The fallacy of the wake-up call

Photo by Wecker.

I’m old enough as a nonprofit communications practitioner to remember a time when the “wake-up call” was a vital piece of the messaging toolbox for everyone. Anytime something remotely bad happened, we blasted out emails to the full list with the subject: “This is a wake-up call!”

Scary new climate report from the United Nations? Wake-up call! Proposed amendment to the Endangered Species Act? Wake-up call! Cuts to funding for land protection? Wake-up call! And the quotes in our press releases, you better believe that the first one had to start with, “This is a wake-up call to anyone who cares about [insert important issue here]...”

While I still see some nonprofits clinging to the past, I am here to declare the “wake-up call” officially dead. In retrospect, it was a poor concept to begin with, and we should have learned this when, despite our thousands of emails and press releases, very few people actually woke up. After all, climate change is still a problem. Bad actors continue to wreak havoc on the environment. And, of course, we re-elected Donald Trump. So why didn’t our “wake-up calls” have the desired effect? Because we were clinging to a communications idea that defied how our audiences experience and react to the world around them.

The truth is that most people, when they receive an email that tells them that something should be a wake-up call, do absolutely nothing. That’s because this message is in competition with the 5,000 to 6,000 other messages they receive every day from advertisers, family, friends, politicians, news outlets, social media, and everything else. If they notice the “wake-up call” at all, they’ll still file it away to respond to something more immediately important in their life, such as their family or their job. If they keep hearing that it’s a big deal, or if more people in their network validate it, then perhaps they’ll do something. Probably not, though.

Even worse, if people like me continue to bombard them with “wake-up calls” and the sky continues not to fall day after day, well, then we can pretty much assume that every one of our urgent messages are going to get ignored.

[I don’t want to get into the concept of “woke” here, as that term has been totally distorted beyond belief. But I’ll grant that perhaps there’s some connection between “wake-up call” messaging and the idea of being woke.]

The bottom line is that we’re not going to jolt people into awareness about issues. The bombardment of bad news has become so steady that people are incapable of shock anymore. What is horribly unimaginable today will be overshadowed tomorrow. That’s the strategy of our opposition, and they know that it dulls our capacity for outrage and undermines our sense of hope.

Of course, the big problem here for communicators is that very bad things are happening and something has to be done. The current administration is tearing down environmental protections, dismantling the social safety net, attacking underrepresented communities, and rolling back essential rights, among other awful things. And they’re doing it at such a pace that it is demoralizing our audiences, making them think that there just isn’t any way to stop the ongoing disaster.

So if the panicked “wake-up call” brand of advocacy communications isn’t the answer, what is? I wish I had a simple answer, but my instinct tells me that we in the nonprofit world have to stop being lazy. The “wake-up call” and other communications like it are far too facile to be effective today.

We can’t get people to care about an issue with just a message out of the blue. It needs to be an ongoing communication, and it can’t just be full of alarming rhetoric. We can’t try to match the frenetic pace and messaging of the other side. That’s the mistake. Instead, we need to build a narrative, tell stories. Help your audience see themselves as part of the issue. Connect with them on a sustained emotional level. If they come to trust us, then we will be able to build the empathy within them that will eventually spur them to action.

And then, when we ask them to do something, the request must be clear, and real, not something that just looks like shameless data gathering. Help people take meaningful actions that make a difference. Then we’ll hopefully make some progress.