Designing and Selling Policies, Part 2

Last time I mentioned a few elements of creative social policy, creating one and selling it. You want to be able to identify the real problem, brainstorming, and borrowing ideas. This post includes notes on designing social policies and selling them.

Design Thinking - Before getting too deep into creating a new policy or advocating a policy consider the resources that would be available to implement the policy. Of course the most important resource is going to be money, but people are also important - will enough people be available for enough hours to actually implement the policy? When in doubt it might be wise to assume that there won’t be. What elements of the social environment need to be accounted for in thinking about this new policy we need? Consider values, beliefs, education level, technology, physical infrastructure, and general economic conditions. You will have to determine exactly what factors need to be considered in each particular situation.

Selling ideas - Whatever the policy idea is, someone else will have to implement the policy, by voting for it, creating new regulations, or something else. You’ll invariably have to depend on selling the idea through advertising, public education efforts, demonstrations, and other means. Search various combinations of audience, location (to place ads or stage demonstrations or whatever) and medium. YouTube videos of bawdy “activist” songs might be just the thing for your particular cause and target audience.

Businesses sell things all the time, often just an image or feeling. Maybe stealing ideas from the business world (sidewalk sales, advertorials, et cetera) would work. An adversarial is a promotional essay that reads like an editorial.