By Emma O’Shaughnessy
In our last Notes in the Field we wrote about how civilians – every day people – become mobilised to fact-check. We are interested in fact-checking because Africa Check is one of our alumni, and also because the fact-checking mission holds for us some secrets to what it takes to mobilise ordinary people to create change. Here are more thoughts on the matter.
We saw from our Q&A’s with Africa Check that mobilising everyday people to help us create change has two essential prongs: the first is the awareness building and the appealing to what matters to people, to get them excited about participating. This is naturally in itself a complex business, as different groups of people resonate with different ideas and idioms, value systems and motivators. The second is building capacity.
Opening hearts and minds
As for the first prong: establishing the connection with what matters to people takes time and research and organisations need to test our ideas and messaging constantly to ensure we are activating the desire to engage in our audiences. You can read about some of the best ways to do this in our Content Strategy Toolkit. However, this is not usually enough for people to adopt or create change easily within their everyday lives. Creating change on the ground takes labour (the second prong).
Building capacity: Practical routes to change
Indeed, if awareness work is a door that opens potential, supporting people with the practical knowledge and resources to follow through on actions makes a tangible difference to a situation. When you think about removing barriers to change, often you will find people are aware of the need for change but lack the practical know-how on how to effect change on a daily basis.
With fact-checking, we saw that while the desire to stop the spread of misinformation is a great initial motivator, to actually do the work, which is important in stopping the spread of misinformation, everyday people also need easy access to the internet, they need to know how to research and verify sources, they need time and digital skills and the literacy required to use online tools and engage with information itself in multiple languages and iterations. Take a look at what Keegan Leech says about this in this short video:
Yes! For us to mobilise change, on the ground, we need to give support, training, resources and build community to help people develop agency, remove barriers themselves and step into the roles of organisers and change-makers.
Practical tools and resources
Many of us use communication to change attitudes, and this is excellent work and certainly, the start of a social change pipeline. But, it’s the beginning. If we want ordinary people to join us on an often arduous journey to creating a fair, transparent, thriving society then part of our service as civil society is to ensure we are providing the practical support and tools needed for everyday people to take on this work. This could come through funding, training, consistent community building and networking spaces, active opportunities to be part of something organised as well as consistent content that educates and guides. After all, people need to be connected, educated and organised to feel like they can do something important.
I am reminded always of sociologist, Zeynep Tufekci’s Ted Talk about how social media makes it easy to connect to people from multiple spaces, but that sustained movements come about through long term, sustained organising of people, the working together to do something important. You can watch the talk here:
Social change work is… hard. To make it easier, we need to build practical capacity in people and push ourselves, as nonprofits and non governmental organisations, to marry powerful communication tactics with engagement with our communities, solutions that help them access the information, resources and tools they need to do the work too.
