The Public Interest Comms Textbook We Needed Yesterday – with Ann Christiano and Angela Bradbery

 

Eric: [00:00:00] Welcome to Let’s Hear It. Let’s Hear It is a podcast for and about the field of foundation and nonprofit communications, produced by its two co-hosts, Eric Brown and Kirk Brown—no relation.

Kirk: Well said, Eric. And I’m Kirk.

Eric: And I’m Eric. The podcast is sponsored by the College Futures Foundation, which envisions a California where post-secondary education advances equity and unlocks upward mobility now and for generations to come. To learn more, visit collegefutures.org.

Kirk: You can find Let’s Hear It on any podcast subscription platform.

Eric: You can find us online at letshearitpodcast.com. You can find us on LinkedIn.

Kirk: And—

Eric: Yes.

Kirk: Even on Instagram. And if you like the show, please, please, please rate us on Apple Podcasts so that more people can find us. Let’s—

Eric: Get onto the show.

Kirk: Welcome in. Hey there. You know what? It’s a heads up. It’s good to see you. So I really think you owe me an apology, but— [00:01:00]

Eric: You’re right, but I issued a blanket apology on January 1st for all of the things that I was going to do.

Kirk: Can we assert—can we accept that Ann Searight Christiano is an expert, is brilliant, and knows what she’s talking about? Can we say those things are true?

Eric: Duly stipulated.

Kirk: So at the end of this interview—I’m gonna jump way to the “too long, didn’t read” part—Ann said, “Thank you for creating this podcast. It’s an important part of creating the capacity for this field.” Thank you very much, Ann. Thank you for joining us here, Kirk. I have very bad news for you.

Eric: She was just being nice. She was nice, and I’m smitten. No, no, she didn’t mean it. She was just being nice. But listen—

Kirk: To this: she actually listened to the interview that you did with me, referred to it in the interview. So now I’m smitten. So, no, that—

Eric: Was Angela who listened.

Kirk: Oh, Angela listened to that interview. Okay, well, so Angela and Ann were both just incredibly [00:02:00] gracious, so you’ve gotta set this up because this is so wonderful. I’m also—I’m trying to decide because I’m incredibly thrilled by this conversation and I’m also mortified by it.

Eric: Excellent.

Kirk: So set it up and then we’ll come back and we’ll talk about it. But it’s really awesome. This—

Eric: This is what, you know, in psychology, it’s a clash of psychological situations for you.

Kirk: That’s exactly what it is. All right.

Eric: I interviewed Ann Searight Christiano, who’s the founder and director of the Center for Public Interest Communications at the University of Florida. And Angela Bradbery is the Karel Chair in Public Interest Communications in the Department of Public Relations at the University of Florida College of Journalism. So they both are at UF, where the Gators are, where Gatorade was made, and where Pete Alonso, the Mets slugger, went to college. So there’s that. Ann used to work at [00:03:00] the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, where I knew her a million years ago, and then she went down to Florida to be the Karel chair. Frank Karel—I’m sorry, this is a lot more—it’s worth going through than you wanted.

Kirk: It’s worth going through.

Eric: Frank Karel is the godhead and the godfather of foundation communications. So Ann went down to Florida to be the Karel chair. Frank’s widow set up an endowed chair at the University of Florida after which point Ann started the Center for Public Interest Communications, where she became the director. And now Angela is the Karel chair. That’s who the folks are that I spoke with. And they have a new textbook—it’s a textbook, book, whatever you want to call it—guide called “Public Interest Communications Strategy for Change Makers,” a textbook that I never had when I was growing up in communications. But now all of you people who are listening to our voices can [00:04:00] have, and we talked about their book, we talked about communications and a whole bunch of other things, and you know, that’s what it was.

Kirk: It’s an enormously important conversation. So Ann Christiano, Angela Bradbery, both from the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications here, talking about their textbook that was published on April 30th: “Public Interest Communication Strategy for Change Makers.” So well spoken, so thoughtful, so dialed into everything we need to know and talk about in this field. Let’s listen, then we’ll come back. So this is Ann and Angela on Let’s Hear It.

Interview Begins

Eric: Welcome to Let’s Hear It. My guests today are an old friend of the show, Ann Christiano, and a new friend of the show, Angela Bradbury. Now, Ann Searight Christiano is the founder and director of the Center for Public Interest Communications and a clinical professor in the Department of Public Relations at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. Go Gators, or something the [00:05:00] Gator people say. And Angela Bradbery is the Karel Chair in Public Interest Communications at the Department of Public Relations—woo, this is fun, how I get to say this so many times—at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. But before that, before joining in 2020, Angela was the communications director at Public Citizen, a Washington DC-based public interest advocacy organization. So you guys know what you’re talking about, and you have this new book out that I have a feeling is going to be of astonishing value to many, if not all, of our listeners. It’s called “Public Interest Communications Strategy for Change Makers.” Thanks to you both very much for coming on to Let’s Hear It.

Ann & Angela: Thank you.

Eric: For starters, at this moment, at this phenomenally fraught moment, it feels to me like navigating the challenging times that we’re living in is gonna take a lot more than just energy. It’s going to take strategy, and so it feels to me like your book is particularly timely. Maybe I’ll just start with [00:06:00] you, Angela. Why did you and Ann write this book?

Angela: We wrote this book for a number of reasons. We wrote this book in part because when we were both practicing, we would’ve loved to have had this book. We would’ve loved to have had all this information and this great research about communications at our fingertips. We also wrote it because part of what we want to do is to grow the academic discipline of public interest communications. People have been using communications for social change for a very long time, but there’s now science behind communications. We have cognitive linguistics and behavioral sciences, social sciences, psychology, and so forth that can really help us better inform the communications and how we approach problems [00:07:00] in a way that will help ensure that we are as effective as possible, rather than guessing about what the best messages are, the best strategy. We have these tools. So we really are eager to put these things in one place and get them out into the world.

Eric: So now when Ann went to the University of Florida—and you had come out of your PR practitioner work, you had worked at Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and other places, and then you were kind of thrust into the world of academia and you have taken to it like a duck to water, clearly. But Angela, had you taught before you came to Florida?

Angela: No, never. Never. And I was—I had never planned to leave my job at Public Citizen. I absolutely loved what I did. I was very fortunate because I got up every day, very mission driven. When I saw this job description that happened to cross my desk, I thought, that sounds amazing. I get to grow a program, a [00:08:00] public communications program. It was a program that Ann started because she had this role before I did. And I thought, but I’ve never taught before. I don’t know how I would like teaching. So as part of the interview process, you teach a class and see how it goes. I loved it. I loved interacting with the students. I found them so insightful, and when I came, I started teaching and I just absolutely love it. That’s one of my favorite parts about the job now—working with students, mentoring them, providing opportunities and opening doors for them. So it’s tremendous.

Eric: And I wonder if now that you are a seasoned educator, if having somebody who is coming right out of this work as a practitioner—if it harkened you back to your previous days, and what that dynamic [00:09:00] was like for you to bring somebody else into academia who was, you know, the day before, just a practitioner. How did you work on that and how did you introduce and welcome Angela into the field?

Ann: I think a couple of things. One, Angela was actually qualified for the job, so that made a huge difference. And, you know, I think also I just want to acknowledge that Angela started at a really rough time. She started in August of 2020.

Eric: Oh, what was going on then?

Ann: Just, you know, just—yeah. And so, you know, I’ve always sort of been awed by the ways in which Angela was able to do so much when she didn’t get to meet people in person for years and the challenges that that faced. So she had a much rougher start. You know, I got to be the first one. I got the parties and the cakes and the welcome receptions, and [00:10:00] Angela got an empty building and COVID.

Eric: Let’s get into the book. Obviously it is a textbook, but it is also a textbook by practitioners. And how do you think about—how do you think about academia? You know, clearly communications departments across the country are going to want to use this as a way to teach public interest communications. And I love the idea that you’re expanding this discipline, which for many of us—I didn’t know anything about communications when I got my first communications job, which was scary for everybody, but I would’ve loved to have resources like this or a class to take, frankly. How do you think about taking the practitioner work, turning it into an academic environment without denuding it of the action that the practice brings? So sometimes you’ll read an academic—you know, you read a textbook for class and it [00:11:00] feels academic. And so how do you try and bridge those two things—the action and the teaching, or the practice, or whatever goes into teaching a class?

Angela: I’m sure Ann has some thoughts as well. Really through case studies, right? And telling stories is what we do as public interest communicators. Telling stories is what we do throughout the book. Telling stories is what we do in the classroom to illustrate the theories and the science. And I think that’s how I’ve always operated and thought, and so it’s possible to provide a lot of examples and include and weave into that the theories and the research and make it all digestible and understandable and accessible.

Eric: And Ann, I would think that writing a textbook is actually almost as much for the writer as it is for the reader. What have you learned [00:12:00] putting together this project?

Ann: One of the things that’s been really interesting is that I think the space between practice and academia is much more permeable than we might assume it is, particularly in a field like public interest communications that’s still kind of new and because a lot of people who are in practice came from academia, a lot of people who are teaching in academia like Angela and like me came from practice. So there’s a lot of permeability there. It’s also true that we have a lot to draw on. You know, the center—we operate kind of more like a startup company within academia. We’re working with real partners every day, applying these frameworks and theories. And we also have the incredible reservoir of great ideas coming out of 10 years of doing FRANK conferences and all those practitioners [00:13:00] standing on stage, sharing their secret sauce, being so willing to explain exactly how they did it. And all of that goes into the book. And we tried to bring it to life as much as we could on the pages. We have this phrase that we use on our team in the center when we’re talking about research. And, you know, we’ll have some finding or some new report or something that has come up in some of the research that we’re doing. And it’s like, “Gosh, that’s really interesting.” And then we’ll go on and we say, “Well, how do I play with this toy? What does this mean? How do I use this to actually drive strategy?” And so I think that ethos of it’s gotta be useful above and beyond everything else. It has to be useful, whether you’re a student, whether you’re a scholar, whether you’re a practitioner. It has to be something that you can open up and find something that you can apply to the work that you’re doing that day.

Eric: So when you decided to start on this, how did you think about what to include? If you were to ask me to write a textbook on communications or strategy or [00:14:00] something like that, I don’t know if I could, but I don’t know where I would start. So what was your process, Ann? Why don’t you take that first and then we’ll talk to Angela.

Ann: Okay, sure. We have a couple of frameworks that we have been using in the center with our partners. One is what we call the six spheres of influence. The other is back-of-the-envelope strategy, and we created these because the problems that our sector works on are wicked problems. They don’t have a clear definition. They don’t have an agreed-upon answer. There are perceptions of being a winner or a loser when we actually do get to discussing a solution. And so I think that we need some tools to navigate those big messy challenges. And so the six spheres were tools that we came up with to help practitioners figure out where to start. Let’s map the spaces through which we can communicate to drive change, and then let’s get as specific as we can about what we’re working toward and who can make that [00:15:00] change and what is gonna really engage them that connects to what’s already important to them. We were able to take these frameworks that evolved from the work that we were doing with our partners. And I think once we had that, we had a lot of back and forth. We had a lot of debate about the sequence and what some of these ideas meant, but having the frameworks in place made it a little bit easier to figure out, “Okay, this is chapter one. Let’s go from there.”

Eric: Angela, I’d like to hear from you about how you—it feels like you are writing this book for a variety of audiences and I’ll guess at a few: educators for sure, practitioners, students. How do you think about how to help people use it as effectively as possible? Are you working directly with professors who are setting up a curriculum, for example, or students who are trying to take this work and apply it to their own [00:16:00] work as students and so on? So can you talk us through about how different people use the work in different ways?

Angela: Well, kind of all of the above, really. So for educators, we have launched a Public Interest Communications Educators Network, which includes academics and some practitioners who also are adjuncts around the country who are interested in building the academic discipline. They all know about the book, and we’ve gotten it out to them. And we say this is a public interest communications course in a box. It’s all you need to teach public interest communications to make it as easy as possible. For students, we tried to make it as accessible as possible, so it has all the concepts and frameworks that students would need. And as an aside, it’s not just for communications students. We have public health students, anthropology and political science and sustainability. We have [00:17:00] students from a variety of disciplines who take the public interest communications course because the concepts are so relevant and helpful. We’ve had business students as well take it. So the idea really is—we made it as accessible and clear as possible so that anybody can pick it up and read it and understand it and learn about the concepts and put them into practice.

Eric: Yeah, I, like I said, I would’ve loved to have had such a resource when I was coming up, because there just weren’t that many. What do you draw from, and I’ll turn to you, Ann. What did you draw from to pull this together? There are so many resources in here, like the bibliography is off the charts. How did you gather all this material together? How do you begin to cull through all that stuff? [00:18:00]

Ann: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s reflective of the fact that there’s a lot of really fantastic work happening in the field. A lot of people have done a lot of really good work, and one of the things—when Angela and I sat down before we started writing and talked about what was important to us, there were a couple of things that we did that I think really guided those kinds of things. One was that we wanted to celebrate as much work that was already happening in the field as we could and draw people toward that work. I think we both kind of feel like we wish that those lists could have been 10 times as long as they were, because there is so much great work going on. The other thing that we did is we sat down with students and we brought in some pizzas and we sat down for, I don’t know, three hours or something, and we just had this really long, great conversation about what are the books that you’ve been assigned to read in your courses that really stayed with you, that were meaningful to you? What do you want from your textbooks? What do you want from your course materials? [00:19:00] And they said, you know, we want stories, we want resources. We want the opportunity to be able to scan a chapter and get the big points, but when something really fascinates us, we want to be able to go deeper. And so those kinds of insights, I think, really helped us to find the resources. And again, I just want to mention too that FRANK community that has been so generous over the years and being able to draw on all of those resources that have been shared is just incredible. And what Angela has done through the educators network is similarly just vibrant and robust. And so that is all to say, we had a lot to work with and we did the best we could.

Eric: We’re gonna take a very quick break and we’ll be right back with Ann Christiano and Angela Bradbery right after this.

[Commercial Break]

Eric: You’re listening to Let’s Hear It, a podcast about foundation and nonprofit communications hosted by Eric Brown and Kirk Brown. If you’re enjoying this episode, [00:20:00] you may just be a rule breaker. Check out season two of “Break Fake Rules” with Glen Galaich, CEO of the Stuart Foundation, as he chats with inspiring leaders in philanthropy, government, media, and more about breaking the fake rules that don’t work so that we can build a future that does. New episodes of “Break Fake Rules” drop monthly. Check them out wherever you get your podcasts. And now back to the show.

Eric: And we are back with Ann Christiano and Angela Bradbery. They have just written a really amazing new book called “Public Interest Communications Strategy for Change Makers.” All right, so Ann, let’s just talk—let’s back up for just a second and talk a little bit about the Center for Public Interest Communications because you do a little bit of everything. You do writing, you’re obviously helping to lead academics and the practice of public interest communication. So can you just kind of give us the 10-cent tour of the center for folks who don’t know? [00:21:00]

Ann: Sure. Yeah. Well, back in 2018, after Annie and I wrote a couple articles for Stanford Social Innovation Review, we started getting these calls and emails from people saying, “Hey, could we maybe hire you to help us take this public interest communications approach to a really big problem that we’re facing?” And we’re like, “I guess so. I think, yeah, that’d be fun.” And we started getting more and more of those calls and we quickly realized that we needed to establish a center so that we could hire colleagues and actually begin to work in this really concentrated way on projects. And now here it is, 2025. We’ve been around since 2018 and we are working with partners all over the world to apply these public interest communications frameworks to these really messy problems. So some of the things that we’re working on right now are: How do we find common ground around what we should do about affordable housing? How can we help the charitable sector tell authentic, meaningful stories of how change happens? How do we talk about [00:22:00] things like guaranteed income in a way that helps people make sense of it and understand its value? What’s really cool about that is that we have just incredible resources available to us being in an R1 university. We have nearly every journal article ever written. We have a fantastic partnership with the Atlas Lab, which is using data science and AI to really find the conversations that are happening on these profound social issues and figure out, instead of how we push messages out into the world, how we join the existing conversations and offer value and meaning. So it’s really great work and I get to work with some pretty amazing people and some pretty amazing partners on those projects. And one of the other things that we do a lot of is training and professional development to help practitioners take some of the frameworks that you’re seeing in the book and apply them to the challenges that they’re facing.

Eric: So it’s like almost a high-powered consulting firm with all of the resource riches you could possibly imagine at your fingertips. [00:23:00]

Ann: Absolutely, absolutely. I will say though, that one thing that is important to note is that we have sort of a unique funding structure for universities in that we’re not funded by the state of Florida. All of our funding comes from those external partnerships, which makes it a lot more fun and also a little bit more scary. But I think that’s how the world works in most places too.

Eric: And these days, maybe you sleep slightly better, but enough of that. Let’s get into the book a little bit. Angela, can you kind of walk us through the structure of this book? What’s in it? How is it set up and what are some of the big lessons that folks can get from it? [00:24:00]

Angela: Sure. Well, as Ann mentioned earlier, we structured the format of the book around the frameworks—these two main frameworks: the six spheres of influence, which are some of the levers of change that we use as public interest communicators and strategists, and the back-of-the-envelope strategy, the four questions that if you answer those questions, you have the outline of a strategic communications plan. And it’s funny because we kind of went back and forth as far as which should come first. We did several outlines for this.

Eric: I thought about that when I was reading it, but keep going, because I’d love to know how that conversation went.

Angela: Right, exactly. It isn’t necessarily linear, right? It depends on where you are in the process and on the project. Sometimes you have to loop back again, and when we do that in classes, we start out with the six spheres and talk about the various approaches that you can use to affect change, which include things like activism, because activism is a communications tool. [00:25:00] Policy, media, the financial markets, social norms, communities of influence—that’s where a lot of the powerful messengers come in. And we lead people through analyzing cases through those spheres. Then we go to the actual, here’s how you create a strategic communications plan, walking through each of those questions and delving into them in depth. As far as, you know, what do you want to be true that isn’t true now—and which goes into what makes an effective goal. Who must act to make it happen? Those are your actors. And we talk about having core actors, the only people who can make the change happen. And then who influences those core actors? I know all this is familiar, I’m sure, to your listeners. What must they believe to act, and this is when we really delve into the importance of understanding the worldviews and values of the people you’re messaging to. [00:26:00] And this is where public interest communications can really help us with the polarization and help us bridge divides. Because if we understand and take time to listen to and understand where people are coming from and what their concerns are, we can craft messages that will resonate with them rather than crafting messages that make sense to us, but not necessarily the people we’re trying to reach. And then finally, how do we connect with them? Literally where are they? What conversations can we join and how can we get our information in front of them? What are their information sources? And then we talk about measurement and evaluation, and I have to say, Ann wrote what is probably—she did the measurement evaluation chapter—hands down the best measurement and evaluation content I have ever seen. So if folks get the book only for that, they should. And then we walk people through and walk students through the process of putting the whole thing together at the end.

Eric: I have to say that the four questions made it feel like a Passover Seder for communications people. [00:27:00] Let’s get into some of these specifics of this. So for example, the back-of-the-envelope strategy, Ann, is like the sort of thing—everybody wants an easy way to think about anything. The back-of-the-envelope strategy caught my eye. Can you talk about it?

Ann: Yeah. So we were doing—this was way back in, I think, 2012. We were doing a workshop for nonprofits who were gonna come up to the University of Florida, and I knew that they didn’t have communications teams, but they needed communications in their work. And so I was just kind of agonizing over how can we make this as simple as possible for them? How can we make communications and the thinking behind strategic communications accessible and useful to people who don’t have training in it? And for sure, those questions have evolved over time, but they’ve [00:28:00] held up really well, and we’ve had the opportunity to check them with lots of different people, and they’ve found it really helpful. I think one of the things that I’m excited about—one of the things that I’m most excited about in the book—is moving from analyzing these six spheres and really looking at the six spheres as systems, and so connecting the discipline of systems thinking to strategic communications and really thinking about how those systems can help us create a theory of change for our communications work. There’s not a single person who’s listening to this podcast who has worked in communications who hasn’t had somebody stride into their office and ask for a one-minute video, or some very specific deliverable that’s gonna solve all of the organization’s communications challenges. Like we have all been there. I think about the back-of-the-envelope strategy like these are four questions that you can pull out when you’re in that moment. So instead of just being annoyed that this person’s asking you to make a video, and you know the [00:29:00] video is not gonna be the thing that’s gonna solve the problem, that together you can start to say, “Well, what is it we’re actually trying to do here? And who can make that happen?” And now you’re on the same team and you’ve helped your colleagues think about communications in a much more focused way. So you have the opportunity to kind of upskill the people around you as well and really offer something that’s useful to your colleagues in your organization who may not have your experience in communications.

Eric: We, I believe it or not, we just have a couple of minutes left, so I’m gonna start with you, Ann, with this set of questions. What do you think the public interest communicators need to be doing that they’re not doing, and what do they need to stop doing that they are doing? [00:30:00]

Ann: One of the things that’s happening right now is that we’re sort of getting really mixed up between strategic communication and self-expression, and they are not the same. Strategic, effective communication is not a form of self-expression, and I think that it’s really hard because you don’t come into this field without caring desperately about these issues. So getting really pragmatic about how you are gonna achieve change is so hard, right? Because how do you separate yourself from that? And I think in this moment that feels so fraught, I think we do need to be more pragmatic. We really need to think about where we have resources, where we have relationships, where we have power, can build power and apply that the most specific dose possible to leverage the [00:31:00] most change that we can. And that’s hard when all of these other thoughts are in your mind, and it can be hard to separate that. But I do think that that kind of thinking is what we all need to kind of hold ourselves accountable to doing right now.

Eric: Well, it really comes from this—what you’ve talked about in the book about listening, about really understanding what your audiences care about, rather than the thing that you need to say. So I really take that point, especially today. Just pick up any newspaper and people feel the need to express, but we also understand that as a movement, we have to figure out how to create change. And those two things don’t necessarily always go together. That’s such a really important lesson. Angela, what would you send our listeners away with about your book and about the work and about the practice of communications of social impact communications these days? [00:32:00]

Angela: Well, I second what Ann said, and I think if communicators can listen to people outside their circles when coming up with messaging, it’ll be very helpful and much more effective. I think it’s easy—and I know because I’ve certainly been in this world—it’s easy because of time pressures and other reasons to just come up with messages that sound good in the office focus group, right? Because that’s all you have time for. But really kind of understanding people outside the usual suspects, outside your supporters, and working with local organizations and empowering local folks for change. Toward the end of the show you did with Kirk, when you interviewed Kirk, you had a wonderful comment about the importance of local communities and local organizing, and I think that’s where a lot of important work happens, because that’s where people [00:33:00] can reach across divides and can come together on issues and create communities. And change comes really from the bottom up. It’s increasingly more difficult to have positive change from the top. So I think kind of listening outside and working with local organizations and empowering those local organizations is really key going forward.

Eric: Yeah. And as you say that, it occurs to me that the only way to ensure lasting change is to do that kind of work rather than to pummel your enemy into dust, because you know they’ll be back. Well, this has been a great conversation. I really deeply appreciate the work that you both do. I appreciate the contribution that you’ve made to our field and our craft. It is growing. It is something that did not exist when I got started in communications. And thanks to you both and to your colleagues and to your students, I think that the future is really bright for this work. And so just thank you again, Ann Searight Christiano and Angela Bradbery. [00:34:00] Their new book is called “Public Interest Communications Strategy for Change Makers.” Thanks to you both again.

Angela: Thank you so much for having us. It’s been fun.

Ann: Thank you, Eric, and thank you for everything you’ve done to build this field, and this podcast is a really important part of that.

Eric: Ah, shucks.

Post-Interview Discussion

Kirk: Hello. Thanks to you both. Here’s where I’m excited and mortified. This is the first textbook ever, “Public Interest Communication Strategy for Change Makers.” It’s the first textbook for bringing people into this field, and I was hearing you talk about all the topics and concepts and it’s so cool what Ann has done here. And also I’m sure it’s difficult, right? Because she’s working at the center, it’s externally funded, it’s not using funds from the state. I’m trying to wrap my mind around this work being done in Florida because of all the preconceived notions about Florida, you know. But here’s this great work that Ann’s doing in Florida. [00:35:00] She’s actually utilizing people, this incredible asset, the range of assets she’s developed as she’s done her work over the years. Here we are in 2025, finally producing the first textbook ever on how to deliver public interest communications programs. And that concept is both so exciting and so welcome and it’s clearly so necessary. But also, Eric, isn’t it just astonishing that it’s 2025 and we’re getting the first textbook in this field on this topic now? There may be another textbook—

Eric: Kirk, I hate to tell you this. Well, so I don’t think I have it. If there’s that, it may not be one that anyone has heard of. There are books.

Kirk: There are books, right? There are books and people have—and it’s like it’s a thing for firms even and people and practitioners, you write your book. But are there really textbooks that you can use in an academic setting that you can build course curriculum around? Because that’s how they’re promoting this—this is the first textbook of its kind.

Eric: I actually don’t know. [00:36:00]

Kirk: Yeah.

Eric: But all I know is that this is a textbook and it’s really good and it is written both because Ann and Angela are so-called practitioners, people who actually do stuff.

Kirk: Yeah.

Eric: As opposed to the old Woody Allen thing, like, you know, those who can’t do, teach, and those who can’t teach, teach gym. They actually can do and they can teach. And so if you can do, and you can teach, and you create a resource for people to both do and learn, you’re in good shape. And so I think that’s what makes this thing so useful for so many kinds of folks. And as I think it was Angela who said that it’s not just communications people, it’s advocates and other folks who are interested in learning about how to use communications to advance their work. And I think that’s what has just lots and lots and lots of applications and that’s what’s really cool.

Kirk: Yeah, and I really like Angela and Ann, both of their kind of origin stories for how they come into this work and [00:37:00] I think about Angela doing this journey where she’s coming from Public Citizen. She, of course, by the way, another former journalist, right? Coming into journalism ranks, goes to Public Citizen and then decides, “Hey, I’m going to try this out. I’m gonna go teach.” Have you ever had a job interview where one of your first tasks was to actually, in the interview process, teach a class? That thought of not being a teacher and then standing in front of a group of students being like, “Okay, let’s give this, try this out. Let me just take what I’ve learned in my life and see if I can bring this into a classroom setting” as part of an interview process. I mean that alone, Angela, I think, gets you the job that you could even walk into the room and get out of the room alive. I think that alone can get you the job.

Eric: I think everybody had to teach a class who was interviewing for that job, since it’s like a teaching job. But still, I’ve never had to do that. And I’m, you know, I’m not a teacher, so that’s why. Well, actually I was at the—you know, I taught junior high school in Japan. [00:38:00]

Kirk: Mm-hmm.

Eric: Which required absolutely no training whatsoever. The only requirement I had was to speak English.

Kirk: Mm.

Eric: Because I taught English. So, can you speak English? You have the job.

Kirk: That’s great. That’s great. Well, so they talked through how they’ve organized these two key aspects of the work and how they help center people’s thinking. First by talking through this notion of spheres of influence, which they’ve published about and they’ve written, and you know, so these are the spheres of policy, media, communities of influence, the market and industry, activism, social norms, and just as you skip through the tulips of those different spheres—

Eric: Tiptoe, you tiptoe through the tulips.

Kirk: Each of them, tiptoe through the tulips, right? Tiptoe through the spheres. And then what Angela talked about is that we actually need to bring a systems thinking sensibility to how we think about activating those spheres in support of change. And just that notion there, the idea of needing a textbook to ground our [00:39:00] thinking and help introduce people to this work, this thinking, how it works, the practice. How important it would be to have a resource like that just lands for me because I think about, and by the way, thank you for your true confessions on this podcast—your first communications job. “I knew nothing about communications. I wish I had something like this.” So I think about this—some people may say that I still know nothing about communications. Do you think it’s possible that none of us know anything about communications even today? No, I’m serious. Well, I’m just, because again, I think about these spheres of influence and how difficult it is. So this is what we need, right? We need textbooks, resources, and then teachers, thank you Ann and Angela, for helping bring us through this thinking, because guess what? It’s really complicated, like how you approach any one of these spheres and then think about how they relate to each other. This is complicated stuff.

Eric: Yes. No, I agree. The cool thing is that rather than—most of the time when we start thinking through a communication strategy, there are a lot of folks out there who will think through a so-called strategy. [00:40:00] You will say, “Well, what do you want to do?” And they say, “Oh, I want to raise awareness about this thing.” Or, “We want to start using social media,” or “Should we switch to Bluesky?” Like all these very random questions about how we’re going to communicate with a great big C in the front of it without thinking about where is my organization, where does it exist in the context of others? What kind of work are we trying to do? What sort of persuasion are we into? And what they give you are some tools to start thinking through who are we, what are we trying to achieve, and what context does our work occur? And I think that’s just really, really helpful. It’s the basic kind of building blocks of actual strategy, and they give you the tools to do that. And then you have to ask a whole bunch of other questions. What kind of things have to happen in order for [00:41:00] us to be able to succeed and that kind of thing. So, you know, the building blocks of strategy, which everybody should do no matter what. You have to question all the assumptions, and you have to figure out your role in helping to achieve these kinds of changes that you’re looking for, and that’s really a great way to help people think about strategy.

Kirk: Well, I wish we could enlist one of our foundation supporters to purchase this book and ensure that it gets sent out and delivered to every communications department for every organization of concern in the entire country. And here’s the reason why, because I think about, you know, as you point out in your comments too, like these communications jobs, they all have their entry-level components. And there’s a lot of folks that come into the field. This is their first job. You know, whatever their education or whatever their experience has been, that’s brought them to that organization, that position. And I think about in today’s media landscape, poor 20-something maybe sitting at a desk, maybe sitting in the other side of a Zoom call if [00:42:00] they’re in a hybrid setting, and somebody pops in—it’s a senior executive, tired, under stress, great pressure, budget constraints—and they look at that communications person and they say, “Get me on TikTok.” Right. And, rolling the tape all the way back decades and decades and decades, it used to be “get me on the New York Times” and roll me all the way back decades and decades and decades, it used to be, “get me at the National Press Club,” you know, but like, so there’s gonna be that one tactic, right? That just grabs our attention. It’s like, “Oh, that is what communications is.” And so when I see this concept of spheres of influence, this really simple way to walk people through it and how complicated and what a systems thinking it needs to be, it only helps that 20-something in that moment say, “You know, can we actually think about the why here a little bit?” It gives them some resources to say, “Hey, can we think a little larger about this?” I feel like we’ve done an incredible, tremendous service to the whole field if we just equip that person in that moment around that conversation. [00:43:00]

Eric: Yeah, your boss walks in or comes on Zoom. It’s harder—it’s harder to hand them a book on Zoom. Your boss walks into your office and says, “Hey, can we do a TikTok?” It’s like, “Here, read this book, boss, and then ask me about your TikTok.” That reminds me of the time when I was working at a nonprofit organization and the development director came in and said, “Hey, Eric, by the way, we need to do a video.” “Oh, just, oh, okay. You want me to do a video? All right.” We did the video. It was fun. “What do we do with this?” “I don’t know. It’s a video.”

Kirk: So they also talk about the back-of-the-envelope guide to setting strategy. And I love this notion. So you start with your spheres of what you’re trying to do, and now you’re into your questions. So the first question is, what is your organization trying to make true that isn’t true now, right? And what a great pause point for your organization. Like, “Okay, yeah, what is it? What are we trying to make true?” Second, who has to do something that they’re not doing now or stop doing for you to achieve that [00:44:00] goal? And isn’t that a gnarly, complicated, nuanced moment? Third, what would they believe that would motivate them to take action? Right? So this is like what are we driving towards, you know? And then finally, how will we get that message in front of them? And again, back to the “get me on TikTok,” it seems like still so much of our communication stuff is really about that fourth question, right? What are the tactics? Where do I have to go? And we just assume we know the messages because we have it intuitively in our minds. That first question, what are we actually trying to make true that isn’t true? What’s our goal? Then who actually has to act on that goal first to make progress for it. So I love how this back-of-the-envelope notion really just gets to the heart of the matter. And again, thinking about that poor 20-something who’s in that pressure moment? Just having four key questions that can help somebody walk through to get oriented in their thinking. Again, it’s just like making this stuff simple, digestible, but then using that as a way to start the conversation. It just feels so crucially important for people to have these resources. [00:45:00]

Eric: It’s like Passover questions for comms people. Yeah. I love how you said that. What makes this TikTok different from any other TikTok? No, it really is true. They are excellent questions that are very difficult to answer sometimes, and that’s why you have to go back to the drawing board and figure out how you can answer those questions with confidence. Because those assumptions that you make when you launch into some kind of communications activity often go unchallenged. And you really have to ask yourself those questions and answer them with fidelity and with authenticity because people, they just like, “Oh, this is gonna work. I know.” “Well, how do you know it’s gonna work?” “Just ’cause it’s gonna work.” And this is the kind of thing that applies a discipline that you need to apply. Also, given that resources and time are phenomenally valuable, any time spent or any money spent [00:46:00] making an assumption that you cannot prove or that you don’t have confidence about is wasted and we do not have time or money to waste.

Kirk: You know, on that count, the only thing that I didn’t hear you guys talk about, and I was wondering as you were going through this, you know, this textbook, right? So we need this textbook. We need to orient people to how to approach this thinking. But in reality, there’s another aspect of this, which is you can do the work, you can be clear, you can try to get as clear as you can. There is a concept around budget that holds all of this too. Right? And I think about that in terms of like, how do we help our leaders understand that part too? Because even that notion that you just talked about, like the time it takes to actually slow down and ask these questions with rigor and to be thoughtful about it, you know, I was—it’s an upsetting day in the United States. We won’t say specifically why, but there’s a lot of stuff happening on the federal policy front that’s so upsetting and just really challenging and. I’m sitting here thinking about our entire field and have we in our own minds deconstructed the communications thinking that went into the moment we’re in now. Like in terms of [00:47:00] the people that brought us to this point and like, what did their rooms look like and what were their theories, their theories of change, and how would they have answered the question? What are the six spheres? And, you know, what did people need to believe to support what’s being done? And you can kind of use these questions and tease out wow, like there are people who will sit in rooms and come up with some pretty awful answers, but actually be correct in their, at least from the standpoint of like, “Oh wow, if we cognitively trigger these responses in people, we can create these outcomes. Oh my gosh, we’re gonna do that.” That kind of a thing. But it still boils down to also I think, what is the budget? What’s the resource we’re gonna apply to do this work? And I wonder about that sometimes in our current information landscape because this is where I go back to, do any of us know anything about communications these days? Because I don’t think we even know clearly anymore what are the tactics being used against us? How are those tactics being framed? Exactly. Like we have some sneaking suspicions, but then what’s the price tag that’s going along with it? You know? Is all this horribleness being created for a million dollars a year or a billion dollars per year of spending pointed at us? [00:48:00] I mean, what do you think about that on just the spending and budget side?

Eric: All right. That was the—sorry, Cory Booker language. Sorry. This is a novel filibuster. Come on. So there was a question in there somewhere into a little bit of a—

Kirk: Yeah.

Eric: Hand wringing. Let me unpack your phenomenally circuitously challenged question statement filibuster thing. It’s like in improv, you just listen for the thing, the word you liked best and try and riff off that.

Kirk: I just went into it. There you go. Great.

Eric: So there was a question about budgeting. And budgeting was always a guess. You’re always trying to decide what things are gonna cost, and sometimes you do it based on what things cost last time, and sometimes you’re guessing about what things are gonna cost in the future. And I don’t know the answer to that other than that. Try and be as specific about your assumptions as possible, and then record it and figure out what things go, you know, how much time and how much money did anything cost. [00:49:00] Now, that other bit in the middle there that created the rant in the middle about the other side and what they’re doing. Yeah. They’re just trying to disrupt and they’re trying to like, how many lives can I make miserable today? And creating mayhem is probably faster and cheaper than building anything of value. I mean, for sure. So I don’t know exactly how you combat that other than that we are all going to have to build new movements that are enduring, that reach across traditional “us versus them” kind of things. And so like, what’s that look like? I don’t know. I don’t think anybody really knows, but we’re gonna have to start trying some things that undo that because this sucks.

Kirk: Well, look, you got to the heart of some really important stuff though when you were closing things up with Angela and Ann because you had that back and forth about listening and how important it is to listen and to listen to hear what our audiences care about. And I really thought it was poignant, their feedback saying, you know, you need to listen to people who are outside of your circles when you’re developing your messaging. [00:50:00] You know? Yeah. That’s for sure that your listening cannot just be the focus group in the office, and I do think there’s—and again, you know, back to the notion of doing this work in Florida, what a great place to be located to be doing this work for sure. You want to be in these places where you actually get to hear conversations that maybe land differently than they sit, let’s say, for instance, within a stone’s throw of San Francisco, which is where you and I both sit today.

Eric: Yeah. You know, so a bubble. Yeah, that’s right. It’s—

Kirk: It’s foggy.

Eric: It’s foggy and—but it’s a nice bubble. It’s—

Kirk: It’s foggy and cold on a day when it’s bitterly, brutally hot in other parts of the country. Right. Come to San Francisco people, it’s chill.

Eric: Yeah, right. That’s exactly right.

Kirk: I also liked the reference to the work that Ann did in the measurement and evaluation chapter, because that’s the other piece of this too. Right. I think we struggle with how to measure and evaluate. We struggle how to—right. And so just to have some clarity and guidance for people on how to approach that, that also just seems super important. [00:51:00]

Eric: I’m a huge fan of measurement evaluation, and I had a very interesting conversation with a colleague the other day who said, “Everything can be measured. Everything can be measured. And so just measure things.” And now it doesn’t mean that everything is going to be measured equally or that a lot of things are qualitative measurements. I rate this an X, you know, a seven or a 10 or something. But we are always trying—anything you can put a number to gives you a—I don’t know what you want to call it—a place to, something to hang on to. Something that gives, that you can refer back to. Everything can be measured and now that doesn’t mean that the thing that you measured, the measurement you come up with is the end all and be all. It can’t be, but that the practice of [00:52:00] trying to figure out what is this thing that I’m doing? How can I measure it? It can be measured in feeling, it can be measured in numbers. But the act of it is really valuable, is really helpful to you because again, you state your assumptions, you see what happens, and then you look back and say, “How did I do relative to my assumptions?” You can do that with almost anything and I think that that’s really important that just the act of it is good for you.

Kirk: Yeah, absolutely. Well, so much content and did you really read it, Eric? I was so proud of you and you’re like, “When I read the book—” I did. That’s incredible. I mean, that’s—

Eric: I did, that’s—

Kirk: So how did it feel reading a textbook on communications at this point in your career?

Eric: I felt like I was a little late. This is my point. I felt a little late. This is needed. It’s necessary. It’s too late. It’s too late for me, Kirk.

Kirk: Oh, it’s just in time. This is just in time.

Eric: So this is the “Public Interest Communication Strategy for Change Makers” was published in April. Please go check it out and find it. [00:53:00] Written by Ann Searight Christiano and Angela Bradbery, both from the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, the Center for Public Interest Communications. There it—what a treat. And Eric, this is Ann’s second trip to the podcast.

Eric: Yeah, that’s right. We’ve now—we’re starting to get second timers.

Kirk: And that’s so exciting because this is such great work. So man, Ann and Angela, thank you for all the work you’re doing. Thank you for forging new paths in this field for publishing and writing. I also loved by the way, Ann’s aside about how this practice group around the Center for Public Interest Communications that she just started publishing on some stuff and the phone started ringing and people started saying, “Hey, can I hire you?” I’m like, that’s just pretty cool, huh? It’s very cool. It’s very cool. So Eric, that was awesome. And Ann, Angela, my gosh. So generous of you to come join us on Let’s Hear It. That was really, really cool.

Eric: And Kirk, may I just say something?

Kirk: Yeah.

Eric: You do a very good job at this.

Kirk: This is so great. You’re very good at this. Look, come on, this work is important. These folks need a big, fat, positive [00:54:00] spotlight on them because they’re doing important work. And guess what? This is the kind of good news that I don’t know, I don’t know about you and your world, I need it. I need to hear from people like this. This is—I’m so glad there are people out here doing this work because man, we need it. We need it. But thank you for that. I appreciate it.

Eric: You’re very welcome.

Kirk: Well, thank you everybody. Thanks for coming to join us on Let’s Hear It and we will see you next time.

Eric: Okay, everybody. That’s it for this episode. Please let us know if you have any thoughts about what you heard today or people we should have on this show, and that definitely includes yourself. And we’d like to thank John Allee, the tuneful and inspiring composer of our theme music, our sponsor, the Lumina Foundation, and please check out Lumina’s terrific podcast, “Today’s Students, Tomorrow’s Talent,” and you can find that at luminafoundation.org. We—

Kirk: Certainly thank today’s guest and of course, all of you, and most importantly, thank you, Mr. Brown.

Eric: Oh, no, no, no, no. Thank you, Mr. Brown.

Kirk: Okay, everybody, till next [00:55:00] time.