by Deborah Rinio, March 2018

When we advocate, we typically attempt to persuade someone to shift their attitude, alter their priorities, and care about what we care about. Persuading others is difficult, but it's something we do all the time; for example, we might recommend a movie to a friend or encourage a family member to try a new restaurant. Sometimes just suggesting the shift in attitude is enough other times it requires monumental effort. The difference is the result of many different factors, but one of the major ones is the difference between your position and theirs.

As many of us have experienced personally and professionally, if a person is noncommittal or indifferent, they are likely to be open to new ideas, but if a person feels very strongly about a topic, or has a strong personal connection to the idea, it is much harder to get them to listen, let alone shift their attitudes (Sherif 1963).

Understanding how people make decisions and change their attitudes can help when developing advocacy strategies. To persuade someone, you must first understand where they fall on a continuum of ideas about your topic. Are they strongly in favor, strongly against, or somewhere in the middle?

If you're familiar with your audience—your principal, for example—you are likely to know their positions, but those of school board members, superintendents, and legislators may be less clear. Thus, the first step in understanding your audience is to pay attention to what they promote and decry. You can glean ideas about their positions from emails, speeches, social media, and other communications they produce.

If you are unable to determine an individual's position, or if you must persuade more than one person, adjust your strategy. For example, if you wish to convince the superintendent to promote the freedom to read, but you have never heard his or her thoughts on students' freedom of choice, find a related issue you can capitalize on. Perhaps he or she has often expressed the importance of supporting students with various difficult life circumstances. In this case, you may wish to frame your message as one of ensuring that students can benefit from learning about difficult life issues via the safety of age-appropriate literature available in the library.

Once you've established the attitudes of your audience through observation and friendly conversation, you can begin to craft your message. If your audience has no strong ideas already, you can probably be direct, clear, and cut to the chase. However, if the person you wish to persuade has strong opinions, you're likely to be more successful if you approach them with an idea that is closer to their existing perspective.

When a person with strong opinions encounters a message they perceive as opposing their position, they will exaggerate the difference between the two. For example, suppose your principal believes that students should be completely silent in the library. If you suggest that the best libraries are lively ones, your principal may assume you will tolerate any amount of noise from students. You didn't say that, but because you argued an opposite idea to the principal's position, he or she exaggerated the argument and leapt to erroneous conclusions. If, however, you instead make your argument closer to the principal's current position, you are much more likely to gain traction. For example, if you instead suggest that you teach the students about differing noise levels (shoulder voices, elbow voices, etc.), the principal may think it's a brilliant idea because it falls much closer to his or her current position.

In short, data, research, and common sense are good starting points, but if you want to be effective, establish the position of your audience, and if it is a strong position to one side or the other, match your message to be close to their existing ideas on the topic. It may not get you to your goal in one fell swoop, but it will help you move in the right direction.

Work Cited

Sherif, Carolyn W. "Social Categorization as a Function of Latitude of Acceptance and Series Range." Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67, no. 2 (1963):148–56.