This week we made a big step forward in understanding our audience. Leverage public communication has been wonky for years, and that’s in big part because we haven’t understood who our audience should be. There’s more to understand, but we expect Leverage messaging to be much more cohesive from here forward.
The Leverage audience is, for lack of a better term, aspiring world leaders. That sounds like a fluffy label or like we’re in direct competition with the World Economic Forum, and maybe both of those things are true ;). The fact is, people in the Leverage audience have a set of priorities and perspectives that make them into a unified group. The overarching and unifying factor is that the people want to responsibly affect global affairs, taking into account the dimensions of science and technology.
This means our audience is quite open. Someone could be working in a biotech lab or on an education startup, or be an artist or billionaire — they just have to be focused on the goal of responsible governance while trying to take into account the big picture.
It also may mean that our audience is currently small. Lots of people are working in biotech labs, but if you’re not thinking about the potential consequences of your work, you’re not in our audience. Lots of people are artists or billionaires (or at least, millionaires), but if you aren’t thinking about how to make the whole thing better, you’re not part of the audience.
A decade ago, we thought about this as “improving the world.” The audience, when we did try to communicate with people, was people who wanted to improve the world. When Leverage started doing public communication in earnest in 2019, we picked as our audience the “interested public.”
It makes sense to focus on the interested public, at least as a first guess, because we’re in a democracy and everyone is anchoring off of the public perspective. It’s the most available common denominator, and you don’t have to pander, because the public is actually quite sophisticated. Of course, most of the public doesn’t care much about introspection or metascience or bottlenecks, so we limited it to the interested public.
It turns out, focusing on the interested public was actually right. The thing we missed was that the “interested public” and “aspiring world leaders” are actually the same people for us. The people from the public who should be interested in our work are the people who want to take responsibility on a larger scale, and everyone we’ve met who seems like an aspiring global leader is a member of the public.
This realization is going to change our messaging and communication substantially. Previously, we thought the “interested public” were members of the public who had an interest in the topics we cover. We research the history of science and introspection, for instance, so we thought we were communicating to people interested in those (as well as researchers, of course).
This “topic-based” approach is wrong for two reasons, however. First, we actually aren’t trying to write for people with an “idle interest” in given topics. If we were, we’d write history of science tweets for people with lots of fun history of science facts, because the history of science is cool (which it is). We actually tried that at one point. It was fun, but it’s not actually what we’re trying to do, so we didn’t keep it up.
Second, our programs don’t actually limit our focus very much at all. As part of Bottlenecks, for instance, we looked at bottlenecks to safe nuclear energy, which led us to nuclear geopolitics, history since World War II, and non-proliferation treaties. Our current map of what’s going on with nuclear covers everything from Stuxnet to fears of radiation to perceptions of regulatory capture to major geopolitical rivalries with a nuclear undercurrent.
So we’re not topic-based. The topic, if there is one, is how people who want to take responsibility for the future of the world should think about science and technology. If you’re interested in that topic, you’re in our audience. Because whether you like it or not, you’re an aspiring global leader, or at least, the very beginnings of one. ;)
Until next time,
Geoff