On 4 June, some 50-odd civil society communicators and experts on public attitudes, narrative change and strategic comms came together to share ideas, test strategies and strengthen networks.
The programme included a presentation by Steve Ballinger, director of comms at British Future, on the importance of proactive, positive narratives that build a shared and inclusive sense of identity.
His session began with a reminder of Comms 101 – clarity about objectives and audience. “Yes, this is basic. But I still think some campaigns don’t always focus enough on what their core objective is, usually in terms of trying to change behaviours or shift attitudes, and what audience they need to reach and persuade in order to achieve that,” he said.
British Future uses a simplified way to talk about public attitudes – segmenting people into the roughly 20% who are liberal and pro-immigration and diversity, the 20% who are sceptics and feel much more anxious and negative about these issues, and a group called the Balancers – the majority of the public who see both pressures and gains from immigration and diversity.
“Our aim is to reach and persuade the Balancers – the toughest of whom may not be actively prejudiced but may provide the oxygen of latent support to those who are,” said Steve.
“If we’re looking to counter harmful narratives and to shift the attitudes underpinning them, it’s of limited use targeting comms on under-30s graduates who vote for the Green Party. While we want to keep our core support onside, the audience we want to reach is predominantly older, whiter, more likely to be male and more likely to be cheering for Nigel Farage or Kemi Badenoch than Keir Starmer or Ed Davey.”
It was with this older, whiter audience in mind that British Future developed a campaign that aimed to build common ground between people from different backgrounds. It tapped into the British public’s love of history and the way in which World War Two is foundational in Britain’s national identity – particularly among this target demographic.
“What a lot of people in the UK don’t realise is just how diverse the armies that fought in the World Wars really were. Awareness of Indian soldiers’ role in the World Wars has increased in recent years to nearly six in 10 people. But far fewer know the story of African or Caribbean service, or that the Allied armies included Muslim soldiers too,” said Steve.
British Future found that while there is low public knowledge that Commonwealth soldiers fought in the World Wars, there is significant public support for doing more to raise awareness of a history that is shared across people from different ethnic and faith backgrounds. Crucially, narratives of shared World War Two contribution can help build a shared sense of identity in modern Britain – building common ground between people from different backgrounds.
A schools project that invited local families, mostly from a South Asian and Muslim background, to share their stories of ancestors who served in the World Wars helped demonstrate just how effective this approach can be. Not only did it help connect the students and local communities to Britain in a way they hadn’t before, but the subsequent media coverage helped change attitudes in wider audiences too.
A video from the project was used to run split-sample polling on a nationally-representative sample of 2,189 British adults. Half watched the video, half did not – then all respondents were asked a series of questions about diversity and integration, with specific questions to test attitudes towards British Muslims.
Watching the video significantly increased support for positive statements about diversity and reduced support for negative statements about British Muslims. What’s more, that effect was particularly strong among those who held less positive views about diversity: the audience that British Future was most interested in targeting.
“Some of the discussions on social media were instructive too,” said Steve. “The videos were overwhelmingly positively received. I’m not going to pretend that we didn’t encounter any prejudiced responses. What was interesting, though, was that there was an element of self-policing among those who were watching the videos. If someone posted something negative, they were shot down by other people in the comments. And these weren’t particularly liberal respondents. ‘They served this country and we should be proud to remember them, wherever they came from’ was the overwhelming, and often very emotionally expressed, response.”
However, for all its positive impacts, Steve reminded us that talking about history, and the history of the World Wars, isn’t for everyone and it isn’t always going to be effective.
“This approach was effective because it reaches the audience we wanted to target. It connects with them in a frame that is particularly emotionally resonant for them – pride in Britain’s history – and it uses that to gently encourage them to think differently about their fellow citizens and the society we share. Other campaigns seeking a different outcome, or targeting a different audience, would need a different approach,” he said.
“We didn’t lecture people; we didn’t suggest that they were prejudiced for not knowing, or celebrating, these stories before. We just highlighted that this is part of our history that deserves commemoration as much as any other. And we also showed that people from a range of diverse backgrounds were proud of this history too.”
Steve’s presentation showed that by clearly identifying an objective and an audience, and aligning your approach to them, you can have a positive emotional effect on them – even on potentially highly charged issues such as national identity.
