Changing Hearts & Minds
“Neither revolution nor reformation can ultimately change a society, rather you must tell a more powerful tale, one so persuasive that it sweeps away the old myths and becomes the preferred story”.
Ivan Illich,
from Storytelling of Myth-making
The world is a place of conflicting and converging interests.
People around the earth come together with their allies and fight their opponents over their vision of what makes a better future.
The alliances and the fights can be for land or other resources like water and energy sources.
They can also be for ideas and values. And nowhere is this battle more visible than on the front of sexuality and gender.
So it’s a culture war that is being waged. And the future belongs to the ones that will win it
Campaigning is
the art of waging
these battles.
[dt-space height=”60″]This course here is the first of a series of courses that we will develop over time.
[dt-space height=”30″]These courses are part of a wider resource center to help activists fight the battles.
This first course here is to set the basic principles of CAMPAIGNS COMMUNICATION: How can you influence the attitude of people so that they move closer towards your own world vision? In other words, how can you change hearts and minds?
What this course is about
[dt-space height=”30″]The art of changing people’s hearts and minds is often left to “gut feeling”, emotions and “instinct”, when it actually requires strategic thinking and planning, and the mastering of many skills .
This course will take you through a learning journey and give you insights into the ways hearts and minds can be influenced.
There are specific learning outcomes throughout the lessons
Important
A communication strategy needs to fit into a broader strategy plan. Such a strategy needs to unpack many other aspects, such as doing a situation analysis, a power mapping, an alliance mapping, building a community of campaigners, fundraising, and much more. All these elements are crucial but they are not developed here. They will be developed in future, in other courses in the sogicampaigns series.
Note
This course focuses on how to build effective messages to change attitudes. It will not touch upon how and where these messages can be delivered, so it does not include media and social media planning strategies, written and oral expression techniques, etc. Again, we will try to develop these in other courses.
Intersectionality: “Is this course only about LGBTI issues?”
This course focuses on sexual and gender diversities and most examples will focus on this. Nevertheless, we will also often draw on other social change issues.
Raise your Hand!
At every stage of the course you will have the option to raise a question, make a comment, share a story, etc. As a matter of fact, we WANT you to do it as much as you can !! On every page you will see a “Raise your hand” button. Use it as much as you want.
Who has done this?
The content of this e-learning course has been developed by a group of Global LGBTQI+ campaigners who are developing sogicampaigns.org – a resource center for campaigning on SOGI.
The Public Interest Resource Center PIRC
The Movement Advancement Project
The lessons within were inspired by and developed in collaboration with many organisations campaigning for sexual and gender minorities. Along with development support from specialist e-learning educators and direct action organisers from Matters of the Earth.
This isn’t your everyday e-learning course, as we take you beyond building upon your skills to gearing you up to roll out a stronger and more impactful campaign that changes hearts and minds. [/ultimate_modal][dt-space height=”20″]
Enter the community
Registering for this course automatically creates your profile in the system. You can access it via the profile button in the header. In your profile, you can access an overview of your progress status in the course. Your profile will also identify you when you post comments and submissions throughout the course.
Express Yourself!
This series of courses is a work in progress. The more we hear from you, the more it will help us make future courses better; or even improve this one. At the end of the course we will ask you to send us some feedback by responding to a one minute survey. While you’re going through the course, please note all your ideas, comments and suggestions about it. We appreciate you taking this learning journey with us and for helping us to develop this course further.
Course Completion Certification
Complete all comprehension check interactions (quizzes) to qualify for a certificate issued by the sogicampaigns.org project.
Comprehension check
This learning interactivity will check your base knowledge around the art and science to campaigning. These are for example multiple choice questions. You will be required to complete this type of interaction before accessing the next screen.
Interaction !
This interactivity will suggest that you contribute your own thoughts, ideas, experience to generate discussions with fellow learners. These contributions are totally optional, but of course we would love to have them !
Deep dive
These learning activities will need you to pause, take some time and dive deep into building knowledge and engaging with theory. These “deep dives” are not a requirement, but we strongly recommend you to check them out if you want to become a stronger campaigner.
Tool for Campaigners
Wherever you see this purple mascot you are accessing and engaging with a tool that we think is really useful to keep track of.
Case study
Sometimes the best way to understand something is to see it in action or read about the people making it happen!
