Avoid launching your next big idea. At all costs.

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Avoid launching your next big idea. At all costs.

After months of devising a fresh idea, and months more planning and researching, it’s tempting to reward yourself with The Big Launch. Two things will happen. First of all, you’ll realise that the Big Launch was really for you, not your community. Second of all, you’ll realise that even if your launch goes well, that cake is cut, that fizz is popped, consumed and enjoyed… people still won’t adopt your ideas on Monday morning.

Here’s the secret of creating a powerful movement of change: you don’t need to convince everyone at the start. You just need a small group of people to test things out.

In 2011, when I was young, we designed and directed the online work for an election campaign in Scotland. The client was the SNP. They were in Government at that point, but at risk of losing it within 100 days. When we were hired, the party was 15% behind the Labour Party, the competition. The focus was simple: get 15% ahead of them instead, meaning the Government would retain power. Any more than that, and we’d get a majority. But technically, a majority was impossible in the proportional representation system adopted for that very reason.

We got 18%.

How did we do that? In 100 days?

Our firm gained some significant plaudits for what we helped the party achieve. The majority made it possible to create the 2014 referendum on independence for Scotland. (Note that they didn’t hire us back for that. I wonder often if the result might have been different if they had).

But the reason for the buy-in had little to do with technical magic or talent. It all came down to relentlessly positive and myopic communication of one key idea for each group who needed to hear it.

We worked out who was already going to vote for us. They got one set of messages to encourage them to keep talking positively about what the SNP had done for them so far.

We had one group who definitely wasn’t, ever, going to vote for the party. We didn’t expend too much time trying to move that mass.

And then there was the small number in the middle who had no idea yet how they wanted to vote. They were the only people who really needed communication, to understand what was in it for them, for their community and their family.

When you know who you’re talking to, their needs and desires, it suddenly becomes quite simple to communicate clearly with them.

Politicians love to launch a manifesto but there’s a terrible truth in these documents — no-one reads them. They’re roughly 41000 words long, about 50 pages of tight text, written for a general audience of journalists. Not even they read it entirely, I’m sure.

So we made a crucial decision. We focussed the manifesto down from 90 pages to one, designed for each of these groups who were sitting on the fence.

These mini manifestos were then launched every day in the last 20 days of the campaign, along with some targeted Facebook advertising that would catch some of the people we wanted to hear our message.

And it worked.

Professor Erica Chenoweth’s analysis of over 300 political revolutions in the past century finds that it only takes 3.5% of the population in a society actively participating to succeed, and many campaigns have prevailed with less.

Recent research by sociologist Damon Centola at the University of Pennsylvania suggests that the tipping point for change is getting 25% of people in an organization on board.

Who are the 25% of people in your community who don’t know what they want, really, from their education, their child’s education, or their classroom?

Focus on them. Listen to them. Ask them what they need to do 1% better tomorrow.

Then gather your results. And write the manifesto that will deliver everything they need.

Share it. Publish it.

You’ll find that most people in your community want the same. They were just too quiet to say, or too brazenly supporting the way things have always been to realise there might be another way.