To catch a fish you have to reach the fish and this entails, among other things, knowing how deep they are swimming. Anglers call the span from surface to bottom the “water column,” and targeting exactly where the fish are is a matter of science: calculating water temperature and using fish-finding sonar, and experience and wisdom: when the surface water heats up the fish go deep unless, of course, you are fishing for fish who like warm water who then rise to the top. As Buck Perry, the inventor of the spoonplug, is said to have said, “They’re either shallow, deep, or somewhere in between.” Once you have a hunch of where the fish are you need to select the right lure for the depth. If they are up top, I use a dry fly, a popper or maybe a jerk bait. Down low, I go with weight, often dragging along the bottom of the lake or beach with some sort of sinker. And in the middle, a diving lure is a good bet, or possibly a fast retrieve on a jig. None of which guarantees I’ll actually catch a fish, but knowing whether to run deep or shallow makes my odds better.
Too often activists approach people as if they are all at the same level, making the same pitch to the person who has no knowledge of, or interest in our issues as we do with those who are already active and on our side. This one-size-fits-all usually results in confusing the uninformed or boring the committed. To combat this common tendency in our trainings, we borrow from a model used in public health campaigns. Getting someone to quit smoking, for instance, entails moving them through a series of steps, from basic awareness of the issue, to acting on that issue, to having their action on that issue become part of their identity. There are 12 steps in all, and it gets quite complicated, but the point I want to make here is simple: you need to know where the bulk of people are in these stages in order to design the most effective tactics to reach them. Tactics that get people’s attention and raise awareness (the fallback for many activists) may work well on people who are completely new to the issue, but trying to raise awareness of someone whose awareness is already raised is a waste of time. Most people today, for example, know that climate change is a real problem but the problem is that they don’t know what to do about it. Getting people to commit to action once their awareness is raised needs a particular approach, and so on up and down the ladder. Since people are not all at the same level, no one tactic will reach all of them, that’s why it’s good to use multiple tactics, aimed at multiple audiences, in every campaign.