Help shape crisis experiences

Try to identify emerging day-to-day experiences that best connect to your issue and your mindset objective, then craft messages that combine both. For example, if your goal was to normalise and promote cycling during Covid-19, one way of shaping the crisis experience for your audience would be to work on establishing temporary or permanent bike lanes in your cities, whilst linking it to the necessity to avoid crowded buses or metros during the pandemic.

If emergency regulations force communities to live differently, for example during lockdowns or curfews, you have an opportunity to propose how this new temporary normal is designed. Equally, if new habits emerge that align with your goals, you can support their pick up and create positive experiences for the affected communities. For example, improving the working from home or learning from home experiences during the pandemic. 

Try to design a communication strategy that allows your participants to share their experiences with others and look for ways to create dialogue rather than broadcasting, for example, using forums, videos, live streams or chat functions. The Defining Moments engagement rules can also be useful here when designing formats of digital or face to face interactions. Lastly, gamification can also make it easier for people to engage and encourage longer-term engagement. 

The shared experiences of a lasting crisis and the meanings that people attribute to them alter and reshape our cultures.  Nevertheless, we often tend to fall back to old patterns of thinking. When a new behaviour or norm is coupled with an opportunity to create an explanation that matches our worldviews, it is more likely to stick. Thus providing space and shaping positive reflection on these experiences in a way that facilitates self-discovery yet gives pointers is important.

This can best be done by regular conversations with a small part of your audience and, when time allows, sporadic surveys. Use these to find out if their experiences are impacting the mindset factors you set out to change (e.g. their emotional reaction or the creation of norms or narratives). Adjust and redesign experiences if they aren’t. This sensing will also provide you content that you can use to share stories about the emerging changes (See recommendation 5 and 6).