Telling Stories and Creating Action: Building Skills Online to Fight Climate Change

The climate crisis is no longer a future threat, it’s a clear and present danger to communities everywhere. So what do we do when everything is on the line? We go all in.

350 is working with communities across the globe to build a global people-powered movement to tackle the fossil fuel industry from every angle.

The scale of climate change is enormous. To be effective in this struggle, we need to equip people commensurate with the size. That means empowering our worldwide network of campaigners to successfully inspire action. 

But in the face of trying to support people all over, we simply cannot keep up with requests for one-on-one, traditional training approaches. We had to think differently with a new reach-and-teach strategy.  

Complex Skills: Using the Elicitive Model

Simply handing out information is not how social movements grow. The top-down, instructor-led world of online classes and courses is too focused on information hand-off and doesn’t invite active participation. This approach wasn’t going to have the impact we need.

Instead of the transfer of knowledge being one-way, we wanted to use the elicitive model, where information is freely shared and the teacher also learns from their students. Unlike simply learning an HR policy, campaigners need to rely on their own ideas and resources, while being exposed to the knowledge and resources of others. 

As much as possible, we want to root lessons within people’s own psyches and experiences—as opposed to just talking at people. 

When teaching a concept like our introduction to campaigning, we start with open-ended questions to get learners to reflect on ways they have already demonstrated the skill they’re about to hone. 

We rely strongly on the storytelling element and encourages activists to share their experiences, practice pitches, and get to hear how others are using the skills. We want every learner who completes a skill-up to be empowered with the confidence and skills necessary to make a positive difference in the world.

With that in mind, we created what we call: “online skill-ups.”

Why do we call them skill-ups? Because they are not simply trainings or courses taken online. They are designed to skill you up.

Online skill-ups are not a replacement for training—they are a supplemental method for learning, organizing, and encouraging.

In Online Skill-ups we tell participant stories, hold discussions, and encourage questions. We help people to think like a campaigner by, yes, sharing guidelines and principles but also recognizing and honoring that there are no clear right or wrong answers. 

With these skill-ups we can reach members of our network in areas as remote as Nepal—all to support our overall mission of skilling-up climate justice activists around the globe.

Empowered Skill Building

Unfortunately, the world of “online training/courses” is dominated by boring lectures, one-way questionnaires, and drawing out the worst of traditional education. We don’t want to replicate that model—but we are honest enough to have grave reservations about what can be done in an online platform.

For a while, we experimented with simultaneous online interactions. We loved the idea that participants could interact with each other. But the foremost problem was the technical problem. While in some places video chatting could work, a poor internet connection would mean that someone else was left out, locked out, and further marginalized.

There were other challenges: timezones, language, and moderation. Any one of these could end up making the project a failure.

Also, we were aware that while there’s great benefit in interacting online, it’s a lot of coordination that should not be underestimated.

Because of our goals at 350, we had additional challenges: a global audience (limiting the scope of specificity to region) and a wide range of knowledge and experience levels (totally new to activism and climate change and some of the most experienced climate activists on the globe).

Our approach didn’t seem to fit with how most elearning software is designed. Luckily we came across Elucidat. The team had contacted us as part of their “giving back initiative” and they wanted to support us in the fight against climate change. 

It turned out that Elucidat could help us get closer to our aspirations than any other solution we could find on the market. And, while it wasn’t the deciding factor, it felt good to know they supported 350’s mission.

Elucidat’s cloud-based authoring platform has enabled us to design custom, responsive learning programs. The online skill-ups we’ve developed using Elucidat are interactive and accessible anytime, anywhere, on any device. They have also been translated into multiple languages. This has been essential in being able to reach individuals all around the globe. 

What Would You Do?

An example of how we are designing skill-ups: the Advanced Campaigning Lessons. 

We start by asking people to think about a time they got someone to do something they didn’t want to do. We ask them to reflect on what they did—and how that skill you already have can be useful as a campaigner.

Then we tell three campaign stories. We tell the story of how people fought, the impact of different interest groups, and the implications locally and globally. To facilitate reflection, we told the story in chunks. With Elucidat, we stop and ask our learners, “What would you do?” Based on what they say, we give learners some options to consider and then offered tailored feedback based on what they say.

The ability to give personalized feedback without classifying their answer as right or wrong is invaluable. We’re giving students a chance to reflect and activate their minds. They’re not a bystander in their own skill development. 

Allowing people to own that kind of control is a real plus for us. We want them to take charge of their own learning so they can take charge of the movements in their area—and around the world.

Global Feedback

Reaching with people from all over the world has its own unique challenges. 

So in writing our skill-ups, we asked 50 activists in 15 different countries to give us feedback. Their feedback helped us to realize that creating skill-ups for global audiences is its own special type of challenge. We’re writing for very different political environments. Some highly repressive, some very open. One group of people may feel very optimistic about the future while others feel pessimistic. We have to be keenly aware of these differences when developing our skill-ups.

It was not a huge surprise for us that people tended to react more with the campaigns that reflect the realities of their region, which is to be expected. For that reason, we picked a range of campaign stories from around the globe—and made sure there was a mix in each. 

But what was more unexpected was how much people were able to dig deeper and learn completely new and different concepts from stories in other places.

Continual Improvement

We see this whole online teaching as an experiment. So we’re constantly striving to improve and continuously getting feedback from activists, trainers, and volunteers. We know we have so many more people to reach and lives to impact. 

We now have to analyze our successes and setbacks. We’ll use Elucidat’s analytics dashboards to get insights into how people interact with the content and identify ways to improve engagement. 

We’re working to build the best skill-ups because our planet’s future depends on it. Let’s grow the movement and keep going.