Every day, busy people face a barrage of information—thousands of facts and demands on their attention from every possible direction. We’re sure you know the feeling of being swamped and wanting to just turn off.
In today’s entry in our current Be The Mondoweiss Megaphone campaign, we are sharing some of what we’ve learned about how to win people’s attention and engage them on the critical issue of justice in Israel/Palestine. Recently, we’ve introduced a new tool that, with your help, can increase the attention and sense of urgency among people less focused on Israel/Palestine — a curated weekly e-newsletter that is sensitive to the information overload so many people experience. You can sign up for the new weekly email here. It hits inboxes on Friday and is edited by a Mondoweiss staff person to share the highlights from the week on Mondoweiss.net.
The new weekly newsletter is an alternative to the daily email we’ve offered for years, which provides readers with links to every Mondoweiss story. While thousands of regular readers find this useful, the weekly newsletter will be a better way to introduce either the issue or our site to new audiences.
That’s our part of the process: a more concise communication, with images and brief analysis to convey important points quickly. And your part? You are the one who can give this tool the other elements that earn attention.
If you share Mondoweiss content on Facebook or Twitter, you’re reaching out to friends who are deliberately logging in for links to information and ideas. On email, by contrast, many people are annoyed by political communications— especially mass messages. We’ve all had the experience of a friend or relative who sends a constant stream of email with no filter, and obviously you don’t want to be that person. So how can you succeed at sharing ideas and news?
Research has shown that when people rate the attention they give to messages received through conversation, e-mail, or other media, certain factors rank highest. Most effective at getting attention are messages that:
- are personalized;
- evoke an emotional response;
- come from a trustworthy or respected sender; and
- are concise.
By selecting recipients to forward the message, you are using your status as a trusted resource. Don’t forward every message to a large group of people; consider each person individually. Share only a message that will have particular meaning for them, and always include a comment explaining why you thought of them. That way you are respecting them by personalizing the communication and including your own emotional response—which is more likely to evoke one from them.
Please use the tools we provide—the weekly roundup, the “share” buttons on each post for you to spread the word through Facebook and Twitter—to lend your own network and your own credibility to Mondoweiss. Share with friends what means most to you, and what you know will touch them most.
Since the weekly highlights message is new, we would appreciate your feedback on how to make it most useful. As always, we depend on you. Turn up the volume on Mondoweiss megaphone today: spread the word, and contribute financially to help us keep developing new tools. Your involvement in our work is the difference between an echo chamber and a resounding call to action for all.
Mondoweiss is not getting banned at Slate.
Nice job on the coaching.