3.2 Develop talking points for your campaign
The third step of the narrative change campaign planning process – Prepare for responses & engagement - consists of three elements that give you the chance to test the campaign elements you prepared in the previous step and also guide you through preparing the team for the campaign roll out in the next. On this page, we focus on the second element – Develop talking points.
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Test & adapt campaign elements
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Develop talking points
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Prepare the team
Once the testing and resulting adaptations have been completed, it is now time to put together a short summary of the key insights from the campaign to guide spokespeople and campaigners, often referred to as a set of talking points.
Two main tasks should be completed by your campaign team in this element, detailed in the bullets below.
Develop a short set of talking points to guide your campaign team.
A talking points document is developed and used by campaigners to ensure coherence and consistency of message(s) by everyone, often referred to as keeping everyone ‘on message’. This takes on extra importance if your campaign is being run by a broader coalition and/or if some messengers were not involved in the campaign development process. Based on an analysis of multiple real examples of talking points for campaign preparation, we offer the following description and guidance for developing your talking points.
Talking points are short summary documents of between one to three pages which aim to guide spokespersons in their preparation for campaigning by covering the key messages and key frames that the campaign should be built on.
Talking points for narrative change campaigns commonly have the following subsections:
- The main campaign messages – two to five sentences outlining the main concepts and ideas you want to get across;
- Story to illustrate - a short summary of the story(ies) you are using to illustrate the points made in the messages;
- Q & A section - covers the questions you expect to get asked and a short guide to answering them, centred around what to say and what to avoid. The questions are dependent on the nature of the campaign, but can include:
- The basics of the campaign – who is involved, when activities are happening, why you are doing this now, how it started/where the idea came from, and what you want to achieve/change through the campaign.
- Challenges to your frames - why you are approaching the issue in this way, the implications of your approach and what you think of others’ positions.
- Policy questions – If there is a direct ask inbuilt in your campaign, you need to be able to talk about what the problem is, its impact and your proposed solutions.
- Next steps/action – what comes next if you are successful or if the campaign fails.
The answers need to clearly guide spokespeople on how to frame responses, what language to use, what illustrations or stories to use and also what to avoid. It can be particularly useful to really work on the most challenging and difficult questions you anticipate that campaigners will face and to have authentic answers ready that are convincing. We provide more guidance on predicting and preparing responses to challenges in step 4 of the campaign development process.
As the talking points document is a summary in two to three pages, most of the points are in note form, in one sentence or short paragraphs that provide a reminder of the broader campaign thinking. Not surprisingly, such documents normally contain lots of bullet points. You can see two examples in the footnote1
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Get everyone on the same page to follow and understand the talking points.
As talking points are summaries or notes on many decisions made in the campaign planning process, it is not normally enough to hand them to campaigners and think your job is done; a significant preparation process would need to go hand in hand with the talking points to get the team ready for the campaign work. Those who have not been in the campaign development team will have many questions and clarifications to understand what is behind the answers and the overall strategy. You may also have to develop different versions of talking points for different roles, e.g. for those doing media interviews versus those meeting and campaigning directly to the middle.
Step 3.2 Develop talking points
- Who in the team needs a set of talking points?
- Will one set be enough or will you have to prepare specific sets for different spokespeople or campaigners?
- What are the core campaign messages?
- What are the stories you want campaigners to tell?
- What key questions will campaigners be asked? What should they answer and what should be avoided?
- How will you prepare spokespeople and campaigners to become very familiar with the talking points and stay on message?