“I’m in a hurry.”
In our current national moment, when authoritarianism looms and the First Amendment is under attack, action needs to be taken. Support needs to be provided. Voices need to be raised. I’m not gonna lie, there’s not a whole lot that can be accomplished right now at an individual level, but that makes it all the more important for organizations to step up. Particularly ones with seemingly bottomless resources — any help that can be provided is helpful.
… ish.
Yeah, I say all that (with great sincerity), and then I turn around and nitpick a well-meaning organization that does have seemingly bottomless resources, but I promise I’m not doing it for the substance of the organization’s mission — it’s for the haphazard rollout that… Okay.
The haphazard rollout
So, yeah, Jane Fonda has been making the media cycle to announce the resurrection of the Committee for the First Amendment, which was first organized by Hollywood celebrities during the McCarthyist Red Scare. This new incarnation features hundreds of A-listers pledging to “stand together — fiercely united — to defend free speech and expression.”
10/10, 100%, I’m in.
And judging from Fonda’s interviews, the group is hard at work educating themselves and intending to do things, those things being coming up with narratives, coming up with creative ideas, coming up with creative ways to Christopher Columbus the concept of nonviolent resistance, and doing webinars about autocracy.
So you maybe get the idea that the rollout didn’t have a ton of strategy behind it — that it was one of those things where you get so excited about your new thing that you take it live before it’s fully ready for primetime. I totally get that. But: Here are some tips for making that rollout less bad than it could be.
Tips for doing better than that
Roll it out when it’s ready, not when it’s needed.
(Yeah, I realize that sounds kind of bonkers in our current desperate moment — I’ll get to that in a minute.) If the moment demands action and you don’t yet have any action to provide, launching your intent to act doesn’t really serve that moment. Best case, it gets totally ignored, and worst case, it pulls focus from groups that actually are taking effective action. Waiting is fine. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast — your time will come.
Partner with a group that actually is acting in service of the moment.
(See? I got there.) This committee has resources social activists would trade a kidney for — a massive collective platform and the kind of money only someone who gets a million dollars just for waking up in the morning can provide. If you don’t have your own plan set up yet, partner with a group that does have stuff going on, share what you have, and, yeah, borrow their legitimacy. You can provide the much-needed resources the group is desperate for — on account of, again, you’re rich and famous — and then already have visibility when you’re ready to roll out your own stuff.
Have talking points.
Go into any media interaction prepped with talking points about your organization’s mission, what it’s doing, and what it plans to do. It’s great to have even more answers than that in your back pocket, but those three are the bare minimum and non-negotiable. You have to have more than “have creative ideas” and “stand united against bad stuff.”
What are you fighting for? What do you hope to accomplish? Who are you fighting for? Who’s fighting alongside you? When you’re in the spotlight, you get to tell your story your way, so be sure you know what your story is — and you can articulate it clearly and briefly. (And you know which talking points go with which questions. When an interviewer asks a question and the subject goes off on some unrelated, clearly canned response, it’s like those sideline interviews after a football game where every answer is, “I just went in knowing my guys were with me and we had to leave it all on the field.”)
Have a CTA (or a few).
You have to have some kind of call to action. It doesn’t have to be huge — you don’t have your own thing fully set up yet, so your CTA can just be pointing people toward things that already exist. Point listeners toward resources to learn about the history of the First Amendment and actions against it. Encourage them to read some Orwell and Huxley. Tell them to call their congressperson. Direct them to donate to your partner organization or others (and the other organizations thing is important, because “donate to our collective literal hundreds of rich celebrities to support our cause” is going to get you the attention you don’t want).
If you don’t have a CTA for your audience, the only purpose of your publicity campaign is to publicize the fact you put together this organization of famous people that doesn’t actually do anything yet.
Your time will come.
Waiting is fine. It’s not like opportunities to help are going to dry up any time soon. (God, if they would, though.) No matter how excited you are about the potential of your new initiative — and again, I get it, I’m hardly the queen of delayed gratification — you have time to do your rollout right, come into it with a strategy, and know what you stand for and what you’re doing so you can share it with the world.
Your thing is going to be good for the world — and I say that with absolute certainty, because I have to have something to believe in or else the single remaining load-bearing wall of my faith will collapse and leave me amid emotional rubble — and it’s only going to be its goodest when you take the time to get it ready before you roll it out.
Because seriously, I’m counting on you, no pressure or anything but the brittle shards of my mental health are in your hands.