An Open Letter to Democratic Funders: What Does it Take to Build a 30-year Communications Plan?

A solution to fight disinformation, reach into news deserts and help save the country.

Retweet This

Dear Democratic Funders, Build Back Together, The Great American Build, The DNC, the DCCC, Committee Leadership and the Biden communications team,

We need you to hear this before we miss another opportunity to build relationships with the people of America: our country is under attack. Democracy is in peril due to our collective inability to fight disinformation.

A vast, well-funded, interconnected right-wing digital ecosystem is hitting all of us every day, 24 hours a day. This ecosystem responds immediately to current events and is actively shaping and creating an alternative reality for millions.

At a moment when voting rights, climate, equity, wealth redistribution, and the For the People Act all hang in the balance, there is a one-sided advantage that favors purveyors of untruths. The coordinated effort to rip voting rights away from BIPOC voters is winning in the courts. Disinformation is the extension of those legislative strategies. The judicial branch has taken a stand against the people (AZ). The Big Lie continues unabated.

If you think we’re on this playing field, then it’s our collective responsibility and duty to alert you that we are not.

We are publishing an open letter as a coalition of creators, communicators, and persuasion experts with decades of experience in this arena. Our goal is to help protect our hard-won advances on restoring democracy — and to shine a brighter light on the urgent need for “more consistent, long-term messaging and narrative building between election cycles.”*

Read the Guardian Article, by Adam Gabbatt

Who are we?

The Persuasion USA Coalition is a diverse group of communications and advertising professionals raising the alarm in advance of 2022, citing a lack of competitive counter-measures of sufficient scale to protect people of all ideologies from the purposeful and highly effective disinformation attacks across digital media.

What do we want?

Stop waiting until the last minute to persuade Americans about the issues that decide elections. Build campaign infrastructure that is always-on, rather than stood up and taken down between election cycles. Winning trust in communities requires a 365 day-a-year offense against an opposition that has weaponized the internet. The time has come for funders, decision-makers, and even corporations to shift money and resources to long-term programs that bridge echo chambers and bring all of us, black, white, or brown, closer together.

DEMOCRACY IS UNDER ATTACK BY THE “DISINFORMATION OPPOSITION”.

Would never happen in the United States, right?

Let’s be clear; Americans are losing the disinformation war. Many of us were part of herculean efforts that you may have funded in the last election, and we are grateful that our combined efforts helped restore the presidency into steadier hands.

But we also lost ground in key demographics due to micro-targeted disinformation.

If you trust voices like Stacey Abrams or Heather Cox Richardson, as the writers of this letter do, you will conclude that the United States is on a risky path towards authoritarianism.

“We are facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War…. I’m not saying this to alarm you; I’m saying this because you should be alarmed.” — President Joe Biden

Our coalition wants to address the critical role that media and communications are playing in defending democracy.

Mainstream media, traditional advertising, and public relations do not push back on disinformation. For all the fantastic and essential democracy-protecting work of journalists around the globe, they cannot win narrative battles against well-funded propagandist disinformation machines. The good work of the occasional breakthrough progressive influencer is not enough — one successful Facebook page cannot stand up to the entire right-wing digital ecosystem.

In politics the status quo is to concentrate huge advertising budgets on the last few months before the election — an enormous waste of resources that is the digital equivalent of lighting those dollars on fire.

Stable democracies can crumble under the watch of intelligent, vigilant people if they don’t understand the battlefield. Innovations in marketing strategies are called for that look beyond the next election and plan ahead decade by decade towards the country we hope to have 30 years from now.

ALWAYS-ON COMMUNICATIONS IS THE SOLUTION.

We urgently need a new scalable strategy to simultaneously drown out disinformation and forge long-term narratives that benefit us all.

This is an all-hands on deck moment. The disinformation opposition is speaking to people globally 365/24/7. It is reinforced by consistent, always-on messaging and media campaigns that are guided by an overarching and multi-year strategy.

What would it look like to counter this with a 30-year communications plan to build pro-democracy power and representation?

It is the belief of this team that we need to think like commercial marketers and invest in long-term building of brands (aka issues). If you ask a brand marketer how to compete for mind share in a noisy digital landscape they will propose a persuasion war room with a decades-long planning horizon. One that can power an information ecosystem competitive with the sophisticated disinformation opposition.

Winning has only two steps, and this is the playbook of the
disinformation opposition:
1. Control and shape how people think about issues.
2. Win elections based on those issue-based narratives.
- Laura Dawn, Art Not War

GO A LITTLE DEEPER

The specialists supporting this letter have been on the front lines of the information wars in both private and public sectors for decades.

We see critical holes in the strategies currently being employed.

1. Narrow focus on solutions. Similar to venture capitalists in business, the disinformation opposition funds many approaches and connects them all through distribution and shared messaging. (Example, where is the progressive version of PragerU?)
2. Inefficient funding infrastructure. Funding for content creation and distribution is just not realistic, the resulting media and marketing efforts to combat disinformation are ineffective. Too little, too late every election season wastes money and does not deliver consistently persuasive creative.
3. Top down approach that sidelines community leaders. Lack of authentic voices speaking directly to their own communities. Study after study has shown that messaging must be personalized to each community.
4. Short term, election strategy thinking. The disinformation opposition knows that winning elections is the cherry on top of a long term narrative strategy. Once you’ve shaped what someone thinks about a topic like immigration, the candidate running for office can slide into that platform of beliefs you’ve instilled. Long term narrative building will beat last minute election spending every time. If you’re pumping money into winning elections in the last six months instead of a multi-year budget of long term narrative vision, then we’d like to convince you that your money is being unwisely spent.

WHAT DO WE URGENTLY NEED TO BUILD?

We are better at organizing than we are at marketing. Indivisible’s Truth Brigade is a valiant effort. Let’s acknowledge the exemplary always-on communications with diverse audiences by Stacey Abrams in Georgia, Corazon Latino , Mi Familia Vota in Arizona, and other bold efforts to break into news deserts in rural America. There are many siloed, hard-working, under-funded efforts.

These amazing efforts are simply not enough. What more can be done? We are asking to toss out the status quo of cyclical funding and build new infrastructure that funds communications over much longer horizons.

Our Pitch: build the “30-year Plan for Communications to Protect Democracy”.

GO LONG OR GO HOME. WE CAN PULL BACK HEARTS AND MINDS OF BLACK, WHITE AND BROWN COMMUNITIES IF WE ARE ALWAYS-ON; TELLING STORIES PEOPLE NEED TO HEAR WITH A DECADES-LONG PERSPECTIVE.

It begins with a very simple step. Launch consistent, sustained, and well-funded communications programs immediately, at least a year before the next election, with an eye towards long-term narrative building. This will push back on the disinformation opposition by talking through media to people at the community level, building trust in culturally-relevant formats where politics are often “at the dining table”; doing this 365/24/7, beyond the election cycles.

CALL TO ACTION

There is a playbook for this, established by commercial brands and perfected by the ever-present disinformation opposition.

Innovations are called for that bring all the communications silos together under one roof: journalism, advertising, influencer marketing, and community organizing. Imagine what is possible with the advent of more consistent, long-term messaging and media campaigns between election cycles.

ELEMENTS OF A 30-YEAR PLAN

1. Cohesive multi-platform messaging. Put a team of experts together to issue messaging points in collaboration with communities on the ground. Don’t overthink how regular people talk to each other, and don’t try to make communities conform to any specific way of talking about issues.
2. Fund more high quality content. We cannot move the dial on issues if we only rely on crowdsourced content of random quality. There are plenty of seasoned, tested content creators living in the diverse communities under attack and they are all under funded. The opposition has PragerU ($10 million yearly budget), Tucker Carlson’s multiple platforms, Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens and many more all aligning their messages to multiple audiences. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on this high quality content by the disinformation opposition.
3. Invest in innovation. Communications is a vaccine, it requires the kind of scale that micro-targeted advertising can deliver. Reach people in news deserts with innovations like Boosted News and Targeted Editorial. Embed media literacy tactics into advertising. Build civic engagement in high value audiences. “Pre-bunking” is a proven inoculation strategy against disinformation that is not being leveraged.
4. Create a central funding organization whose purpose is to champion multi-year persuasion programs: This call to arms is a challenge to invest time and resources in talking to voters and non-voters even in the off-cycles. That means funding multi-year campaigns, that means working with existing incubators, that means media and agencies who stand for truth coming together in a collective effort.
5. Put community leaders in charge: The disinformation opposition wins votes by respecting audiences and giving community leaders a seat at the table. The spending and strategy decisions on communications programs must come from within the cultures we want to persuade.
6. Long term, brand strategy thinking: We must own narratives on issues that candidates can plug into. We must understand that building an “Issue” is the same as building a “Brand”. Commercial advertisers will tell you, it takes a long time to build brand loyalty.

WE GOT THIS

We know great work is being done, we know most of you who are doing it.

We also know that the lack of consistent, long-term messaging and media campaigns between election cycles continues to be one of the most critical gaps in communications capabilities — a gap that contributed to the razor thin outcome in 2020, a gap that is giving bad actors in the disinformation opposition a competitive edge as 2022 approaches, and a gap that may be one of the primary reasons why the great United States slides towards autocracy in 2024.

TAKE ACTION: We will be elevating this conversation in the weeks to come and working with many of you towards the launch of consistent, sustained and always-on communications programs.

Let’s come together and get it right this time. Or we are abandoning millions of the hearts and minds of this nation to weaponized disinformation.

Signed,

— Laura Dawn (ArtNotWar, founding Creative Director of MoveOn.org), Carl Cameron (Former Chief Political Correspondent, Fox News), Stacy Whittle (CEO, Front Page Live),Felipe Benitez (Corazón Latino),Vince Murphy (Tall Glass Media, formerly Acronym), David Fenton (Fenton Communications), Marvin Randolph (President, ONYX Communications and President, Southern Elections Fund), John Sellers (The Other 98%), JoAnn Loulan (Progressive Women Silicon Valley), Charles Lenchner (Organizing 2.0), Lora O’Connor (Women’s Foundation California), Dan Murphy (VNCS), Ben Monterroso (Former executive director Mi Familia Vota), Suzanne Turner (Turner4D), Wojtek Wacowski (Being Liberal), Garth Holsinger (Enterprise Alpha, former Klout), (John Eaton, (COO, Front Page Live), John Corrigan(TessioLabs).

Contact: Stacy@frontpagelive.com