Herbert Chao Gunther, Public Media Centre, San Francisco
1. Communicate values. Effective advocacy communications is predicated upon the strong clear assertion of basic values, moral authority and leadership.
2. American political disclosure is fundamentally oppositional. People are more comfortable being against something than for something.
3. Most issues are decided by winning over the undecided. Typically, the percentage on one side of an issue is offset by an equivalent percentage on the other side. If is the undecided or conflcited percentage left in the middle who determines the outcome.
4. More than anything else, Americans want to be on the winning side. The dominant factor influencing the undecided to choose one side or another is the perception that they're joining the winning side. So, for advocacy campaigns, acting like a winner - projecting confidence, asserting the moral higher ground, aggessively confronting the opposition - is a prerequisite for winning.
5. Make enemies, not friends. Identify the opposition and attack their motives. Point your finger at them and name names.
6. American mass culture is fundamentally alientating and disempowering. Most Americans don't feel they can make a diffrence or that they count, and they feel unqualified or unprepared to make important decisions about complex social questions. They key is to educate, empower and motiveate your target audiences.
7. Successful advocacy and social marketing campaigns, which generally have limited budgets, mainly utilize communications strategies based upon social diffusion through opinion leaders and not on mass media. Effective social policy movements develop through empowerting, challenging, and substantive messages targeted at a few key audiences that in turn influence larger consitituencies.
8. Responsible extremism sets the agenda. To move the media, you must communicate as responsible extremists, not as reasonable moderates.
9. Social consensus isn't permanent and must continually be asserted and defended. Social advocacy is an ongoing process that doesn't end with the passage of a law or resolution of a specific problem.
10. In the same way that biological diversity is essential to planetary survival, strategic diversity is critical to successful social movements. Multiple, independent advocacy campaigns on a single issue should be encouraged, while centralised monocultural efforts should be avoided.