Part IV Communicating findings 16.3.1. Get the idea, get the picture, get the details Tactical Tech advises that effective advocacy should allow the audience to:16 • Get the idea, which is about exposing the audience to the issue through techniques such as shock, humour, subversion and metaphor to make them think differently. • Get the picture, which is about helping the audience to understand your key points and enticing them to learn more about the issue, presenting evidence selectively to lend credibility to your main arguments, but without “dumbing them down”. • Get the details, which is about allowing the audience to explore the issue themselves by giving them all the information you have, in ways that are both useful to them and helpful to your advocacy. Thinking about these three layers of communication can be helpful in order to design effective advocacy materials to accompany your report. 16.3.2. Use “killer facts” Duncan Green, from Oxfam International, describes “killer facts” as punchy, memorable, headlinegrabbing statistics that can “cut through” the technicalities to inspire people up to change the world and “kill off” opposing arguments. Type of killer fact Example Big number: the single statistic showing the size of the problem. Armed conflict costs Africa $18 billion a year. Juxtaposition to highlight injustice and double standards. A woman’s risk of dying from pregnancyrelated causes is 1 in 18 in Nigeria and 1 in 8,700 in Canada. Absurdity can make a juxtaposition much more memorable. Every EU cow receives over $2 per day in support and subsidies, more than the income of half the world’s people. Surprising statistics. More people die of road traffic accidents in developing countries than die of malaria. Humanizing abstract issues. 12 million more children will go hungry by 2050 because of climate change. Human scale: Statistics can be so big that we can’t comprehend what they mean. They need to be re-scaled. UK aid spending per person per day is less than the price of a cup of coffee. Source: Duncan Green (2012), ‘How to write Killer Facts and Graphics – what are your best examples?’, From Poverty to Power [BLOG] Coming up with these kinds of facts is simply a matter of applying some basic calculations in a creative way. For example, say you find that 1.3 million people fall into poverty ever year. This is a large number that may be difficult to relate to. But you can scale down that number in a variety of different ways to make it easier for readers to relate to. First, you can divide it by the total population. If the population is 10.4 million people, that would mean one in eight people in the country fall into poverty every year. You could also calculate how many people fall into poverty every day, by dividing the annual figure by 365: that is, more than 3,500 people every day. 16 Tactical Tech, ‘Data & Design How-to’s Note 4: Visualisation basics – the three gets’, Notes on Data & Design [WEBSITE]. Chapter 16: Reporting, advocacy and follow up | 157