Communications and Marketing for Systems Entrepreneurship

Engaging the general public and communicating with constituencies, supporters, members of the collective, and among the administrative team is an indispensable part of the process of changing systems for the better. So much so because systems change more than anything else depends on getting people to believe in the possibility of a new reality that does not exist yet — or quickly accepting and embracing that new reality.

Catching the attention of people and keeping it is more challenging today. We live in an era of electronic communications, social media interaction, information overload coupled with an ever-shrinking attention span.  Collectives compete with other movements and organizations in getting people to pay attention to their messages and content and getting them to move from “liking” something to joining and taking action.

Currently, there is a trend, unfortunate, in our opinion, that has resulted from social initiatives adopting market and communication practices designed for the business sector without proper adaptation.  Hence, social movements have embraced the recognition or appreciation of a brand as the equivalent of impact. There is a fixation in parts of the social sector today with brand management, the number of visitors to a website and social media likes and shares, and less with communicating to achieve impact. We are not discarding the fact that numbers matter for a coalition and a movement, especially when they rely heavily on public mobilizations or depend on small donations, but there is much more to communications and marketing, directly related to their role to achieving impact.

Having people associating a movement or a collective with a brand is not as important as having a collective being associating with goals and values. After all, we want people affected by a problem to have more affinity with the change that is pursued, and not with the name that the collective has used to brand itself with or the name of a given leader or leaders. Sometimes brand and goals are the same, but even when a brand describes the issue, it might not describe or convey the change pursued. That is the case of #BlackLivesMatter. The hashtag that launched the movement is better known than the goals of the organization or its impact. Something a bit different has happened with the #MeToo Movement, which somehow intuitively has coalesced people around some unwritten goals that look to expose sexual abusers and have them tried both by public opinion and by the legal system and make sexual harassment and sexual assault unacceptable in any society.

Collectives, as the movements mentioned above, rely on communications and marketing to advance their social change agendas, and the message most of the time is not easy to communicate, given the complexity of their work. Even more challenging is to enlist action.

Determining the right audience is important. There is a tendency to believe that delivering the message to more people will automatically increase the impact. Maybe, the right approach would be to ask who needs to understand the problem better or act to change a given system.

There is a tendency today to have communications and marketing acting as a “program in itself,” and often, it does wield the expected results. Integration and proper coordination is a key factor for success. Systems-change depends on creating the conditions for an idea, value, or standard to be accepted by enough people in society to become the new normal. It generally implies transforming cultural and social institutions. Such transformation can happen formally (policy change, new regulations) or informally (people embrace a new way to understand reality or act).

Effective marketing and communications for systems change are greatly dependent on the capacity of a collective to:

• Create effective narratives to enable funders, stakeholders, and the public, in general, to understand and support the systems change work, understood not as a project, but as a process.
• Use storytelling as a tool to engage society as a whole.
• Exercise influence by having their ideas, models, or principles become a new standard for similar work.