For a Cause

( photo: kalhh )  For grass-roots groups and issues campaigns, you can thrown up a website in a half hour using Blogger, Google's blogging platform.  ¶  It's free, and easy to administer and hand off.

The forms and tropes of traditional news writing might have been made for the internet.  ¶  In a way, they were.  ¶  When I teach newbies about writing for the web, I tell them about leads and the inverted pyramid.

Mission, audience, medium  ¶  If the mission is your starting place, then medium is the bridge to your audience.  ¶  Marry these three and your message will be compelling and true.

During the Second World War, one man recalls,  ❝ Our bulletins in German were the most objective sober bulletins of all that were put out by the BBC. We could not afford to be caught in any inaccuracy. ¶  ❝ The German listeners would not swallow anything, because they were on the lookout to prove us liars. We had to be 101 percent accurate. We had to claim less than we actually did. There is nothing more effective than saying that there has been a moderately severe raid on Essen, when 2,000 people have actually been killed. That sort of thing gives the enemy cold shivers.

You may have seen this making the rounds:  ¶  A typical website visit in 2022 1. Figure out how to decline all but essential cookies 2. Close the support widget asking if I need help 3. Stop the auto-playing video 4. Close the “subscribe to our newsletter” pop-up 5. Try and remember why I came here in the first place — Andy Budd (@andybudd) January 2, 2022 The parallels between good design, good writing, and good user experience are revealing. Writing and design might as well be aspects of the same thing. Which they are. 

It's helpful to craft a functional description of each ongoing communications project.  ¶ ❝ Advocacy Week is a weekly email roundup of events in the nation's capitol. Stories are short with links to further information.  ❞  ❝ The Advocate is a quarterly journal in print of ideas and trends in advocacy. It serves readers with feature stories and editorial departments while promoting our programs and thought leadership. For a Cause is a personal blog to explore the craft of advocacy messaging and storytelling. Blog posts are short and seek to explore and reflect on ideas, concepts, and practices. They are published periodically on no fixed schedule.