6.3.4 Make messages memorable and portable

You not only want to allow audiences access to your messages, you want them to engage with your ideas, and maybe even more importantly, remember them and be able to retell the messages to others once they have been exposed to them. So, your messages need to be memorable and portable.

When it comes to making your messages memorable, this entails trying to find things that catch the attention of your target audiences, thereby getting them to engage further and ask questions about your ideas. There are a number of well-recognized techniques intended to serve these purposes, but a dominant theme through these techniques is to emphasize what you found that was surprising, unexpected, new, interesting, or different from current thinking on the policy issue. The reason to try and make your messages memorable is so that audiences will remember them and tell them to others in their circle. You not only have to make them memorable for the individual, they also have to be easily retellable or what we call “portable.” This idea of easily portable or spreadable messages fits into Gladwell’s (2000) viral concept of how good ideas spread: first from the source, but then from those who have been “infected” to those they interact with, and so on.

Advocates use many techniques for this purpose and we now look in more detail at five that are commonly used to make messages more memorable and portable:

• Sticky titles that are memorable
• Striking facts that are unexpected and draw attention
• Analytical stories to humanize your analysis
• Giving the target audience the language to use
• Pictures and graphical/visual presentation of data

Taking the techniques one by one:

• Sticky titles that are memorable
  By “sticky” we simply mean very memorable.¹ You are trying to come up with titles that immediately resonate with the target audiences, and hence are easily memorable and portable. Sticky titles can also begin the process of communicating your overall message or at least piquing the interest of the target audience to further engage with your advocacy proposals. A good example is the title of the European Stability Initiative’s paper on the business vibrancy of the Central Anatolian region of Turkey: “Islamic Calvinists.” The purpose of the paper was to try to undermine a reductive and ill-informed narrative in Western Europe about Turkey within discussions on its potential membership of the EU. The title itself is such a strange collocation of words that virtually anybody who reads or hears about the paper remembers the title. In fact, it was not something that was invented by the European Stability Initiative, but what people from the region call themselves, that is, they are Muslims, but with a Protestant work-ethic.

• Striking facts that are unexpected and draw attention
  A strong theme in making advocacy messages memorable is to focus on things that you found which were unexpected or striking.² This refers to how you select and highlight the facts, quantitative or qualitative, that you found in your research and which are of such significance or are so surprising that decisionmakers cannot ignore them. For example, in a recent study in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a policy fellow found that the rate of nonimplementation of constitutional court decisions was 9 percent; this is in direct contrast to the publicly released figure of just 3 percent.³ This is a figure and fact that policymakers and citizens alike could not ignore.

• Analytical stories to humanize your analysis
  The next technique essential to making complicated or technical findings more accessible, memorable, and portable is to build the message around the story of the people involved or affected by the public policy in question and support it with your analysis or evidence.⁴ Remember that policy is made by people and for people, and stories around people affected by a particular policy can be a good reminder of this for decisionmakers. Humanizing data is, therefore, an important technique for researchers to develop in their advocacy efforts. A good example of this approach is the European Stability Initiative paper mentioned above, entitled “Islamic Calvinists.” The paper centered on the story of the development of the largest furniture business in the Central Anatolian region and the government and private sector players involved. It did not center on the data on the development of the region, but on the very memorable story of the development of this very successful business—of course, supported by the data.

Our case from Kosovo (UNSCR 1244) has further lessons on this aspect of analytical stories.

• Give the target audience the language to use
  Often it is not enough to come up with stories or striking facts, you also need your target audiences to start using new language or adopting your language or metaphors. Again, you need to focus on the kind of language that might appeal to the target audiences and also consider a language that is memorable and portable. This technique can be especially useful and important if the issue is new for policymakers, and when you are trying to reframe the discussion and/or introduce a new dimension to the debate.

Two of our cases illustrate examples of this transfer of language:

• Pictures and graphical/visual presentation of data to emphasize the key data
  As we read or hear presentations, we never grow out of our childish habit of looking at the pictures. They are the things that grab our attention and we remember and talk about them. Presenting the key findings of research as a graph or in another visual form draws the attention of the reader to that particular piece of data and also means that the reader does not have to search the text to find it.⁵ Unsurprisingly, striking facts, if they are quantitative, are often presented graphically. For example, in a recent paper from a policy fellowship program⁶ on the performance of courts in Bosnia and Herzegovina⁷, the fellows found that the court system was the most expensive and slowest in Europe! The fellows presented the data to support this claim in the following figure:

The figure essentially shows that while budgets increased significantly over a five-year period, this had no impact on the case backlog that, in fact, continued to increase. This one graph forms a pretty devastating picture and completely undermines the standard efficiency argument that the case backlog would come down if more money was made available.

Pictures of the people or places studied in the research obviously humanize the policy discussion, especially if you accompany them with the stories of the person or place shown in the picture, thereby making them memorable. While a picture or graph may be worth a thousand words, you should definitely accompany them with some explanation/story to ensure you get the intended point across and reinforce your message. Try not to fall at the “but it’s obvious” hurdle by assuming that what is obvious to you is also obvious to your audience.