUGH: Everybody’s busy. Everybody’s impatient. Nobody likes their time wasted. So don’t waste it. Brevity is the soul of wit persuasion!

THE ELEVATOR PITCH •You happen to get into an elevator with someone important to your plans. •You have until the elevator stops (~ 30 seconds) to introduce your plans and convince the person to help. •Go. •My (loose, not always exactly what I say) template: •“Oh hi {person} I’m so glad I ran into you! Hey, so, we’re doing {this thing, in fewest possible words} in hopes of {result person will think is awesome}. Hope you’ll {small, concrete action} because {flattering and ideally relevant thing about person}!”

A REAL EXAMPLE •Introducing RADD to the campus A/V archivist: •“Oh, hey, long time no see! How are you doing? {pause for answer and inevitable return “how are you?”} I’m good, thanks, doing some Mad Information Science, building a rig to capture data off obsolete media like VHS and cassettes and floppy disks before it’s too late. Want to come see it some time? I’d love you to tell me what it’s missing!” •Did it work? Yup. •Part of why it worked: I knew my audience. That archivist has a giant backlog of VHS and floppies, among other things. That’s why I mentioned them specifically.

HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE •Be b-o-r-i-n-g. •Don’t let me catch you wall-of-texting at people, okay? Not persuasive! •Bullet points are inherently boring. (I know, I know.) So is complexity. •Nobody cares about your process. (If you try to persuade someone to act on your theory of change by explaining theory of change, you’re Doin It Rong.) •Typical office memos are not acts of persuasion! Try a press release. •Be insulting. •If you misread—or worse, stereotype—your audience, you are very likely to do this. More on this in a bit. •One way to avoid it? Get beta-readers/viewers who are part of the audience and know it well! (This is why marketers use focus groups!) •Make it all about you and how YOU win. •You know they’re asking “What’s in it for me?” Answer that question!

HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE •“I, not being of your community and not understanding it well, will nonetheless swoop in and save your community from itself with my mighty righteousness! Do as I say and all will be well! GO ME!” •This is one reason I am personally sick unto death of the open-access movement. It pulls this odious stunt constantly on libraries and librarians. Stevan Harnad, Björn Brembs, and Richard Poynder resort to it often. Peter Suber and Heather Joseph are much-beloved OA advocates in part because they never do. •More subtly, though: tread carefully with audiences who don’t identify with you for whatever reason. Be sure you understand why they haven’t met your ask yet. •“I don’t give a hoot about your community and have nothing to offer it, but I want your community to do as I say anyway!” •This is another reason I am personally sick of the open-access movement, which has often stated (uncontradicted) “We’re not here to solve library problems! Libraries ARE the problem!” Way to make librarians want to help, jerkfaces.

A COMMON INSULT TYPE TO AVOID •“Do this thing! I’ve asked others to do it, but those losers are too {insulting adjective(s)} to pitch in!” •Insulting adjectives I’ve personally seen used: cowardly, lazy, stupid (this word is ableist; avoid it), old-school, incompetent. •You may mean this as a covert compliment. It’s not. •It’s a transparent attempt to back the other person into a corner: “do this or you are a Bad Person.” •People see through this stunt. They don’t like it, and they don’t like you for pulling it. Ergo, you lose. •Instead: acknowledge the work and show appreciation. •“People who give of themselves to do this thing are amazing!”

THE WORST ATTEMPT AT PERSUASION I EVER SAW… •… tried to persuade faculty from an information school to plan and execute a symposium on the theme “information schools are doing everything wrong!” •(The perpetrator I am thinking of was more specific than “everything,” but I’ve seen this style of pitch often… whatever we do, it’s wrong; I’m used to it.) •So these iSchool faculty are going to do a metric crapload of event-planning work (and spend lots of money; events ain’t free) in order to be yelled at insultingly all day? By people who clearly despise them and what they do? •Sounds like fun! Sign me up! NOT. •(I’m seriously not making this up. I wish I were.) •“Those losers were too cowardly to do it! But YOU will, right?!” •Yeah, um, basically nope. Persuasion fail! •Speaking for myself: my colleagues and I are not cowards. That in no way obliges us to be masochists.

STEP 2: WHAT’S YOUR ASK? •The verb “persuade” in English typically takes two complements. •First: your audience. “I’m persuading María…” •Next, usually as a prepositional phrase: your ask, what you want your audience to do in response to your persuasion. E.g. “… to join our group” “… to talk to her boss about open access” •But Dorothea, what about “that”? •“That” after “persuade” is a piece of information, usually: “persuade Eleni that self-publishing can be legitimate.” •Sometimes you have to do this, sure. (Especially common in intermediate stages of theories of change.) •But for purposes of our assignment, it’s too easy. I want your persuasive piece to make an actual ask. •(Nina Simon’s infographic does not make an ask. Her slides do.)

HOW TO FAIL AT ASKING •Ask too much at once, too blatantly. •This is one mistake the open-access movement has made. A lot. Really a lot. •Try subtle asks! (Nina Simon: “supporters… like you, right?” That’s an ask!) •Ask something too passive. •“Come see our website!” is kind of pathetic really. •Ask something b-o-r-i-n-g. •Ask something that presumes too much. •“Give us money!” sometimes does this. Not everybody has spare cash. •Avoid creating a barrier: “you can only X if you are/have Y.” •One way around this: multiple possibilities! but don’t overwhelm people; the Paradox of Choice is real. •Insult people who don’t meet your ask. (O hai OA movement…)

STEP 3: WHY ISN’T YOUR AUDIENCE MEETING YOUR ASK? •I mean, that’s the point, right? Right now, they don’t. You want to persuade them to. So ask why not, and get answers! •SO MANY persuasion campaigns skip this step, just assuming they know why not (often assuming the worst!). Absolutely fatal error. •They then sound out of touch and/or insult and alienate a target audience and/or create a completely impossible ask. O hai open-access movement! •Key thing to be wary of: For any value of X, not all X’s think the same. Consider a skeptic persona for your persona list. •Can your campaign lower a barrier for your audience? •Sometimes “why not” has to do with false beliefs you can challenge. •Sometimes there is pressure or obligation in the opposite direction from what you want. What can you do about that? •Can your campaign raise their motivation?

REMEMBER WHY PEOPLE DO WHAT YOU WANT •Because you hold power over them •… use this one with great care, if you must use it; don’t use it at all if you can possibly avoid it. It’s kind of evil, also alienating. •Because you’re offering a return that they want •Awesome! What is it and why do they want it? •Because they think you’re nifty •Info pros can often trade on this, but it only goes so far. •But seriously, own your awesome! •Because they think what you want is nifty •Why would they think this? What’s in it for them? •Because there’s nothing and no one preventing them from doing what you want. •If there are barriers, it’s on you to recognize that and strategize to address it. •Open access: TENURE AND PROMOTION processes. Serious, serious barriers.

STEP 4: MAKE YOUR CAMPAIGN •(in this class it’s a very small campaign, but you get the point) •Convey your ask and its justification to your audience in a way they’ll notice, understand, and respect… •“Notice” What kinds of things does your audience notice? Conversely, what do they bounce off of or never see? This should govern your choice of venue, at minimum, and may govern your choice of medium also. •“Understand” Read my lips: NO MORE INFOBOMBS. •“Respect” What does your audience respect? coming from whom? with what support? •… while avoiding turning them off.

HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE, REDUX •Walls of text. Words, words, WORDS, as Hamlet said. •This is such an info-pro mistake! So many of us are hyperverbal! •Crappy design. If visuals aren’t your thing, MAKE them your thing. More help out there than ever. •Visuals aren’t my thing (I mean, my class slides, right?), but look at my conference slides: I’ve gotten better over the years! So can you. •Imitate. Good artists borrow; great artists steal. •See something you like? Turn critical-brain on. Why does it work? How can you replicate that? •Overcomplexity. Excess detail. •Your Theory of Change flow diagram is almost certainly too complicated to use as a persuasive infographic. Slim it down.

GO FORTH AND PERSUADE!

IT’S NOT ABOUT PERFECTION. IT’S ABOUT AVOIDING OBVIOUS MISTAKES. •Copyright 2015 Dorothea Salo. •This presentation is available under a Creative Commons Attribution United States 4.0 license.