Across Europe, civil society plays a crucial role in defending rights and representing the interests of the public. Yet in many countries, the work of NGOs is being deliberately undermined by hostile governments. Instead of listening to the needs of ordinary people and acknowledging their mistakes, they use smear campaigns, polarisation and disinformation to quash NGO’s efforts to hold them accountable.

With authoritarianism on the rise across Europe, engaging the public when their rights are in danger and mobilising widespread support is harder than ever. With this project, we’re helping NGOs push back against authoritarianism by growing support for the causes they work on. By teaching NGOs the skills to communicate with the public in a way that shows how their causes positively impact their lives, this project shows them how to grow their supporter base.

A research-centred approach to human rights messaging

To help address these challenges, Liberties designed a capacity-building project for NGOs to address issues within the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights catalogue and strengthen relationships between civil society organisations at the national and local level.

To kickstart this initiative, Liberties partnered with four network members - Civil Rights Defenders in Sweden, the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union in Hungary, the Centre for Peace Studies in Croatia, and CILD in Italy -strengthening their ability to protect the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. Funded by a Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) grant, this project set out to give the organisations new communication skills and equip them with research-backed messaging guides so that their campaigns impact a wider public audience.

Each partner organisation was trained in how to message in a way that grows public support for civil society, as well as on country-specific topics: migration (Sweden and Croatia), access to citizenship (Italy) and the environment (Hungary).

A central aim of the project was to improve the knowledge and skills of the four partners in persuading people to join their cause. This was achieved through improving their understanding of the perspectives of people outside their supporter base and building tested messages that resonate with their values.

In order to develop this understanding, Liberties led two data-collection phases of the project to learn more about the perspectives of non-supporter audiences.

Understanding the local context

The first of these data-collection phases was a social media narrative analysis. With the support of Comms Hub, a pro-democracy strategic communications foundation, our partner organisations were trained on how to select and refine keywords related to civic space and their specific topic in their local context. These keywords were used to generate a dataset capturing conversations on civic space and country-specific topics across Italy, Hungary, Croatia, and Sweden on Facebook.

Once the datasets were refined and organised, this provided a diverse snapshot of sentiments, terms, and contexts to be analysed for insights into public perceptions, narrative trends and the impact of the topics in each country. A more detailed explanation can be found in this case study on selecting keywords to map audience perceptions of civic space on Facebook, which also serves as a guide for undertaking social media narrative analysis.

The insights gained from this analysis phase were used by Liberties to develop prototypes of country and topic-specific messaging guides. These guides outline the principles of persuasive messaging, give concrete examples of narratives that have tested well and provide practical tips for creating communication content that audiences can connect with.

Research-based training for better campaigns

The second phase of the project involved train-the-trainer workshops facilitated by Liberties, in which partner organisations received research-based training on how to create persuasive messages and develop these into communication materials and campaign content. The workshops combined human rights communication research with communication design, allowing partners to test ideas, refine messages and learn how to adapt them across different visual media formats. To elevate the written narratives into visual content using graphic design tools, Liberties teamed up with a creative copywriter, Jasmin Sharrer, to facilitate the workshop.

This learning process also included training to deepen the knowledge of the project partners to allow them to lead their own persuasive messaging workshops for local NGOs informed by the results of message testing in the focus groups.

The project partners collaborated to develop written narratives, and then converted these into creative products for use in campaigns, such as social media posts, visuals and videos on their chosen topics. Despite most participants being unfamiliar with developing campaign-ready visual content, they were fast learners, and the creative atmosphere in the room was palpable. Having partners from different NGOs learning in sync allowed them to gain a deeper understanding of each other’s unique contexts as well as common challenges, and it created more learning opportunities as they took inspiration from one another’s creative output.

By the end of the persuasive messaging crash course, the four partners had created genuinely moving and visually engaging content that approached human rights through the lens of storytelling. After further refining these communication materials back home in the weeks that followed, they were ready to be tested in the next phase of the project - focus groups.

Testing Persuasive Narratives

While there’s plenty of evidence and practice to tell us what needs to go into a message to make it persuasive, what performs well is always specific to a local context. So the only way to be sure if a certain message works is to test it, which is why the focus group component of this project was so crucial.

To understand how the materials perform in practice, Liberties arranged for focus groups to take place in Sweden, Croatia, Hungary and Italy in their local language, facilitated by Matthew MacWilliams, a scholar and expert on authoritarianism. Participants were screened to make sure we spoke to the target audience we were interested in learning more about: people with a mix of positive and negative opinions on our topics, or ‘undecideds’. These are people who can be swayed in favour or against our causes, depending on the messaging that reaches them. Winning them over is crucial to getting a majority public support for fundamental rights-related causes.

The focus groups allowed us to understand the level of knowledge participants had on these topics, what misunderstandings existed, their associations with specific terms and, most importantly, what kinds of messages were most effective at helping them appreciate how fundamental rights deliver things that they find important.

Based on our analysis of the focus group discussions, Liberties refined the recommended messaging included in the messaging guides and training materials to be used by the project partner to train local NGOs. Watching the focus groups was also helpful for our partners, especially for training local NGOs. Our partners are asking local NGOs to radically change the way they message, which can feel risky. But being able to point to how their target audience reacted to traditional versus the new persuasive messaging gave our partners hard evidence that they could rely on.

Scaling impact to local NGOs

To support long-term impact, Liberties created slide decks and messaging guides for each partner on their chosen topic, which our partner organisations translated into their language and used to deliver training to local NGOs. This maximises the benefit of the message testing and persuasive messaging techniques, giving local organisations the skills, knowledge and tools they need to engage public audiences more effectively.

By combining data collection, training and testing, the project equips civil society groups with tools to reach beyond existing supporters, resist authoritarian trends, and build broader coalitions to protect civic space and fundamental rights. Liberties also hopes to encourage other human rights activists to follow this research-based approach to messaging by sharing the resources and best practices.

If you would like to learn more about creating campaigns that impact people outside your supporter base, Liberties can provide training that guides you through crafting persuasive narratives and then turning them into campaign-ready messages and visual material. Get in touch to learn more.

Resources for activists who want to learn more about persuasive messaging:

Case Study: Selecting Keywords to Map Audience Perceptions of Civic Space on Facebook

Sample Message on Migration from Civil Rights Defenders in Sweden

Croatian Partner Interview: Bringing Back Hope and Optimism to Human Rights Campaigns

Swedish Partner Interview: Learning To Bring A Human-To-Human Connection Into Human Rights Messaging