A New Communications Strategy?
1. Why do we need a new communications strategy?
…..And what was the old one anyway?
I think we would all agree that it is important to get our message out to the residents of our community, that we are not currently doing this very well, and that we need to work on both the media and the message.
I think we can also agree that the challenges we face are common ones in many suburban communities in America today: people are busy, distracted, and have limited attention for local issues; the media are both limited and limiting; the role of money is often greater than that of principle; and the philosophy we espouse – that of collaboration, rational dialogue, greater participation, etc. – is one that is open to being subverted by dishonest tactics on the other side.
In the past our communications have been limited to campaign literature and perhaps one or two press releases; our Democratic Committee web site; and our emails notifying people of meetings, etc. But clearly we’re not reaching even a majority of Democrats, let alone Republicans and independents. One reason for looking at this area is to see if we can do better. Another is to ask ourselves what we might be doing differently.
2. What would a successful “communications strategy” look like?
….And what do we need to make it happen?
From what we discussed and my own thinking I’ve put together a somewhat disparate list of ten items that we should consider – and of course there may be others.
- Buying an email list, and maintaining it more effectively
- Creating and sending out a regular and more effective newsletter
- Press releases
- What’s the key message, and what’s the right tone to strike?
- Focus on the issues
- Focus on the future
- How do we pay for it?
- What about a more “popular,” “muckraking,” or “watchdog” kind of site?
- What about Letters to the Editor?
- Feedback and listening
I have something to say about each of these, and assume you do too; but the bottom line is how are we going make this happen? Here are my thoughts about this:
- We need a group of committed individuals who will keep this activity going, beginning with our subcommittee but expanding to include others
- We need to assign tasks to people who will carry them out
- We need to ask people for a $10 or $15 donation, and have a way to manage this on an ongoing basis; with some kind of budget to work with, this becomes more of a realistic opportunity
- As we discussed in my last email, we need to come up with the right design concept, draft the first newsletter, find out about getting the emails, come up with some compelling messages, and build out a special section of the web site or a new web site – and then get this out to people.
3. How do we proceed to discuss and then implement this?
I believe this is definitely a discussion that belongs on this ”Democratic Voices” site, and I would invite you to post comments and reactions here, so that we can share them with others. Right now this is an internal site – for our discussions only – so I’ve posted this whole message here as a starting point.
But we could make it a public site if we wanted to, as a dialogue that is more informal than the official Democratic Committee site, which I think has already become too stodgy.
A few weeks ago I proposed that we launch a new web site with a provocative slant, in the hopes of getting more attention to the issues, called Bernards Exposed. Not everyone agreed with this approach, but I thought we could afford to be shocking, funny, and irreverent once in a while. While our underlying purpose is to be constructive, I don’t believe we always need to be earnest, polite, or dull.
I think we might also be able to broaden the audience, make this self-supporting, and have it tie into the local self-reliance movement that is beginning to take hold in New Jersey.
But until we agree on this I am keeping it internal as well. You can check it out, but it’s not visible to any search engines.
And here’s some of my “behind the scenes” thinking – please feel free to comment on this also – thanks:
To start with, I think we need to define what a communications strategy looks like before we can decide what to implement.
The foundation of a communications strategy is the message. The mechanics of getting the message to the audience have to be consistent with the message we are seeking to communicate. Web sites, email newsletters, direct mail, letters to the editor are all means of communication that are available to us. But how we use these media really depends on the message, so that the two are fully aligned.
It seems to me that the overall goal of the communications strategy needs to be the expression of an alternative political vision of Bernards Township. The mechanics of running the township are only one part of this. The more important aspect is the concept of “the community” as consisting of everyone. Right now, the township government consists overwhelming of the representatives of one party, a party that represents less than a third of the overall population.
It’s fair to say that right now two-thirds of the population are significantly under-represented in local government – roughly 80% of all township board and commission members are Republicans, with only 10% Democrats, and 10% independents. The political composition of these entities is important. Registered Republicans make up less than 1/3 of the residents; by far the greater number are the independents, at 50%, with Democrats making up the rest, roughly one-sixth. But together they represent more than 65% of the population, who are in important ways disenfranchised by the current system.
When you’re only listening to the views of a minority of the population – any minority – you’re getting something less than the full picture. It isn’t simply that the Republicans are only seeing their own viewpoints reflected on every issue; it’s more importantly that the only the issues that are even addressed are those recognized as important by this powerful and vocal minority. In providing “an alternative political vision of Bernards Township,” we need also to identify different issues as important ones – issues such as transportation, local resiliency and energy generation, energy efficiency and conservation, the inequity in sewer charges in the Hills, the vision for the Quarry, seeking consensus solutions rather than litigation, the level of citizen engagement and participation, availability of municipal services, transparency, and so on. These are core Democratic and independent values.
We have the ability to bring these values to the community, and to our local government.
In one sense the purely numerical distribution of voters is misleading. People are Republicans or Democrats because they care more about the issues. The independents then get to choose whose views they like the most. If Democrats put forward better views, and show that the Republicans’ views are inadequate, incomplete, and inconsistent with the community’s values, we can insist on greater representation in local government.
This seems to me to be core driver of the communications strategy: we offer an alternative view, which points out what’s missing and what’s possible, as well as sometimes what’s simply wrong.
A secondary purpose is to provide a greater sense of connectedness amongst Democrats and other progressives. It’s important to promote neighborhood- and community-wide events, designed to engage citizen dialogue, and then communicate this to the community at large. This includes the discussion of county, state, and national issues, to the extent that local Democrats (and Republicans and independents) want to engage in dialogue around these questions.
Finally, my strong view is that for the most part we are not dealing with the real issues in our town – and in most other similar communities in New Jersey and around the country. Here are a few:
- Our affluent suburban automobile-based, consumer-based culture is increasingly unsustainable. We are facing massive issues of climate change, overdevelopment, and environmental injustice in our society, and while most of us are going about business as usual, this artificial reality simply can’t last.
- We need to think about increasing local self-reliance and resiliency – having people come together more as a community, and start thinking about how to help others more than ourselves.
- We are mostly educating people for all the wrong things – teaching them how to be successful on Wall Street, but now how to be successful on Main Street.
- We are increasingly a society of the haves and the have-nots, and many of us are only a layoff or a health crisis away from becoming one of the have-nots, so most people (including the affluent) are driven by anxiety, self-interest, and a mentality of scarcity rather than sufficiency.
- We’re also in many ways willing to let others make the important decisions for us, and willing to let the most bullying and vociferous control the local outcomes. Important issues like the future of the Millington Quarry, the involvement of younger people in politics, the excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides on our lawns, the waste of local tax dollars on sinecures and buyouts – these are for the most part not even recognized, let along widely discussed and debated.
The point is that we need to offer a different conversation. The question that follows is, how do we expand it to the entire community?
I don’t have an answer to this question, but I do think it is one that we need to ask; and we need to think boldly about it. Do we really have to put up with a local newspaper that is dull, conservative, and mostly irrelevant? Do we really have to accept that most of the population are sheep, and the rest are wolves in sheep’s clothing? Do we really have to have a township government that represents less than a third of the people?
Maybe it’s time for people to stand up and say “we won’t take it anymore.” We know we can do better. Change is coming. We can either get on board and seek to collaborate to make a better world for our children’s children – down to the seventh generation – or stick our head in the sand and think that things will keep going on as before. The reality is that they won’t, and before we know it our time will have run out, and what will we point to?