The most effective public health campaigns aren't designed in conference rooms — they're co-created with the people who know the terrain. Brian Tolleson on why "nothing for the people without the people" isn't just a principle, it's the most practical strategy available for complex community work.

At Lexicon Strategies, a major component of most of our engagements involves developing and conducting structured listening sessions. Authentic qualitative research is so important to successful community and social impact work and, we believe, it’s what makes the solutions we deliver so much more effective.

When we think about solutions or messaging, many people look to surveys or quantitative data. And, it’s always a mistake not to pair data with words. We live in a world driven by language and emotion, not numbers and percentages. The only way to capture actionable, successful insight is to listen to the people involved speaking directly to you.

Surveys and evaluations have become part of our everyday work life. But do we think critically enough about them?

Academic researchers rely on surveys and are constantly refining the science of surveying. It's worth taking a moment to read some of the academic literature as a check for best practices.

We are about to get down to the wire in this election season and polls are going to come in almost daily. There will be bar charts and pie charts and histograms and infographics. Commentators will share these visual works of art and draw pointed, definitive, passionate conclusions about us, and you and me and our country, our county, our zip code. In America in 2020, we have the data science DOWN and we can DEFINITELY make an infographic.

The thing is, many politicians, brands and marketers often confuse surveys and polls with actually listening to constituents and customers and understanding them. In fact, I believe that data can actually CONFUSE the understanding of a particular concept because we uncouple data from human language and human emotion.

Organizations still spend too much time thinking only about outbound marketing and communications strategy. WHAT we are going to say, WHO are we targeting, and WHEN are we gonna launch it all? They furiously toil to proactively define their brands and products and often stop there, like that’s the whole game. It also makes them very unprepared to react quickly when it’s important.

In some ways, it’s like that person at the party who spends all the time thinking about what to say next, instead of listening to what people are actually talking about, or responding to what people actually ask.

It’s important in today’s environment of pandemics, quarantines and disruptive (but of course meaningful, overdue, important and hopefully transformative) social unrest, to think about what’s really going on for your audience.

There’s a very good chance they are in a totally unreceptive state to your message.

I’ve been marketing media and advertiser brands all over the world for over 20 years, including launching Logo, the first-ever 24/7/365 LGBT media brand. From 30-second commercials in the golden, pre-digital days (looking back I call those “the easy days”), to today, leading social media and VR projects, scrapping it out for microscopic millennial attention spans.

Nothing prepared me or my team, however, for what happened on a recent campaign for online travel company, Orbitz. After launching the social media video campaign, we watched as thousands of Facebook comments started in a rapid-fire chain.