Antonia and George doing the Project Turnaround workshop at the Washington State Democrats’ convention in June.
Training: The Science of Messaging
This two-part, online training will get you out of defense mode and prepare you to create effective content and talk to voters with confidence!
“Not just the best message training we’ve had, but the best training we’ve ever had.”
— Shasti Conrad, Chair, Washington State Democratic Party
From Antonia Scatton and George F. Greene, based on the neuroscience of language and decision making from experts like George Lakoff, Drew Westen and Daniel Kahneman.
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The training is in two sessions, each 1-hour followed by Q&A.
Each session is $30.
All sessions are on ZOOM at 7pm Central
TUES, AUGUST 27, 2024 – PART 1: How Messaging Works
THURS, AUGUST 29, 2024 – PART 2: What to Say
What will I learn?
Part 1: How Messaging Works
The Science of Language
We help you understand why the public debate doesn’t follow the rules of logic and what rules it actually does adhere to, based on fascinating and counterintuitive truths about how language impacts the brain at the neural network level. Once you understand the science, you will see the public debate in a whole new light.
The Art of Public Debate Warfare
How do we navigate the public debate to get our messages into the brains of the public? We will introduce you to a set of tools you can use to break down the public debate, stop making self-defeating mistakes, establish and defend our position, and convert attacks to opportunities. In short: how to get our hands on the wheel and drive the public debate back into Democratic territory.
Part 2: What To Say
Verbalizing Our Values
For forty years, the conservative belief system has dominated our public debate. To take it back, we need to understand how to effectively champion our own values and beliefs. In this section, we break down our core values, our beliefs about government and the economy, and how they contrast with Republican values and beliefs.
Top Talking Points for 2024
Finally, we tell you what to say to persuade and motivate voters to see the leading issues of the 2024 campaign from a Democratic perspective and vote for our candidates. We give you talking points and key phrases, along with the underlying strategies that explain why this messaging is effective in the field.
The Trainers
Antonia Scatton and George F. Greene are experts in cognitive science based messaging and framing. Both have a long history of working with state and local Democratic Party committees.
Antonia has more than 25 years of experience in Democratic campaigns and Party operations. She has advised and trained party leaders, professionals and activists from the National Treasury Employees Union to the state Democratic committees of Arizona, Florida and Virginia. She studied cognitive linguistics with progressive messaging guru George Lakoff and is the author of the Reframing America newsletter on Substack.com.
George is the founder of the Connections Lab and has trained thousands of Democrats in the practice of framing in Minnesota and around the U.S. He did his graduate work in experimental psychology around language and learning theory, where he taught sign language to chimpanzees. George has been active in Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and is a long-standing member of the state central committee. His work as Chair of MN Congressional District 3 made it consistently a national leader in voter contact and voter turnout.
Antonia Scatton 