Hi, everyone. So do you remember that awesome talk yesterday I bet you do that Molly Crabapple gave? And remember she was talking about compassion fatigue? I was like, bingo, yes. I’m going to be talking about a related problem. Patent fatigue. It turns out that people in wealthy nations tend to believe that the situation in the developing world hasn’t improved, even though they’ve spent a whole lot of money on it. And so with public opinion like this, there’s not a lot of incentive for news organizations to cover the global development beat, which is also a very expensive beat to cover. So how many of you have heard of the Millennium Development Goals? Okay, this is a higher proportion than the typical US national sample. I guess I’m not surprised by that. But still a lot of you did not raise your hands. This is the blueprint that the UN developed in 2000 for a 15-year global development plan. It was really the structure for most global development spending in the world for the last 15 years. All the member states signed on. And in 2015, they issued a final report. And lo and behold, there was a lot of good news in there. Now, some of these goals were crazy ambitious, eradicate extreme poverty. No, they did not do that. But did you know they reduced it by 33 percent? Also, they hoped to achieve universal primary education. Now, that’s tough. But they’ve actually taken it to 91 percent in the developing world. And when it comes to gender equity in education, they actually met all those targets. There were lots of other victories. A huge dip in the mortality rate among young children, among women who were giving birth to babies. And maybe you have heard some of the news about the huge declines in HIV, malaria, TB. The goal for safe water access was actually met in 2010, five years ahead of schedule. And even though public opinion in wealthy nations is to not increase foreign aid, somehow they raised it by 66 percent. So who’s covering this beat? For one, the Guardian. They entered into a partnership with the Gates Foundation in 2010 to try to focus more public attention on what they felt was a very important thing, something that’s affecting the lives of billions of people around the world, the MDGs as they’re called, and global development in general. So they’ve been doing all this long-term reporting on these complex issues. They’ve created opportunities for communication, community, and interaction. And of course, they wanted to know, are they actually raising awareness? Are they increasing knowledge? And are they encouraging engagement in global development topics? So they approached us at the Media Impact Project to help them figure this out. And we were really excited, because it’s the Guardian and it’s Gates. That’s pretty awesome. And we knew we’d have a chance to do some really rigorous mixed methods research, which makes academic geeks like me really happy. So what we did is we started with a content analysis, a very detailed taxonomy of all the articles that had been written in that section of the site, the global development section of the site. Then we accessed all the web analytics for the Guardian site. We knew exactly who went to the global development section and who did not, and how long they stayed there, what they looked at. And then of course, we had to put together a survey in order to ascertain whether awareness levels had increased, knowledge levels, and also whether anybody was taking action that we obviously wouldn’t be able to read from the tea leaves of the web analytics. Now this wasn’t just a normal survey. This was a smart survey that was targeted because we had web behavior data. So that meant that we could make sure that we were able to harvest people who had very specific patterns of behavior on the website. Our two main targets were of course people who had visited the global development section of the site, but we also wanted to have a matched comparison group, a control group that was very similar to those who had visited the global development section of the site. And lo and behold, they have a huge world news section. So we were able to find a bunch of people there from our 8,000 respondents who were perfect matches for the people in our global development population. That meant we could figure out whether there was some difference between these two people based on media exposure. And the results were pretty clear. We found out that people who visited the global development site, compared to very similar people who had just never wandered over there, were more aware of the Millennium Development Goals. They were more knowledgeable about them. We had a little quiz. They were more likely to have taken two of the engagement actions that we were curious about. They were more likely to have signed some petition related to a global development topic. And they were more likely to admit that they had changed their minds based on Guardian reporting. So this was excellent news for Gates and Guardian. All the things that they were hoping to do were being accomplished. But of course as researchers, we were really curious about who within our cohort of 8,000 survey respondents was most likely to have taken lots of the actions that we asked about, not just those two. What would be the best predictor for somebody to take these actions? Or in other words, who cared enough to translate awareness into action? So we had a lot of data. We had a lot of theories. We were wrong, wrong, wrong about everything. We finally realized that the linchpin was this question that, thank God, we had included in the survey. How much of a difference do you think an individual could make to reduce poverty in poor countries? It turns out that people who think that individuals have a lot of agency are more likely to take action. This is known as self-efficacy. We felt that we had discovered that the link between awareness and taking action was a sense of self-efficacy, which is a sense of personal agency, that you feel capable of doing something and so you’re more likely to do it. So you might think, well, that’s interesting, but how does that apply to a public interest communicator? Well, it turns out that media plays a very special role in people’s appraisal of their own self-efficacy. This guy, Albert Bendur, a total hero in the social sciences, has been doing research since the 70s that has demonstrated that media representations can impact somebody’s sense of self-efficacy. Just one example is that if an individual sees somebody on a screen or reads about somebody who is similar to themselves succeeding at something, they’re far more likely to say that they could do it too. So media environment has a huge impact on your sense of your own agency. So how can you apply this? I think some very specific and practical answers can be found in a research project that they did at UT Austin at the Engaging News Project. They partnered with the Solutions Journalism Network in order to figure out whether there was any impact from including solutions in news reportage. So they did a huge experimental study on U.S. adults. They presented them with news articles that were identical in every way except that half of them included reporting on responses that helped mitigate the problem that was the subject of the news report. Lo and behold, the people who read the Solutions Journalism version of the article were more likely to say that they had increased interest in the topic, that they felt inspired, and that they believed they could contribute to a solution to the issue. Bingo! That’s self-efficacy. And it probably comes as no surprise that this group also was statistically significantly more likely to say that they wanted to get involved and that they’d be willing to donate money. So call me crazy, but I don’t think this just applies to journalism. I think this can apply to any kind of communication, any kind of media. And so the next time you guys are making a documentary film or you’re putting together some sort of video campaign or you’re writing a press release, I think it would probably benefit you to try to think about how you could optimize the possibility that people will feel empowered enough to take action based on the information that you’re giving them. So I think we can borrow from some of the lessons of the Solutions Journalism framework as they call it. Explain the causes of the problem, not just the problem. Describe responses to the problem, whether they worked or not. Give how-to details if you have access to them. And present evidence of results. The real question is whether you care, whether the professional communicators care about having an impact. And if you do, I think these tools are probably worth using. So thank you so much, and thank you to my team for helping me with this project.