We Crafted a Message Together

We crafted a message together this month! You, our community of readers and social media followers, often share great ideas for messaging and ask if we’ve tried one approach or another to connect with women on the issues we all care about. We love hearing your ideas, so we put them to the test!

Our award-winning research team kindly shared the issue they were investigating and one of their prevailing hypotheses for us to work from.

The topic: Reducing othering (such as antisemitism and anti-Black discrimination)

The hypothesis: Telling personal stories about friends who experienced discrimination based on their race/ethnicity/religion will increase issue salience and speak to just world view.

That’s a complicated hypothesis; let’s tease it apart a bit. First, we’re meant to be increasing issue salience. Some people think discrimination is not a current problem; it’s not salient to them. We’re hypothesizing that a good message about othering will help people realize that racial and religious discrimination are still big problems in America. We also know that “just world view” bias will be a barrier for some women in our audience. People who hold that belief think that the world is inherently fair and that unequal outcomes are related to the choices people make rather than to structural inequality. A good message will illustrate that hard work doesn’t pay off equally for everyone because othering stacks the deck against some people based on their race, religion, or gender identity.

But why stories about a friend’s experience with discrimination rather than the speaker’s own experience? Because we want the speaker to be someone our audience relates to, someone whose shoes they can step into easily. Our audience members may not have experienced racial discrimination personally, but they’ll be quick to feel it’s unfair when it happens to someone they value and care about!

So we went to our Instagram followers to crowdsource a message that meets those parameters. Some key themes emerged quickly, and the Galvanize USA crew compiled them into these four ideas:

• Something related to hair discrimination or hair texture differences. Hair discrimination is a real-life example of othering causing harm in the present day. Only 23 states currently prohibit discrimination based on hair texture. Imagine a message where a white woman is upset that her brilliant Black colleague lost an opportunity over her natural hair. This one gets at just world view really well because it compares two high-performing employees who should have equal rights and protections, but don’t.
• Something related to how we acknowledge holidays at work or federally. Not respecting the religious holidays of all communities equally fosters othering and a larger pattern of exclusion. A message from a Christian worker saying “It’s unfair that I get Christmas off while my favorite intern has to use PTO for Yom Kippur” could help people see that antisemitism remains a major problem, and that we need collective action to address it.
• Something patriotic. We didn’t develop any details here, but it was a very good idea! Many people recognize military personnel, first responders, or teachers as people who serve America. A story about someone fighting for her country, but then experiencing discrimination because of her race or sexual orientation could be very effective.
• Something related to online hate speech. Consider a messenger who notices that hate speech has gotten really bad online, and worries about her Jewish or Asian friends having to experience that all the time, on every platform. This one gets at salience by rooting the issue in internet culture.

You voted, and you picked hair texture discrimination.

So we worked together as a group to develop three different messages that use the obvious unfairness of hair discrimination to highlight the harm caused by anti-Blackness. Here’s the one you voted to run:

“I work HARD as a teacher, but I never put much thought into how my ponytail looks. It’s just hair! So I was shocked when admin punished a Black teacher for wearing her braids–and even more shocked to learn that type of discrimination is legal in my state! It’s 2023! Our country needs to attract top talent, not discriminate against our best workers!”

• Is it salient? Yes, it highlights that this discrimination is happening now.
• Does it get around a just world view bias? Yes, it clarifies the Black teacher is very good at her job, preemptively disrupting any biased thoughts from folks who might wrongly assume she is less deserving in some way.
• Is it telling someone else’s story about discrimination? Yes! It meets all three criteria. 

The experts on our research team crafted their own messages as usual. Then they ran a rapid message test! In that test, some women saw our message. Some women saw other messages written by the research team. Some women only saw a placebo message that has nothing to do with race. Then everyone was asked to agree or disagree with the same statements, like this one. In this test, we are studying if the message reduces anti-Black discrimination by seeing if it increases agreement that Black people have been historically discriminated against in the United States and deserve more opportunities than they are currently getting. 

Our message worked! This graph shows that 63 percent of women who saw the placebo message agree that Black people deserve more opportunities than they are currently getting, but 73 percent of women who saw our message agree. That means our message made a ten percentage point difference! Test results also suggested that what we wrote will resonate with people who hold a bachelor’s degree or higher and people over the age of 55. That is not too surprising since it closely mirrors our Instagram audience demographics! We crafted a perfect message for our own in-group.

The research team’s message called “Diner” built even more support for that success question overall, at 76 percent agreement (+13pp). 

“My dad always taught me to treat everyone with respect, and he led by example. Growing up in a small town, he knew what prejudice was. But he always knew that it was wrong. On his senior class trip, his class went to a diner to get some food, but the diner staff refused to serve their one Black classmate. Every single member of the class got up and walked out of that restaurant. He taught me that we can’t take prejudice lying down. It’s up to all of us to stand up for each other.”

That’s a strong message too—no wonder it was so effective! It was also more effective with more types of people, especially with women in the moderate middle that Galvanize USA works to connect with. So our Instagram audience might be pretty good at writing messages for ourselves, but the Galvanize USA research team can’t be beat when it comes to reaching our audience! 

Have other ideas about good messages? DM us on Instagram @galvanize_usa any time! It makes our day to hear from you.