Published before February 2009
How do you engage an audience? How do you convince them to believe in your work? How do you encourage them to actively support your campaign?
These were some of the questions that Fairtrade campaigner Joe Human considered in his workshop at a recent CharityComms conference. His objective was to demonstrate how the use of a case study and a creative selection of presentation techniques can bring a campaign to life and encourage people to support a cause.
In order for your audience to understand your campaign, they must feel engaged with its content.
Human’s presentation had a clear focus and a straightforward structure. He wanted to emphasise the choice of Fairtrade coffee and free trade coffee to potential consumers, by explaining the outcome of both decisions. Holding examples of both kinds of coffee up to the audience at the beginning of his talk conveyed this choice as a simple reality. Human had a focal message: “behind every cup of coffee there is a family”, and he used a case-study of Ethiopian coffee farmers to explain. In the same way that a story needs a beginning, a middle and an end, Human demonstrated that a case study needs a clear structure, made up of the following:
- Issue – the context of the campaign and the problem at stake
- Action – what the audience can do to make a difference
- Impact – the result of taking action
It is important to consider the most efficient and creative techniques for displaying your content.
A presentation should never be too long, otherwise you risk losing people’s focus. The length should vary according to who your audience is. For example with Human’s presentation a younger audience might need the history of Ethiopia explained to them in more detail. While if you were presenting the case to a potential funder, you might be under strict time boundaries to use only key facts. Human encouraged those in the workshop to think carefully about the different ways that you can present facts to ensure that they are received with impact. Using a visually stimulating power-point slide, Human illustrated Ethiopia’s poverty through statistics displayed on screen set against a backdrop of a striking landscape photograph. He strengthened the impact of these statistics by proceeding to add comparative statistics of economically richer countries.
Next, you need to consider how you convince your audience to believe in what you are saying and connect with your message.
Photography is a particularly useful tool for this. Human displayed a full screen photograph of a distressed woman begging with her baby at the edge of the road in Ethiopia to convey the ultimate effects of free trade on Ethiopian society. The photograph represented an immediate and powerful message, emphasising the issue of the campaign and making it disturbingly believable within seconds.
Using direct-quotes in case studies is another effective way of making your campaign real.
Human quoted one of the coffee farmers, Workineh Wodajo, alongside a photograph of him: “We don’t want your money. We simply want you to buy our coffee at a fair price so that we can be independent.” When displaying quotes from the coffee-growers on screen, Human remained silent, allowing the audience to read the quote themselves. This was a good alternative to make the audience focus. It also portrayed the message more directly from the coffee growers themselves.
Before taking action, donors want to understand the impact that they can have by supporting a cause.
They want to know exactly where their money will go and believe that it will be doing some good. For this reason it is vital to show examples in your case study. Human discussed how Fairtrade guarantees farmers a fair-price for their coffee and how producer communities also receive a social premium to invest in community and business development. He proved this with photographs of a school and a health clinic that had been built in Ethiopia as a result of Fairtrade support. So theaudience were able to visualise and understand the effects of supporting the campaign. At the heart of this workshop was the concept of how best to tell a story, this can be applied to presentations, websites, newsletters and leaflets. It is important to have a clear structure and use an assortment of techniques to make case studies engaging and encourage people to take action. The diversity of techniques available to campaigners should encourage creativity and originality, allowing core campaign messages to be received with impact.