fbpx
Donate Newsletters

Collection: Flashcards

Sightline Flashcards are quick reference tools for effective communications strategies. They’re messaging memos distilled from experts and savvy communicators—to help you do your job and save you time.

[long]

Sightline Flashcards are quick reference tools for effective communications strategies. They’re messaging memos distilled from experts and savvy communicators—to help you do your job and save you time. The Flashcards focus on values-based communication: strategies for talking about important policies or issue solutions in terms of shared values. Browse the Flashcards to gain insight into particular sustainability issues or simply to hone your values-based communications strategies.

Sign up to receive Flashcard talking points emails:

[list_signup_button button_text=”Sign Up for Flashcard emails” form_title=”Sign up for Sightline Newsletters” description=”Select Flashcards and any others that interest you below.” selected_lists='{“Sightline Flashcards”:”Sightline Flashcards”}’]

Let’s Get Visual

by

It’s time to get serious about getting visual. Leaving photos and video out of our communications, or dropping them in as mere afterthoughts, equates to lost opportunity. Here’s why.

First, despite our better judgment, emotions drive our decisions. Neuroscientists, using highly sensitive brain scanning technology, have shown that our decisions and actions are based more on emotional reactions than rational thought.

Second, humans are a visual species. Pictures and text reinforce one another; in cognitive science this is called dual coding theory. Pairing words with visuals enhances not only attention, but believability and memory recall. In one study, adding visuals to a presentation boosted recall from 10 percent to 65 percent.

All this has a lot to do with the fact that visuals can quickly evoke emotion, more quickly and in ways that words alone cannot. In fact, the right images can activate mirror neurons, where your brain responds as if you are feeling what you see someone else experiencing.

It all adds up — with good visuals, we invite our audiences to feel first, then to think, and this has the potential to cement our message in their minds.

Read more

Put a Face on Climate Change

by

Scientist and Yale communications researcher Anthony Leiserowitz recently lamented that when it comes to climate change “You almost couldn’t design a problem that is a worse fit with our underlying psychology.”

Why? It’s hard for us to get worked up about a threat that feels abstract, far away in space and time, and too big for an individual to grapple with.

So what to do? We’ve often heard that the best communications strategies drive home how climate change impacts—as well as the co-benefits of smart energy solutions—are local, concrete, and personal. Well, what is more local, concrete, and personal than our bodies and the bodies of our friends and family? Indeed, research has demonstrated that Americans who view climate change as being harmful to people are significantly more likely to support climate policy responses. And the fact is that climate change is expected to adversely affect the health of all North Americans—and everybody else too.

A recent study by Matthew Nisbet and Edward Maibach, and colleagues, compared the effectiveness of three different frames for stirring audiences to support climate solutions—the standard “environmental consequences” frame, a national security frame, and a public health frame. They found that of the three, a public health frame was “most likely to elicit emotional reactions consistent with support for climate change mitigation and action.”

In other words, by framing climate change as a public health threat and presenting climate and energy solutions as opportunities to keep ourselves and our families healthy and safe, we can make strides, including with many new audiences, toward overcoming the myriad stubborn psychological barriers to engagement on the issue.

Talking Carbon Taxes, Free-Enterprise Style

by

Editor’s note: We’re re-issuing this popular Flashcard to pair with last week’s cap & trade in three pictures.

What’s the best way to make a case for a carbon pollution tax to conservative audiences? Why not speak their language?

Just listen to the outspoken conservatives who favor a tax on carbon pollution. Again and again they talk up carbon pricing with the familiar language of the market, calling for a level playing field and accountability for the true costs of energy, and touting the enormous opportunity in homegrown, free-enterprise energy solutions.

These conservatives also like the idea of swapping taxes from stuff we like—jobs, income, hard work—to something we’d be better off with less of: carbon pollution. In fact, pro-carbon tax conservatives talk about a carbon tax swap as a “golden opportunity,” an “old-fashioned, straightforward” solution, a “win-win” and a “no-brainer.” And they see a tax on carbon pollution as a good way to bolster our national security, strengthen our economy, and create “jobs, jobs, jobs.”

Read more

Finding Common Ground on Climate Change

by

Yale and George Mason University recently asked American Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents about their views on energy and climate change.

The good news: There are ways to find common ground across political divides.

Republicans prefer clean energy as America’s energy future

A large majority of respondents (77 percent) support using clean, renewable energy in the US much more (51 percent) or somewhat more (26 percent) than it is used today. Among those who support expanded use of clean energy, 69 percent feel we should be taking action immediately.

Only 9 percent think we should use clean energy less in the future and only 8 percent think the amount we’re using now is just right.

A slight majority (52 percent) supports using fossil fuels in the US much less (21 percent) or somewhat less (31 percent) than we do today. Among those who’d like to see less fossil fuel use, the most common preference is to do it “immediately” (52 percent).

Notably, the terms that resonate most for describing energy types are “fossil fuel”—over terms like conventional energy or dirty energy—and “clean energy”—rather than terms like renewable or advanced.

Read more

Talking Points: Why Taxes Matter

by

“Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. said it nearly a century ago. And, “no one’s said it better since,” New Yorker staff writer and Harvard professor Jill Lepore reminds us, “and that, right there, is the problem.”

[P]oliticians don’t like to talk about taxes, except to use them the way a matador uses a red cape. Those interested in getting voters to seethe will find no means easier. Read their lips.

The persistence of anti-tax rhetoric in the US is especially strange, Lepore points out, given that “ninety percent of Americans receive direct social or economic security benefits from the federal government.” Yet we find it easier to see what we pay than what we get.

It’s a failure not only of attention but also of communication: scarcely anybody reminds us what taxes actually fund. We talk about taxes without connecting them to the countless systems and structures that make our society tick, the protections that keep us safe and secure, and the investments and infrastructure that make up the foundation of our economy—benefits we all rely on and take advantage of, every day.

Read more

Climate Message Essentials for All Six Americas

by

If you haven’t yet watched Bill Moyers’ interview with research scientist and climate change communication expert Anthony Leiserowitz, I recommend doing it ASAP. (Stream it on the Bill Moyers & Co website).

Meanwhile, here are some top takeaways for climate messengers.

Climate Talking Points: Say it Like Jay

by

A few months ago, we issued a “pocket guide” to the climate narrative developed by Breakthrough Strategies & Solutions. The narrative is powerful not only because the opinion research shows it resonates, or because it’s defined by core values, but also because it’s so simple—meaning it’s easy enough to learn by heart and put to work!

The storyline involves just three memorable (and essential) parts—the threat, the solutions, and the villains.

In the spirit of showing rather than telling, we’re always on the lookout for examples of these kinds of messaging recommendations in action.

And as it happens, Jay Inslee, former US Congressman and Washington State’s newly elected governor, has modeled this messaging strategy for years—if not decades.

Read more

How Brilliant is 350.org’s Go Fossil Free Campaign?

by

The perverse irony isn’t lost on Bill McKibben.

On the one hand, America’s colleges and universities prepare the nation’s young people for their future. On the other hand, those same institutions invest in the fossil fuel companies that are profiting—enormously—from the carbon that’s going to wreck the climate over the next 60 or 70 years and beyond (If you didn’t catch it, that’s basically those same young people’s lifetimes).

So, McKibben is calling for divestiture—and he’s doing it in a smart way.

Read more

Climate and Hurricane Sandy: What’s In a Name?

by
New York Air National Guard responds to Sandy.

What’s in a storm’s name(s)?

In hopes of avoiding a “Hurricane Cassandra” (yet another wake-up call that we simply ignore as Joe Romm fears) and moving us closer to a Cuyahoga—the name of the river in Ohio that caught fire in 1969 and set the stage for our major national environmental laws, I’m doing my part to pull something productive from the wreckage.

Seeking lessons for communicating about extreme weather in the context of climate change, I plumb the storm’s names and nicknames for useful and memorable takeaways.

Read more

Talking McGovern[ment]

by
George McGovern.

Because the term itself has been so systematically loaded with negative connotations, talking about government is one of the greatest challenges for American communicators who believe in policy solutions for our health, safety, security, environment, and economy.

This Flashcard is one in an occasional series meant to help NW communicators talk more effectively about government, examining, in particular, how communications experts and some of government’s natural defenders define its role.

George McGovern understood government as a key tool for building strong families, a secure American middle class, and a better future for our kids. As the New York Times related yesterday, he “never retreated from [his] ideals, insisting on a strong, ‘progressive’ federal government to protect the vulnerable and expand economic opportunity.”

McGovern passed away yesterday in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He was 90.

Read more

+ More