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In breve

Use the perception box to understand your audiences better, so you can design effective campaign messages to reach them.

You'll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.

— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Origini

Adapted from The Path of Most Resistance. The perception box is a social movement modification of a classic electoral campaign tool: the Tully message box (named after political strategist Paul Tully). While a message box for an election campaign will focus only on defining the candidate and the candidate’s opponents on the ballot, a perception box turns the focus to your movement’s target audiences, wherever they are along a spectrum of support.

The perception box is a useful exercise for understanding how to craft messages to reach your target audiences and move them along the spectrum of allies.

The box has four quadrants. The first quadrant, “Us on Us,” lists the most important things you believe about yourselves and your campaign: who you are, what you want, and why. The second quadrant, “Us on Them,” lists your perception of the given target audiences.

You’ll have to imagine what others are feeling and use any information you have at hand about them.

The third quadrant, “Them on Us”, lists perceptions that particular target audiences have about you and your campaign, including misconceptions. When filling in this quadrant for neutrals or passive or active opponents, you should list all the reservations they have about you. When filling it in for passive allies, you should list their inhibitions and reasons for lack of their active involvement in the campaign.

In the fourth and final quadrant, “Them on Them,” you’ll list perceptions the target audience holds about themselves — in particular, the reasons why they occupy their particular segment on the spectrum. For neutrals, you want to know why they are neutral on the issue, whether or not they are aware of the issue, whether or not they are apathetic, and so on. For opponents, both active and passive, you must figure out why they hold the beliefs they do, and the reason for their stance on the issue in question. For passive allies, you’ll want to figure out why they remain inactive despite the fact that they have the same position on the issue as you do.

To simplify the analysis for use in a workshop or strategic planning session, you’ll have to imagine what others are feeling based on what you know about them. To develop a more robust analysis, you could use questionnaires, polling, or focus groups with the segments of the population you are analyzing to get feedback directly from them in their own words.

Once all four quadrants have been completed, you can use the insights you’ve gleaned about how your target audiences understand the issue to develop key campaign messages capable of changing behaviours — moving your target one step towards your side on the spectrum of allies.

The perception box can be particularly useful in crafting a campaign message if you remember that your message for a particular audience should consist of two parts:

The first part of the message states the campaign issue through the target’s “Them on Them” perception lens, avoiding and even countering your misconceptions about the target listed in the “Us on Them” quadrant.
The second part contains your proposition or “ask” to the target audience. Here you should seek to use your “Us on Us” message and counter their “Them on Us” misconceptions.

For example, if the campaign issue is police brutality and the target audience is police officers, the first part of your message could describe the problem not as a violation of your human rights, but as a misuse of the police, which officers joined to fight crime rather than to quell democratic dissent and beat innocent people.

For the second part of the message in this example, you would seek to persuade the officers to refrain from using force against activists. This could be done by connecting the fact that you are peaceful protesters and that their desire is to maintain peace and stability.

Come usare

Note: In order to use this tool, you will need a completed Spectrum of Allies (see: METHODOLOGY: Spectrum of allies) or specific stakeholder list for your campaign or issue.

1. Introduce the tool

Introduce the perception box to your workshop participants as a tool for making the perceptions of your campaign stakeholders explicit. We will need to understand these perceptions if we want to craft an adequate message that will resonate with each of these groups. Explain that we need to know not only what each stakeholder thinks about you and your campaign, but also what they think about themselves. At the same time, you must also understand what you think about yourselves and your current perception of each stakeholder.

2. Divide participants into five groups

Give each participant a number, one through five, and then assign each group to a different pie slice of the spectrum of allies—active allies, passive allies, and so on.

3. Have each group complete the perception box

Ask each group to fill out a perception box for their assigned segment from the spectrum of allies chart, either using handouts you’ve provided or on large sheets of paper.

4. Report back from small groups

Now discuss perception boxes for each segment of the spectrum. Have each group report back, in this order: active allies, passive allies, active opponents, passive opponents, and finally, neutral.

After the first two groups have presented, ask participants if they have any thoughts or observations. Ask: what are the main differences between the perceptions of active and passive allies? What do they have in common, apart from sharing the same position on the campaign issue? How could you turn passive allies into active allies?

After the next two groups have presented, ask participants for comments and questions. Ask: what are the main differences between active and passive opponents? What do they have in common, apart from sharing the same position on the campaign issue? How could you turn active opponents into passive opponents?

After the neutral group presents, ask participants for their thoughts. Ask what the main differences between passive allies and neutrals are, and also what they have in common. Ask the same about passive opponents and neutrals. Ask how you could turn neutrals into passive allies and passive opponents into neutrals.

5. Conclude the exercise

Show the spectrum of allies one last time, and remind the group that your campaign’s goal is to move each group one position to the left. Ask for any learnings or AHA! moments from using the perception box to come up with the right message for each group.

You might remind participants that to be effective, the message must be built on your intended audience’s perceptions about themselves and work to bridge these perceptions with your perception of yourselves and your campaign, countering misconceptions they have about you and that you have about them.

Click here to download the instruction sheet