Engaging Loyal Nationals on climate and health

Loyal Nationals are often misunderstood, but climate advocates cannot afford to neglect this audience. We must build trust and be inclusive if we want to build an enabling environment for climate action. If you’re working at the intersection of climate change and health and would like to engage the Loyal National audience, here are some things to keep in mind:

• Using health framing can be particularly persuasive on climate change as it is relatable and can be naturally paired with solutions-focused guidance.
• Human-led content is more engaging and persuasive, with messages delivered by trusted figures being most effective at shifting mindsets.
• Messaging must align genuinely with the current local context. We need to meet the audience where they are in order for them to feel bought in.
• Audiences will trust you if they think you’re genuine. Messengers need to be passionate, empathetic, and credible.

We chose to work with one specific group – Loyal Nationals – an attitudinal segment from Climate Outreach’s ‘Britain Talks Climate’ (BTC) research undertaken with More in Common and underpinned by their Core Beliefs model. Loyal Nationals represent a politically influential group of swing voters. Through our scoping, they were identified as a strategically important audience to engage because they

• express higher levels of worry about climate change compared to many of the other segments.
• are most likely to be sympathetic to backlash narratives, a gap we could learn how to address through testing different framing and messengers.
• turn out to vote at general elections at higher rates than other segments (85%, vs 78% average), making them a key group to engage when building an enabling environment for climate action.

Moreover, key decision makers can have an image in their mind’s eye of climate activists and people who care about climate change. This does not currently include Loyal Nationals and can inhibit political will on climate action.

Through focus groups conducted during the research phase of this project, we found that Loyal Nationals don’t have a strong stance on extreme heat — until they understand the potential health impacts that heatwaves can have on the people they love. It also became clear that a mindset shift was needed. This audience, (and many others in the UK), often look forward to heatwaves. Through this work, we were interested in understanding how we might change this mindset to go from “heatwaves are great, and we look forward to them” to “heatwaves are caused by the climate crisis, and they’re impacting our health”.

We used the British public’s favourite topic – the weather and summer sun – as an entry point to help change Loyal Nationals’ relationship with heat and build their understanding of the connection to climate change. It was important to avoid messaging that is anti-sun or anti-holiday, instead providing information about why the weather is changing and how to stay safe.

A variety of tactics were employed to help achieve this:

• Reactive & earned media: We secured over 70 media placements about heat, climate and health, across over 23 Loyal National-focused Tier 1 media outlets, with coverage amassing over 2m views.
• Amplifying real people’s stories: We produced 3 lived experience case studies, using social-first content to showcase how they suffered the health impacts of extreme heat on holiday.
• Talent-led content: We created videos with key talent such as famous TV doctor Dr Hilary Jones and iconic newsreader Angela Rippon, using a self-filming social video style.

Insights from the BTC research on Loyal Nationals helped inform our approach to sourcing and developing stories, messages and communicators for this audience. Below are some of our key takeaways.

BTC insight: Make it relatable and empowering.

What we found: Using health framing can be particularly persuasive on climate change as it is relatable and can be naturally paired with solutions-focused guidance.

Climate change can feel like an enormous and complicated issue, often resulting in fear or backlash. We found that the health framing was a more inviting entry point to this topic for our audience. Why? Because health is relatable. Even if you have never experienced ill health due to climate change yourself, it is highly likely that you will have vulnerable people in your life who will be at risk.

The health framing invokes an empathic response before you can make judgments on climate change. For example, after viewing one of our lived experience case study videos about the health impacts of extreme heat on pregnant people, one survey respondent shared:

“It’s great to hear real people sharing experiences and raising awareness of issues such as this. In the UK, we are not used to extreme weather and are therefore unprepared for it both at home and abroad.”

Tip: Pairing stories of climate impacts with health guidance can help avoid doom and gloom narratives. It helped Loyal Nationals feel like they had greater agency in taking tangible learnings and actions away from our content.

BTC insight: Address high levels of concern amongst Loyal Nationals through trusted messengers.

What we found: Human-led content is more engaging and persuasive, with messages delivered by trusted figures being most effective at shifting mindsets.

We know that barriers to this segment engaging on climate change are often social or cultural. So, we needed to ensure that this audience was able to trust and identify with the spokespeople communicating our messages on climate and health.

Celebrity influencers as trusted messengers

Informed by the insight that this segment skews older in age, we chose to work with trusted TV personalities such as Dr. Hilary Jones and Angela Rippon to create content around the health risks of extreme heat for older people. The panel testing we conducted showed that Dr. Hilary’s video led to a positive increase in both the perception of the severity of heatwaves, and the optimism viewers had for climate adaptation solutions.

Stories from ‘people like me’

How relatable a messenger appears to our target audience was also important. Stories of lived experience from “people like me” resonated with viewers by staying grounded in everyday life. Our hero videos covered three lived experience case studies, each focused on a particular impacted community from across the UK, e.g., children, older people, and pregnant people. We found that messages landed well when the audience was able to see themselves represented, as hearing a story about a Brit’s experience of holidaying in Spain is more relatable than an infographic with generic global warming statistics.

Tip: You may still get some backlash when working with Loyal Nationals but this can be mitigated by using personal and community well-being and health as an entry point, rather than global climate debates.

BTC insight: Bring climate impacts ‘closer to home’ and show tangible links.

What we found: Messaging must align genuinely with the current local context. We need to meet the audience where they are in order for them to feel bought in.

While we knew that leaning into the cultural insight that Brits are obsessed with talking about the weather was a great entry point, we couldn’t ignore the elephant in the room – the UK was experiencing the coolest summer since 2015, yet we were trying to persuade this audience of the health impacts of extreme heat in the UK. We also knew that Loyal Nationals can be hypersensitive to authenticity, so we could not afford to ignore this gap between perceived risk and reality.

Given the cooler weather in the UK and the media attention that heatwaves abroad were getting, we decided to pivot our effort to include the health impacts of extreme heat in popular holiday destinations like Spain and Greece. This pivot made all the difference, as our audience was much more likely to relate to extreme heat and its health impacts whilst on their holidays, rather than here in the UK. Syncing with the media narrative also meant that we were able to connect more spokespeople to news stories, connecting the dots between climate change, heatwaves abroad and the potential health impacts.

Tip: Messages about the UK becoming hotter are much harder to land when your target audience’s lived experience is that it’s cold or wet. Make sure you are meeting your audience where they are.

BTC insight: Loyal Nationals value authenticity.

What we found: Audiences are more likely to trust you if they think you’re genuine. Messengers need to be passionate, empathetic, and credible.

We knew from the start that this segment was not easily trusting of those outside of family and friends, so we needed to ensure messaging was not being delivered in a way that appeared to be disingenuous. So, rather than having big out-of-home displays, or Hollywood-style films, we opted for less polished, relatable content. We had spokespeople join Trisha’s segment on Talk TV, a channel familiar to Loyal Nationals. Our hero videos included real people who had experienced the health impacts of extreme heat and were filmed in kitchen or dining room set ups to achieve a comfortable and ‘at-home’ look and feel. Our celebrity messengers filmed explainer videos from their phones, with Dr. Hilary recording himself speaking while out for a walk, and Angela Rippon sitting outside in her garden. By avoiding overly produced content, we found that the key messages were better received by the audience.

Tip: Build empathy into your messaging in order to build trust. In her video, Angela Rippon acknowledged that she personally loves summer weather, that she wishes to enjoy more holidays and that we can all fall short of following health guidelines in hot weather. This level of honesty can be crucial in ensuring that your audiences aren’t paralysed by guilt or fear. It is reassuring to know that we aren’t perfect but can still make a difference.

Addie Tadesse is Campaigns Officer on the Campaigns & Public Engagement team at the Wellcome Trust.