Get Out of Fact Land and into Story-Sharing Land – Montana Burgess advises activists
By Ish Theilheimer, a writer and community activist in Golden Lake, ON.
Sierra Club Canada launched a new series of All Hands on Deck webinars specifically on how to win hearts and minds on the toughest climate issues through conversations.
The first session, on April 25, featured Montana Burgess, of Castlegar, BC. She is Executive Director of Neighbours United, a grassroots organization that uses the Deep Canvassing method to win people over on the most pressing environmental issues. In doing so, Neighbours United has won political victories in several Canadian jurisdictions.
Burgess had unique advice and experiences to share. “Get out of fact land, and get into story-sharing land,” she told the 60 activists who took part.
Fittingly, she began with the story of her own personal source of motivation – her six-year old daughter who suffers from severe asthma due to the annual summer wildfires that are now routine, due to climate change, in the British Columbia interior. Burgess’ concern and worry as a mother motivates her, she told the audience, in her work.
“It’s so unfair that in my childhood I got to enjoy summers and have fun. And for six weeks of the year, I’m too scared to let her go outside. This is, this is my stake in this. Some days this, this fight feels too hard. It feels impossible. It feels overwhelming, but I’m like, what other choice do I have? She deserves to breathe, and your kids deserve to breathe. So that’s, that’s why I’m in this.”
Deep canvassing, she said, was born out of the 2008 defeat of a ballot measure to legalize same sex marriage in California. LGBT advocates were devastated and looked for answers.
“So what they did, Burgess said, “Is they started going out to the doors of voters that they believed had voted against them and asking curious questions, trying to genuinely understand why they were voting against same-sex marriage… And they were really trying to understand how can we be honest about who we are as queer people? How can we decrease homophobia and persuade folks to support these policies? This was the birth of deep canvassing.” The technique was first used successfully in a campaign in the Minnesota 2012 ballot measure for same sex marriage. In 2015, marriage equality became federal law in the US after a Supreme Court decision.
Rooted in transformation on both sides
“It’s rooted,” she said, “In transformation of both the person you’re talking to, the voter
and the person having the conversation, the canvasser. And by sharing stories and hearing each other and being genuinely curious, we transform our viewpoints to actually find our common ground.”
Listening curiously and nonjudgmentally, she said, “enables understanding of what’s going on for them in their emotional core.”
The outcome, she said, of when we do this methodically in this method of deep canvassing, “Is that people change their mind and this change lasts.” Ultimately, the method proved effective in California for same-sex marriage advocates the next time a ballot measure was attempted.
Studies showed, she said, that deep canvassing has the largest persuasive impact of any tactic. “It can withstand later fear messaging.”
Deep canvassing, she explained, begins with a 20 minute conversation on someone’s doorstep or on the phone. At the beginning, people are asked to rate themselves as to where they stand on an issue on a zero to 10 scale. After the conversation, they’re asked the same question, and a remarkable number, she said, move.
Canvassers are trained rigorously with a script, she said, but “The most important skill canvassers are trained on is to be able to find that curiosity and dig to find the lived experience of the person they’re talking to, to get them grounded in their feelings and out of their head and out of fact land.
Vulnerable story exchange
“In a traditional canvass, the canvassers are delivering a message. And in deep the main part of it is really this vulnerable story exchange between the canvasser and the person at their door.”
In Canada, she said, “We have this giant challenge when it comes to climate change,” with about 45% of the public “passively concerned… They know climate change is happening, but they’re busy, they’re going to school, they’re trying to make a buck, they’re getting their kids here and there, and they’re just not engaged. And we haven’t done a great job as environmentalists in trying to engage them.”
After the Paris Agreement in 2015, Neighbours United launched a campaign in the West Kootenays to move local governments to one hundred percent renewable energy. They hit a real challenge in Trail, BC, a resource extraction community that has a smelter right in the middle of town.
In the ’80s, the town became notorious for lead levels and many sick and dying children. “So it’s a town that is a frontline community. That is the classic jobs versus environment and they butt heads.”
Locals were skeptical, “So we realized we actually had to persuade people. We had to help them resolve their conflict and help them come out the other side realizing why this policy is what they should support. So we started deep canvassing and we did a huge amount of trial and error on the script, which is the first step. And we ended up with a 40% persuasion rate.”
She said they learned they needed a script “that works as a roadmap,” a training program for canvassers, and “a team and a culture that supported and healed our canvassers to be able to come back and keep having these hard conversations.”
In Trail, her canvassers learned that local people “didn’t trust governments, didn’t trust environmentalists, and they didn’t think solutions were possible… They had this identity rooted in the extraction industry.”
Canvassers developed a technique around what they call the “Cone of Curiosity,” in which “You hear the hint of someone’s story, you really listen and then you try to first get them to tell you a specific time when that thing happened.” Helping people summon up their feelings about, for instance, a forest fire they were close to, “moves people to their vulnerable core and they are ready to shift with you.”
They learned that people in Trail were aware of and proud of environmental progress with curbing lead pollution. “And then the kind of key part of the script is the story share. We learned that we need to get people to share their lived experience with climate impacts.”
The canvassers found they could move people from simply feeling overwhelmed by climate change to thinking about its personal effect. “What’s on your mind now that you’ve told me about your friend Suzanne and her respiratory illness? And let them talk through the two sides of the issue and what’s holding them back.”
Repeatedly, at the end of these kinds of contacts, the voters would report that they had changed on the one-to-ten scale from unsupportive to supportive. “And then for us, we made a campaign ask,” she said. “So we asked them to sign our petition, and then we would follow up with them later to help mobilize them to take further actions.”
The outcome was success. They canvassed 800 residents of this town of 8,000 and achieved a 40 percent conversion rate. Two years ago, residents of the single-industry mining town of Trail voted overwhelmingly for 100% renewable energy.
“What we learned in our Trail pilot, specifically in this heavy industry single company town archetype, was we had to share our personal climate stake story. We had to share the pollution success story of how they’ve already overcome a pollution problem in their community. And then they had to share their personal climate stake story.”
Neighbours United is now applying what it learned to projects in British Columbia, Alberta, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Ohio.
In Coquitlam, BC, a suburb of Vancouver, they are deep canvassing to build support for a building standard for new buildings to be zero carbon with no new gas hookups. “Here, the core belief is all electric buildings are not a better alternative to using gas, and we’re trying to shift them to all electric buildings. And we’ve learned kind of three core things.
The first, in a suburban community, it’s quite different than a small town like Trail, where they don’t have a clear cut identity that’s shared and they don’t have this pollution success story that the community’s familiar with. So the common struggle that we’ve identified here is actually their struggle to adjust to the changing extreme weather. And in this deep canvass, again, we use a climate stake story. We help people get into their lived experience of how the smoke and the heat, how they’re affecting folks, how they’re affecting everyday people. The third piece is we learned, especially in this deep canvass, there’s a lot of misinformation. And here we’ve learned that when we get people in that lived experience with story sharing, we can cut through, that we have become the trusted messenger and we can then offer a brief counterpoint if that is still a concern on their mind and they’re willing to hear it and wrestle with it on their own.”
They are running campaigns in central British Columbia in support of legislation that would make ecosystem health the top priority for forestry management, and they’ve had a persuasion rate of 35.6%. “The core belief shift we’re trying to make is taking people from thinking that prioritizing ecosystem health will be harmful to forestry workers, to thinking that prioritizing ecosystem health will benefit the person.”
The canvassers acknowledge the benefits the province gets from forestry but also, “Help people wrestle with how their logging companies are actually letting them down. … This isn’t about them. This is about the companies making changes. And they get really frustrated when they realize how unfair it is.”
Neighbours United has a partnership in Alberta with the Alberta Talks Project, a project of Alberta Environmental Network, which did deep canvassing in the lead-up to the Alberta election last year, canvassing around ending tax breaks to oil and gas companies.
They have also worked against the renewable energy ban the provincial government has adopted.
Even working in a suburban area they were able to get a 38% persuasion rate. “Here, the core belief people held was that tax breaks to oil and gas companies are necessary,” she said.
“And we wanted to divorce them from that idea and help them understand that tax breaks to oil and gas companies unfairly benefit wealthy CEOs over Albertans. And again, we learned some really important things here. We learned that we had to meet Albertans where they’re at and acknowledge that the oil and gas industry has benefited Albertans over 70 years. And it’s okay that they’re proud of that.” Canvassers, though, successfully were able to bring out concerns about times getting harder, health care and education deteriorating, the rising cost of living, “and how it’s not a good deal anymore for Albertans, then we were able to bring in this contrast to showcase how much the CEOs of the big oil and gas companies were making. They had no idea that the companies were profiting so vastly while laying off workers and that the government was subsidizing this.”
Meet people where they are
“After meeting them where they were and acknowledging it was okay that they had benefited from oil and gas, people were able,38% of the time, to move with us and realize that they actually did not want to see oil and gas any longer subsidized and did not want those tax breaks in Alberta.”
Burgess said it isn’t necessary to run a complete deep canvassing program to use the principles of deep canvassing. It’s about hearing the core beliefs people hold that are different from your own, “Meet them where they’re at and help them shift.”
You can use it in conversations with your neighbors, with key stakeholders in your community, with whoever you think you need to find new common ground.
“We use our learnings in our communications work and we always make sure the way we do that is we apply the formula of telling someone’s personal backstory, acknowledging their identity and their community and family connection to really ground the reader or the person we’re communicating with.”
Neighbours United believes in communications that is “solutions-focused,” because a sense of hope that change is possible is an important element, for them, in persuasion. People need to feel, “Hopeful, at the end, that it’s not too late and we still can do things. So showing solutions that communities are taking to solve a problem, or try to, has been a key part of our communications.”
She particularly relished the response of people who are, “Not the classic environmentalists. It’s that movable middle that is responding to this type of content.” Sometimes, she says, their approach has put off traditional allies but she feels it is critical to broaden the movement.
Burgess says campaigns need to be people-centered. “So don’t talk about the trees, talk about you or your loved one and how the thing is impacting you. Name your feelings. It’s so hard for us to do, to name our feelings and it takes practice.”
Her most important piece of advice to campaigners is, “I want to challenge us to get out of fact land. More data and info does not win the arguments. It just reinforces what we already believe. So if we want to change someone’s mind, we need to get into story sharing-land or feelings land. We need to meet people where they’re at and acknowledge their identities… Name our feelings, name what we agree on so we can meet somewhere.”
She advised that deep canvassing is not something to be take lightly. It requires months of preparation and lots of people power. “If you want to use deep canvassing, great, but be really clear on what is the policy goal, what am I trying to change?” In some cases, simply utilizing the principles without a full campaign may be what’s needed.