Disrupting for Good: Fieldnotes and Pride Month Inspo

I had many opportunities this past month to practice the messaging ideas I share here. Canadian Viral Hepatitis Elimination Day and Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) Week, the day and week I made up a few years ago, were both in May. I found myself releasing our 2025 Progress Report in Viral Hepatitis Elimination in Canada, preparing a one-pager about supportive housing, preparing a proposal for decentralizing hepatitis C treatment in Manitoba, meeting with provincial policymakers in Ontario about both hepatitis and housing (separately), writing letters to the Public Health Agency of Canada, and attending a medical conference in St. John’s. 

And I have some observations on what worked best.

In honour of Pride month, I’m also going to weave in some lessons that are still relevant today from the fight for marriage equality, an important and inspiring victory for the LGBTQ2S+ community (and arguable for us as a society). Winning over the majority of Americans on marriage equality seemed impossible. In 1996, only 27% of Americans supported gay marriage. However, by 2015, marriage equality was law. Public support had increased to 60%, and it hasn’t dropped since then. 

I’m borrowing heavily from a recent Stanford Social Innovation Review article, Aspirational Communication, by Doug Hattaway of Hattaway Communications. I hope something here sparks a thought that helps you with your own messaging.

Field Notes + Pride Month Inspiration
1. Moving Beyond Rights to Community Care
Most organizations I am part of love to bang the drum of human rights. And they’re not wrong that we should fight for rights that are not being realized. 

However, that is often not the packaging that wins hearts. 

When I tell a policymaker that they have a responsibility to work toward the progressive realization of the right to housing, they get defensive. (I’ve done this many times.) BUT, when I say we know that by almost every measurable metric, we are all better off when we all have a home, and that [insert city] is a city of people who take care of each other, and that includes making sure we all have a safe, affordable, hopeful place to call home, those same policymakers mostly nod along. 

I’m working toward the same outcome, but I’m packaging it up differently - crucially, in my opinion, I’m still making it a system problem to address, not an individual failing of the people experiencing homelessness in my community, but framing it up with the values of community care and interdependence feels better, so, as I have observed, it lands better.

We also see this in the marriage equality movement: an initial base of support in the U.S. was built using messages about civil rights and equal protection under the law. But to get to a majority, it took a reframe to “love and commitment” and “love is love.”

Which brings us to point #2.

2. Connecting Our Cause to Their Aspirations
As Hattaway writes, “Your aspirations are your ideas about the kind of person you want to be, the life you want to live, and the world you want to live in. Aspirations are important to our personal identities and play a powerful role in driving our attitudes and behaviours. What’s more, lifting up aspirations and values that people with different backgrounds and perspectives share can help them see themselves in a cause. We can relate to people who seem very different to us when we sense that they share hopes and values similar to our own. We recognize our common humanity.”

When we feel under attack, it’s tempting to slip into crisis mode and fight against the threats. But in a long game, tapping into aspirations and a vision of who we want to be and the world we want to live in has more staying power.

3. Winning Words
Framing is so key. We’ve talked a lot about it here. Words that people hear first shape their opinions on an issue. And words that get repeated win, so simple but meaningful words and phrases that are easy to understand, remember, and repeat are going to help win. 

Hattaway summarizes: 
This short-and-sweet message also delivered a powerful counterpunch to the opposition’s message, which defined marriage exclusively as “a union between a man and a woman.” Marriage equality supporters could now say simply, “Marriage is about love and commitment between two people.” Two words helped take the moral high ground on the way to a winning majority. Who wants to stand in the way of love and commitment?

4. Focus on the Undecideds
Sometimes our instinct is to take on the die-hard base of the opposition. But it is so energy-intensive and can be demoralizing. Also, it rarely works, and often, we don’t need them to build a majority. We can usually get there with our base + a good number of the undecideds, or those who are “of two minds” on a contentious issue, so are staying quiet or leaning toward maintaining the status quo. 

Anat Shenker-Osorio calls this the “movable middle.” This group is a great place to start on your way to a winning majority, and many of them will join you when you have effectively employed the other messaging tips here.

5. Tell Strategic Stories
Did you think I would write about messages that win without mentioning stories? Oh friend. Stories are where it is at. 

I was reminded of this at the medical conference I attended last week. There were a lot of scientists reading their slides and attention in the room was often low. I found myself Googling “how do you know if it is perimenopause or ADHD?”

But then, Leonard got up and told us the story of growing up with hemophilia in rural Newfoundland. I know you will believe me when I say the room was hanging on his every word, that I can tell you more about Leonard’s life than I can recall from every other presentation over the three days put together, and that I was newly motivated to take up the cause of rural and remote care for people living with bleeding disorders. 

Stories create empathy like nothing else can. Using them as a scaffold to deliver the information you want your audience to take away is a solid strategy all day, but it does take a bit of work to make sure the story uses winning words, connects to shared aspirations, and ideally, shows your audience a clear path or role for themselves in your cause.

Thanks as always for reading. As I said above, I hope something here inspires your own messaging as you disrupt for good!