RC undertakes continuous research and message development to meet the urgency of the moment and find the most effective messaging to shape the public narrative. We aim to build a more powerful and unifying pro-democracy narrative that brings together all of the disparate battles over issues so that our collective messaging can break through the noise.
How our research is different.
Focus on feelings, emotions, and motivations
Most people might say that the purpose of research is to figure out what the majority of people support or agree with. While it is of course useful to take the temperature, doing simply that is insufficient if the goal is to change the hearts, minds, and behavior of voters. Humans are much more motivated by emotion than reason and, importantly, emotional valence is known to facilitate memory. For that reason, our research focuses heavily on understanding the existing emotional state of voters as well as the messaging strategies that evoke activating emotions (e.g. hope, defiance, anger) in our base and deactivating emotions (e.g. fear, despair) in our opposition. By listening to people in regular qualitative research, we are able to understand the emotional nuances of where the electorate is at.
Ongoing and iterative
Unlike many other research projects which are conducted as one-off projects, we are doing research continuously. We hold weekly focus groups with a variety of audiences and conduct monthly quantitative surveys. Due to the continuous nature of our research, each piece of research is able to build upon all of the insights of all of the research that came before it,we are able to iterate very rapidly, and we’re able to track and detect changes in attitudes across time.
Collaborative
RC works with a research team of half a dozen different top Democratic pollsters, who are some of the sharpest research minds across the field. With so many eyes and minds on our work, our findings are continually iterated and validated by different research approaches.
Expert messaging
Unlike most polling projects, all of the messaging we test is informed and written by deep communication and messaging experts. RC works with messaging expert Anat Shenker-Osorio and her team at ASO Communications for all of our research projects.