"The essence of the communication strategy is to recognize that people are very sensitive not only to what your message is, but to how it is communicated, and, perhaps most importantly, to who is transmitting it."

— Emile Short

Today, we return to the tools of persuasion. This is the last instalment in this blog's trilogy on the super yummy tactical notebook, Powerful Persuasion, by Emile Short. 

Persuasion is an inexhaustible theme in human rights and social change work, because it is such a needed skill. After exploring more in depth the "What" and the "Who" of persuasive communication, we now turn to the "How" in the delivery of your message, especially in face-to-face encounters.

In his notebook, Emile Short shows at length how much effort went into setting up respectful encounters that would allow change to really work its way in. As Short says: "It was essential to avoid taking a moral high ground. We could not be too critical, because in the end we knew any change of mind had to be voluntary." 

In his tactical notebook entitled Making Sense of the Information Wilderness, Saša Madacki says “even the smallest nongovernmental and governmental human rights organizations could be lost without a proper documentation system and an individual guiding it.”

If real life experience hasn't convinced you yet, it will eventually.