During my entire time working on nutrition, one of the things that I strove to discover was what would bring people onto my side on the issue I was advocating for. It also means defining who the audiences really are first.
Who are the audiences involved in a school district?
There are 3 I have found: Parents, Students, and District Personnel.
Within District Personnel, you can divide that up between the Principal, Teachers, and District Staff and Board of Education. At PAUSD, there is the added complexity that the individual school sites have a lot of autonomy to operate and traditionally have not been so tightly tied to central management. The members of the Board can be great partners, although they too can require persuading to help out.
Each one of these groups requires different messages and reasons to persuade them to be on board. They also can be resistant and deter if not prevent progress. In Part 1, I discuss some discoveries in persuasive messaging for the Parents.
Parents are huge advocates for their children. What is most important, though, can be up for debate. Certainly what affects one parent or family may not be another family’s issue at all. As a collective body, there will be issues that are more prominent that others. If their childs’ wellbeing are not being supported, that advocacy can rise substantially in energy.
At PAUSD, I will say that many of the parents who do speak out *do not* follow the 13 Tips for Successful Advocacy! Most notably, they can get so keyed up that they resort to berating, bullying, and disrespectful tactics that one can only find now in the age of social media. In talking to people in other school districts, Palo Alto seems unique in this respect, at a level far beyond what other districts encounter.
Finding persuasive messages in this kind of environment can be challenging!
Some of my discoveries include:
Facts and information almost never sway anyone. It is the sad truth. You can produce all the research about the downsides of poor nutrition and they will discount or ignore it all.
Along with that, I was not a recognized expert in the area, which further eroded their willingness to take my facts as something they should act upon.
Working on nutrition, already a field that is supremely muddied by conflicting information across the board from industry, research, medicine, and media, that makes things even more difficult to be believed, and that I have information that should be trusted over someone elses.
Instead, I had to find other persuasive arguments. The first one I found that resonated well was that this was a parenting issue and that when standards violate my ability to parent the way I want to, meaning things like not wanting my kids to eat sugar, or only eating things I want them to eat, then I get angry. Or worse, this shows how another parent can violate my parenting desires by simply bringing in a bunch of cupcakes for a birthday party. No parent likes to have other people tread on their territory; nobody tells another parent how to parent their kids or else they risk a lot of ire and negativity in their relationships. This worked well but only up to a point.
It wasn’t until this school year that I found a message that worked exponentially better. It was relating nutrition to an equity and access issue. Basically, a few other interested parents were working on the sugar issue and we met to brainstorm on how we might get this done. I relayed my efforts and the need to come up with a more effective message than the parenting one. One of them then remarked that she noticed that there were always kids who never got cupcakes brought in by their parents after school. This could cause bad feelings in those kids who felt left out because their peers would get cupcakes to celebrate their birthdays but they didn’t get that. There were two reasons for this. First, it could be simply because both parents worked and the parents couldn’t get away from work to deliver cupcakes after school mid-afternoon. Second, it could also be because of the many disadvantaged families who come to PAUSD for school. They don’t have the economic means (nor time typically) to think about bringing cupcakes to school for their kids.
Here in Palo Alto, there is a huge effort to make sure that everyone gets equal access to education and resources, no matter where they come from or who they are. It is by far the most supported platform of any platform I have discovered. So linking sugar and nutrition to equity and access instantly gets you support across the board.
Using this as the lead message, we were able to get agreement at the PTA to limit the after school sugary treats that would often show up to our elementary school.
Therefore, strategically this means that in order to be most effective, you must look in your community and find what makes it tick, and what unifies them the most. Then align your message to that, whatever it is. Ultimately it can take a lot of creativity to find a compelling relation to some unifying issue. However, if you discover it, it will go far in bringing them on board to your cause.