Engage with emotions

Acknowledge the range of powerful emotions that people accumulated during the crisis and consider their potential consequences.

What: When communicating with audiences, acknowledge feelings and design your interventions with them in mind.

When: The Transition

Why: Crises usually lead to a build-up of emotions such as grief, anger, or suffering. These can take time to process and can result in collective expressions after the crisis has ended, such as civil unrest, rule breaking or hedonism.

Learn more: Read about the role of emotions in crises in The Disrupted Mind Part 1: Scientific Insights.

How to

Research and monitor the emotions of your audience

Try to understand early enough the emotional state(s) of your audience. You can rely on existing research or consider doing your own audience research in order to uncover what feelings dominate.

Common emotions include grief, or trauma-related emotions like depression, PTSD or anxiety. As outlined in The Crisis Timeline, the “Transition” phase of a crisis, when coupled with a surge of perceived or real inequality, can lead to an accumulation of anger which can result in social unrest. For example, the Covid-19 pandemic has created waves of anger as people slide back into poverty.

In other cases, the liberation from the feeling of constraint and frustration can release a wave of hedonism after a crisis. Crises can also create positive emotions like gratitude, joy or curiosity. These emotions will inevitably impact the mindset shifts within your community or audience.

Create emotion-based engagement

Emotions are often there to protect us or signal us something. For each emotion, there are better ways to engage with, as well as more counterproductive ones. Make sure you inform yourself about the needs of persons that exhibit a specific type of emotion that you have discovered in your audiences. Craft your engagement strategies and messaging based on that information.

Tools

Shifting emotions tool

The Mindworks tool to help you understand and shift the emotions of your audience.

Learn more →

Examples

Flight shame or train pleasure?

During the Covid-19 pandemic many people went a long time without flying – a temporary habit that environmentalists would love to become a new normal. However, people feel they have sacrificed a lot and we can expect an outburst of hedonism once the crisis ends. In this situation, changemakers would be more likely to be effective by redefining what creates pleasure rather than showing what people shouldn’t be doing. Taking emotions into account, creating a campaign on how more and more people find pleasure in taking train journeys or on holidays closer to home would be a more powerful alternative.

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