When people embrace a project, they embrace the benefits. Then they can become an advocate for us.
When they embrace the project, they embrace the benefits, they can now become an advocate for us.
In this episode, the delicate work begins. John lays out his techniques for embracing those members of the community who will become the most important advocates for the project.
Takeaways and Teachable Moments
SHOW THEM WHAT IS GOING ON AND LET THEM DRAW CONCLUSIONS.
WELL-INFORMED COMMUNITY MEMBERS CHANGE MINDS AT COFFEE SHOPS FOR YOU.
CONTINUE TO EMBRACE PAST THE FIRST ENGAGEMENT AND MAKE IT ONGOING.
ONCE YOU START INFORMING THEM YOU HAVE TO KEEP THEM IN THE LOOP SO THEY FEEL THAT THEY BELONG TO THE TEAM.
EMBRACE MUST BE A NEVER-ENDING BEHAVIOR.
EMBRACE IS ABOUT TIMING. KEEP THE INTERVALS CLOSE AND DON’T IGNORE THEM.
YOU CAN’T EMBRACE THEM AT A TABLE WHERE YOU ARE COLLECTING NAMES OR REGISTERING PEOPLE AT AN EVENT, IT IS FOR LATER.
Embrace is the process of finding and creating advocates from within the community. John describes how to locate and inform the most likely individuals who want to know more. The odds are usually that whether you realize it or not there are already a majority of people who will be in favor of the project once they get the right information.
This is about embracing the 70% of people you can get on your side, using all of your energy to focus on them and not expend energy on the 30% you will never get on your side. The best chance of changing the minds of those 30% against you is to have well-informed community members in favor of the project, and they will be the ones who ultimately change the minds of the opposition, not you.
Overcome the Opposition: Embrace
Mark Sylvester: John Davies has a method, an approach he systematically developed over a career spanning three decades. He's proven it to be invaluable for dozens of industries and thousands of projects facing public acceptance. Up until now, the method has only been available to his select client list. John is unpacking his insight and wealth of knowledge to overcome opposition and earn public support for the first time right here.
Throughout these episodes, we'll take a deep dive, step-by-step with John, into his strategies to overcome opposition and create support. Nothing is free in this world, but good ideas are priceless. This show could be just the thing you've been looking for. I'm Mark Sylvester. Now, let's get started and talk with John. John, welcome back. I'm really intrigued with where we're going and how you coupled acknowledge and contrast. Now we get to the third step, which is around embracing. Now who are we embracing, embracing the idea, embracing the audience? Who do we embrace?
John Davies: Now we're really embracing all the benefits. We're wrapping our arms around what happens. We're trying to do it without just giving numbers. For example, we're going to embrace the benefit family farmers, what this does. We're not going to give all the numbers and lay out the numbers here. We're going to embrace that in this community, the number of family farms has continued to decline at a rate of 10% a decade or 15% a decade, depending on what the crop was.
Mark Sylvester: That's going the number route.
John Davies: Well, no, but that's happened. We have an opportunity to help them.
Mark Sylvester: Oh.
John Davies: We don't get into the dollar amount here. That's the next step, the bridge, but the idea here is that we're starting to embrace the benefits of wind. Clean air. Clean water. Everything's better from renewable, but also, it helps the local farmers and that they have a new crop, which is wind, that they can start harvesting.
Mark Sylvester: Huh. I hadn't thought about that. We're harvesting the wind.
John Davies: Exactly.
Mark Sylvester: Have you said that?
John Davies: Oh yeah, that's been the cover of a brochure.
Mark Sylvester: Really?
John Davies: Yeah, or of a fact booklet, yeah. Harvesting the wind.
Mark Sylvester: I'm curious when did that start? Because that concept like that really lands with farmers, I bet.
John Davies: Well it does, and being the geniuses we are, we asked the question when we're talking to them on the phone.
Mark Sylvester: Sure.
John Davies: About what they think could be good about wind, and how it would tie in with family farms. They go, "Yeah, it's just another crop to harvest."
Mark Sylvester: Oh.
John Davies: Being the geniuses we are, we read that line and circled it in red and started using it. They gave us that line. Of course, they understand it.
Mark Sylvester: Which is another reason for the research, and really the raw research, where you're listening to them. You said it earlier, the words and the music.
John Davies: Right.
Mark Sylvester: What they said, how they said it. Those little pearls are buried inside of that.
John Davies: Right. I wish when we did our interviews, that instead of reading the verbatims, I could listen to them all, but you can't record conversation. I would love to hear it because you want to hear the energy level. A phone call, it sometimes lasts an hour, because people keep talking, it is pretty exciting when they get into the key point.
Mark Sylvester: Right.
John Davies: They get excited.
Mark Sylvester: You can hear them leaning in, right?
John Davies: Exactly. You can hear them pacing and doing whatever they're doing, but they get excited about certain things, and other things, they give you a phrase. Sometimes they give you three paragraphs. That's when you start paying attention.
Mark Sylvester: One of the things that I've noticed about you over the years is you use storytelling a lot. That's a big part of the way you communicate is through a story. It makes me think that when we're embracing the benefits and we're not going to do facts, do we go to story?
John Davies: We do. The challenge with story is how to put that into a written format.
Mark Sylvester: Oh.
John Davies: It'd be great to be able to meet with everyone. That's one of our challenges is to do the story. It's the tone of how we write. It's the simplicity.
Mark Sylvester: Give me an example of the tone, so you mean tone of voice.
John Davies: In the written word ...
Mark Sylvester: Right.
John Davies: And what it is, is we don't use adjectives or adverbs a lot.
Mark Sylvester: Oh.
John Davies: We use verbs and nouns. Why would we do that? Because we want them to use the adjectives and adverbs. "Oh, that's a great idea. Oh, that would be good for us. That's outstanding. That's awesome."
Mark Sylvester: Let them draw that conclusion.
John Davies: Let them. You show them what's going on and let them draw the conclusion.
Mark Sylvester: I love that. You also though when I'm thinking of embracing the benefits, how do you get the team to embrace the benefits?
John Davies: Which team are you talking about?
Mark Sylvester: I'm talking about the communications team.
John Davies: Well, that's really hard.
Mark Sylvester: Well that's what I'm saying. You would think that would be like they're doing the comms on this project, and yet you've said that's an audience itself.
John Davies: It's hard because they're on the frontline. I'm not out meeting people, and I'm not wearing the team t-shirt. I don't have the name of the company on my t-shirt or on my jacket or on my hat.
Mark Sylvester: Right.
John Davies: When they get attacked, they take it personally, and they want to respond to that attack.
Mark Sylvester: Oh.
John Davies: When you respond to that attack, you're buying into the attack. To get them to agree to stay on our message and to pivot to our messaging, which is you're embracing the good things about wind. What happens so many times with wind and trying to earn approval for a wind farm, is it becomes the same as trying to rebuild an old coal fire plant. They get back to the same arguments. They don't go back to the benefits of wind, the baseline benefits, the environmental benefits of wind, the reason the 71% of America likes wind.
Mark Sylvester: You've said before that when you're talking with the top executives in the wind industry and how you just said, “Everyone wants wind, you said it, except the wind companies.”
John Davies: Well, so many people use wind turbines, and it's these beautiful things. Then in the wind industry because they've been beaten up, two out of three, four out of five, who knows what that number is going to be soon, they get very defensive about what they're doing because it's hard. Their future is tied to it, and they find that they get defensive, and they're not as proud of what they're doing sometimes.
Mark Sylvester: When you're working with one of those executives, and they've brought you in because they buy into this method, and you guys are going to come in there. You sense that, what coaching do you give them? Because now, I'm thinking the person listening to the podcast now maybe has one of those executives on the team, and how could they coach them?
John Davies: Well, what you're doing is really good for the society. What you're doing is generally accepted by the large majority of our society. You've got to keep talking to them and not talk to the group that is chasing you through town. Because a group that is fighting you are motivated by pure anger with everything, and you just happen to be the cause of the day, or they're being paid to do this by someone. At the end of the day, you got to talk to the people who already support you and are accepting of you and stop trying to change a mind, like performing brain surgery, on people who disagree with you.
Mark Sylvester: That brings up a different question then is I don't want to focus on it. If I've got 74%, I don't want to focus on that 26%.
John Davies: 71%, that would be 29, not to do the math for you.
Mark Sylvester: I'm not a math guy.
John Davies: Well obviously.
Mark Sylvester: I talk for a living. Do you spend any time addressing that? Do you acknowledge that opposition?
John Davies: There are two groups. There's limited resources, resources being time and money.
Mark Sylvester: Okay, right.
John Davies: We want to go to the people who are likely to be supportive and get them motivated, got to motivate them to be part of our team, then we can educate them, and then they will go to work for us. They will change the mind of the people that haven't made up their mind. They will actually change the mind of opponents. They change the mind of more opponents than they do the undecideds because they have a conversation over the back fence, at the coffee shop.
Mark Sylvester: Sure, sure.
John Davies: They're able to change people's minds more than we can. We come in with a company clipboard and show up at their door.
Mark Sylvester: Right.
John Davies: We're not going to change their mind. We're a suspect.
Mark Sylvester: Right.
John Davies: But, their neighbor who they trust and like says, "Hey, you know, maybe you should rethink this. I mean, this is a pretty good deal for our community."
Mark Sylvester: Is that where embracing turns into engagement?
John Davies: Exactly. What happens, and we'll talk about this when we unpack the strategic steps to do this, is one of our goals is to take someone who supports us and turn them into an advocate because support means, "Yeah." It's like ...
Mark Sylvester: "I'm behind it."
John Davies: It's a thumbs up on Facebook. That doesn't mean you're going to do anything. We need to turn them into being an advocate. An advocate in this regard is talking to their neighbors, talking to friends, being someone who believes this for sure. When they embrace it, they embrace the benefits, they can now become an advocate for us.
Mark Sylvester: Do you have a trick? There's a call to action there, right? Where I don't think you can actually say, "And go talk to your neighbor." You can’t actually say that, so how does that happen?
John Davies: That's our continued engagement.
Mark Sylvester: Oh.
John Davies: I was a bachelor until I was 40. I learned how to go on a date and then blow it because I didn't call someone back for a month or two because I was so busy. It was my political campaign era where I was busy 24/7. You can't engage with someone and then leave them. They're not going to do anything for you. It's like going on a date, you probably should send flowers, make a phone call, check in, go on another date, seal the deal. You got to keep engaged with them. You got to have a relationship with them and never stop.
Mark Sylvester: That's really an important bit there. Let's go back to your advertising days when they said you had to have seven touchpoints with that consumer, around that message.
John Davies: Well, it's interesting because that was the old advertising. It's also fundraising. When you raise money and someone gives you money, you want to say "thank you" seven different ways.
Mark Sylvester: Oh.
John Davies: When we're doing this, first off, you become a supporter. We want to thank you. We want you to keep you up to day. You say, "Hey, I'm in." Then we don't tell you anything, and you read in the newspaper that we did something. You're like, "Well, I'm not part of the team." If you know things before other people do, you're kept in the game. We tell you that we're really having a hard time. "We're a little frustrated, and you know, if you got a chance, could you help us here," or to say "We're moving forward with this," whatever it is. Keep them engaged. Email now makes this so much cheaper.
Mark Sylvester: Sure.
John Davies: If people will share their email, we have a whole different game, and you don't send them a 15 panel email. You send them a very short, straight-forward email.
Mark Sylvester: Engagement is an ongoing thing.
John Davies: Never ending.
Mark Sylvester: No.
John Davies: Never ending game.
Mark Sylvester: Never ending. Our listener is trying to think like, what could they do today to think about embracing the benefits? Is it just simply make a list of them?
John Davies: Well, first off, you should have a list, yeah. That's important, but the other is going to the county fair and setting up a booth with a little flyer about your company and what you're doing is not engaging. That's not engaging at all. You look like the guy selling all the other wares up and down the county fair. You want to get the name of people. If you get the name of people at the county fair to say you like it, you want to start calling them. Someone at the table needs to start calling them the next week and say, "Hey, you want to get together and maybe we get a group of people? We'll have some coffee. We'll have a lunch. Let's talk about this," and then you have a very well put together presentation to show them. You tell them what you're doing, and you listen to them. Engaging them at the county fair as they walk by is not engagement.
Mark Sylvester: No, that's selling them Kewpie dolls.
John Davies: Yes, exactly.
Mark Sylvester: John, thank you so much. I learned a lot on this, and I know our listener did. Next week we're going to get that, the fourth step there in the Davies Method on the strategy side. We're going to talk about how we bridge that conversation.
John Davies: We are. That'll be great.
Mark Sylvester: Thanks John. Thank you for listening. It's now your opportunity and responsibility to use the method today. You've completed one segment toward understanding the Davies Method. We look forward to you subscribing. Join us as we uncover and explain the nuances of John's distinctive approach. For more episodes, visit thedaviesmethod.com. I'm Mark Sylvester recording at the Pullstring Press Studios in Santa Barbara, California.
Start here with WIND
SHARE THE VISUAL version OF THE DAVIES METHOD
Check out our blog for more insights and fresh content about how to gain support for your wind farm.
READ THE LATEST BLOG POST