5) 9 March 2023: Finished survey tool, now developing messsaging campaign

Just an update as we’ve been “heads-down” on our next steps for a while.

In August we did complete successful development of the survey tool, which we will use to test if our messaging campaign measurably alters attitudes toward collaboration with opponents. This is actually kinda a big deal. So, the intent of the tool is to identify anti-collaboration sentiment in a population. Its first iteration identified over 90% support for cooperation, sorta no matter who we surveyed with it. In and of itself, that was an interesting learning, which was great, but unfortunately it was also not what we were trying to achieve — a tool that could find opposition to collaboration. Through months of iteration we achieved that and the final tool records typically 75% support for overcoming opponents instead of cooperating with them. This remains true across both left- and right-leaning populations.

So we’ve got our survey tool now.

We also dove (lightly) into the degree to which support for or opposition to compromise varies with the specificity of the topic of compromise. ie: Are people more willing to compromise “in abstract” than they are on a specific issue like abortion? According to our research, yes they are, but the difference is not as pronounced as one might imagine. Generally, support for compromise remains above 65% even on such contentious issues as abortion and firearms. Again I’ll caution that our study on this effect did not go very deep, but the top-level insights were interestingly surprising.

Wrote a blog post about all these insights, and the process of getting there, here (I framed it as relevant to the Freedom Party simply to increase likelihood of virality, given that was a trending topic at that time):

Independent polling sees promising opening for Yang & Whitman’s Forward Party

OK, so since that time we’ve been working on several “next steps” to prepare for the launch of the messaging campaign (hence, our heads have been down):

1. Recruited a bonafide researcher from Stanford’s Polarization and Social Change Lab to help design and measure the messaging intervention(s) and effects thereof.
2. Forming additional partnerships to support creation of messaging ads and optimize social media buy strategy.
3. Working to raise external funding to support expansion of the project
4. Research to optimize the messaging in the ads. Some helpful specific work has been done by the Civic Health Project in testing messaging around the America Talks project.
5. Creation of the messaging ads themselves.

Right now I would say we are on track to launch the next phase in April. Of course, obstacles always arise …

Stay tuned!

• This topic was modified 6 months, 3 weeks ago by Hank.
• This topic was modified 6 months, 3 weeks ago by Hank.
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