<aside> 💡 Campaigns need to consider approach and audience. What tone will best reach a specific audience?
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The tone of our tactics should match our goals for who we’re trying to reach. We may have actions with different tones depending on the audience we’re trying to motivate. Reviewing these photos, you’ll see actions that were hopeful, joyful, sarcastic, defiant, encouraging, threatening, solemn, outraged, determined, angry, and vulnerable.
When choose tactics and designing actions, we can ask, what tone…
Campaigner Daniel Hunter shares examples in the Climate Resistance Handbook:
“As you’re developing a tactic, you can pick your tone. This is a way that movements express the feelings of the people. Take a simple march. It’s a tactic where people go from one place to another place. But the tone can be very different:
WATER IS LIFE • Canadian protestors decided to pressure their newly elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. It was just a few days after he was elected. But they didn’t want to wait around. They wanted to pressure him right away. So over several days, they stood outside his residence, asking him to become a climate champion. On each day, the protests were led by prayers from indigenous leaders. On the third day, the protestors carried water with them. The water came from vulnerable areas where fossil fuel companies wanted to exploit the land. Tearful prayers and heart-filled stories of the water echoed as people marched to Trudeau’s residence. The tone was somber.
RAISE THE HEAT • In Australia, there was a major fight to stop nine new coal plants in the Galilee Basin. With a hostile government and well-connected coal companies, it would be hard to stop. Protestors decided that in order to stop the plants, they would target the banks funding the projects. One of the biggest was CommBank. And during a week of “Raise the Heat” actions, protestors in the city of Canberra donned black formal clothing and yellow scarves or hats. They brought along percussion instruments for a lively march to the CommBank offices. And they brought a coffin full of fake coal — to symbolize this dead investment. The action had music and was a mix of serious but also hopeful. The tone was future-oriented and stated the positive vision of a world without coal.
DRACULA STRATEGY • In France, pressure was mounting to scrap any new fossil fuel projects. Protestors had just waged a multi-year campaign to halt fracking and were ready for more. So activists saw a chance when the fossil fuel companies hosted a major summit on offshore drilling. All the big fossil fuel companies would be there, like Total, Shell, BP, and Exxon Mobil. 350 organizer Nicolas Haeringer describes their strategy as “Les vampires sont tués par lumière,” which means “Vampires are killed by light.” They decided to be highly confrontational to raise the profile of all these vile companies meeting. Activists planned sit-ins and major blockades. They added marches to the mix, some building up to attempts to get past police barriers and get into the meetings. In this context, marches were confrontational, even angry. The tone was defiance and anger.
THE THREATENING THANK YOU • I was part of a campaign where our reluctant City Council had done (nearly) everything we asked of them. It was strange, because they were definitely not allies. But they felt our pressure and so gave in to our demands. At the end of the year, we wanted an action to let them know the pressure was still on them. But it wasn’t like they were a hostile target. So what did we do? We created cardboard “Standing with the People” awards. We made one for each City Council member. We marched outside City Hall — then entered City Council during their regular proceedings. We interrupted the meeting by shouting down the head of council. We announced we were giving them awards! We quickly gave each councilmember their own award, before the police escorted us all out. It was a message of encouragement and a threat. The tone was kind, laced with warning.
As you can see, the same tactic can easily have a wide range of tones. You can pick the tone through the symbols, actions, speakers, and framing of the action. In this way, you can connect to the feeling of the people you are organizing — because actions are about expression of what is inside of people.”
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