011.NGO campaigns miss how humans process difficult emotions. Listen to Stefan Flothmann of Greenpeace to learn how to fix this

In this episode, I discuss with Stefan Flothmann, who heads Greenpeace's MindWorks Cognitive Science Lab, how campaign designs miss how humans process difficult and negative emotions, and how this diminishes campaigns' effectiveness.

Quotes:

“Greenpeace staff were working on the assumption we were working towards a state of paradise, but they are struggling instead with the state of loss we have to deal with”

“Our assumption used to be: we are humans, so we understand how other humans work. Common sense approaches to our campaigning suffice. We were wrong”

Stefan's bio:

·      Global Director at Mindworks Cognitive Science Lab, Greenpeace (GP) East Asia

·      Former Program Director, Greenpeace E-Asia

·      Former Dir Climate and Energy, Greenpeace

·      Former Dir of Int Ocean Governance, Pew Charitable Trust

We discuss:

Why Greenpeace as one of the largest brand names in environmental activism felt the need to change its assumptions behind its campaigning approaches

The relevance of behavioral psychology, social psychology and neuroscience for campaigning organizations

How to better take account of difficult, and negative human feelings in advocacy?

How to go from broadcasting and audience-centric to audience-empathetic approaches

Organizational resilience within NGOs during this period of a pandemic; how should leaders respond?

Stefan Flothmann’s LinkedIn profile

Read more here about  MindWorks's advice on how to campaign during the Covid pandemic. And here is MindWork's website about campaigning for mindset change

You can reach Stefan at sflothma@greenpeace.org

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