The Dancing Disability Enthymeme
1st February 2010
Stayed tuned for a likely change in the real world brought to you by the folks at Health and Disability Associates (HDA) in Chicago. They are putting together a smart persuasion campaign with national reach aimed at changing employers behavior toward hiring people with disabilities.
Two features from the Standard Model mark this campaign with a high probability of success (meaning that more people with disabilities will get hired as a result of it): 1) big Reception and 2) smart Processing.
First, HDA has assembled a large cast of supporting actors for the cause who are also putting $30 million into an advertising budget. While that number won’t dominate the world, if properly targeted, it will dominate the information environment of people who make hiring decisions. Thus, the campaign is buying Reception which is what you have to do with any large campaign. Furthermore, they are clearly doing a good job at getting free media coverage as the NY Times story demonstrates. That amplifies the Reception rate.
Second, the campaign is starting with a humor approach that mocks the disabilities of people without disabilities. You might recall, for example, from Seinfeld, Elaine’s disabled dancing ability, which she thought was pretty hot. The HDA campaign gently teases nondisabled people for the funky, weird, and discombobulated things they do and through the laughter, the campaign asks, how are you different from someone with a legal disability?
It’s a sly Enthymeme, that Persuasion Syllogism that deliberately leaves holes in logic that you have to complete for yourself, as guided by the Enthymeme. Of course people with disabilities are different from people without disabilities; that’s why we have the laws and regulations we’ve got. But, those laws and regulations carry the cause only so far and don’t get at normalizing the hearts and minds of employers. Laws do change things, but they can also create Reactance. The humor Enthymeme makes us assume that all people have disabilities, it’s only a matter of how we’re differentially disabled.
It also appears that the campaign is using the media buy to drive people to the HDA website which contains messages that will actually drive the behavior change. If you think about it, the humor Enthymeme will probably not change the key attitudes and beliefs that drive the hiring decision at the point of attack. To change those key Response variables, the HDA website has a variety of links that provide strong Arguments on points such as everyone’s favorite new business slang, ROI or return on investment, various tax incentives, and best practices examples.
My largest concern, as always, is with measuring outcomes. Remember the Rule: If You Can’t Count It, You Can’t Change It. What exactly is the TACT here, the Who does What When and Where? I hope this campaign has a measure of hard outcome (number of disabled people hired) that they can track through the campaign and that they also have a good process model that ties all of the channels, messages, attitudes, and behaviors into a coherent system of change. This is a national campaign, so they can’t compare states or regions who get the intervention versus those who don’t. A process model is an excellent way to measure success and failure and provide indications of why things go the way they do.
Now, let’s look at home movies of our dancing!