Coping with COVID: Tips for Spreading Hope
Podcast Outtakes
How can communicators spread hope? Here are some practical tips from Thomas Coombes, a human rights strategist and the founder of the organization Hope-Based Communications.
These tips are excerpts from our interview with him but were not included in the final cut of the 2-part podcast.
JOZA: What are some of the strategies and tools that we can use in times of fear and uncertainty?
THOMAS: So I think it’s a really exciting time for communicators. One of the reasons that I set up Hope-Based Communications was I feel there’s so many tools that we have that are currently being used by some politicians to spread fear. And we could also adapt those tools to spread hope.
I have a simple formula which is essentially listen, test, and pitch.
So the first part is we need to be so much better at listening to our audiences. To understand how they feel. But above all, to understand how we can communicate our story to them. To me, that’s why I started by saying we can all do narrative. Because I believe our starting point should be about the ideas and the values that are important to us.
Even if they are things that feel hard to communicate like caring and empathy, we need to test it. And this is where I think you know we can use social media advertising. I’ve done a lot of testing using A/B tests. So running different versions of a content with different messages to try and refine how we actually talk about values like humanity, caring, empathy. Seeing what actually resonates best with our audiences. And also you’re just doing focus groups just to see if some words might actually trigger the response we want to see.
And then I think the crucial thing is pitching. So I think what we often see in communications is a sort of split between one team and just post content on social media. And another will try and react to the crises of the day in the press. And I feel we need a more integrated approach where we decide: what are the stories that will promote our narrative? What are the stories that show for example the way to respond on this crisis is to take care of each other cause we’re all in it together. We need to actually help shift the news maybe away from that crisis angle and try and get more of those stories of humanity in the news.
So, you know I spend most of my career pitching calling up journalists trying to get them to write about a human rights abuse that we had documented. Actually, I realize now that the bigger challenge, if you’re a public relations person is can we get a journalist to tell a very hopeful story. And then can we get people to share it on social media.
What we’re all learning as we as we’re stuck in our homes right now is a story that makes you feel good, that touches your heart, it will probably have some sadness and anger in it, but above all, it’s going to have hope.
What we’re all learning is on social media, we know that the fake news and the anger spread very well. But so does hope.
Thomas Coombes also recommends listening to Anat Shenker-Osorio’s podcast Brave New Words.
