"Anything Else Is Just Busy Work" — Dana Johnson on Strategy, Solidarity, and What Comes After

You went from communications to leading large organizations and then-

Yeah

... federal advocacy.

Yeah.

Um, and now advising clients more broadly.

Yeah.

Um, has that sort of journey and those lots of different roles been helpful in shaping your understanding of what drives change?

Yeah.

So I think the, the through line in all of the work was really to, like, know your audience, understand your audience.

So if you're trying to get, you know, a groundswell of, of energy around the approval of a drug, for example, or people to adopt into making sure that they, you know, have up-to-date home safety equipment or even to get a member of Congress to, to pass legislation that benefits your community, it's really like being intimate with the audience and understanding what motivates them and really targeting, like, your strategy and all the, the things that support it in a meaningful way.

So I, I felt like that part of, like, probably some of who I am but also the training that came through academics and their work experience probably made it easy for me to adapt that kind of thinking to whatever work I'm doing.

That's really a-amazing because-

Yeah

... knowing your audience and how to talk to that audience and thinking in terms of audience, I mean, is particularly how so much politics works-

Yeah

... today.

Yeah.

It's really audience is influence.

How do you approach designing campaigns? Like, do you have a process? Um, 'cause that's, of course, one of the, one of the points of the podcast is to share, "Hey, how do different people go about doing this?" So I just wanted to hear, how do you tackle it when, you know, a client or an organization comes to you and says, "We need-- We wanna get to this.

Help."

Yeah.

Ooh, that's a really great question, and I think a part of that is probably something that's, like, innate.

But I do try to, I think, go back to what I said at the start of the podcast.

Like, what's the real, what's the big-sky objective here? And then I probably come down a layer, and I think about, like, how do I get to that? And there are oftentimes, like, multiple strategies for doing that, and I try to think about, like, the audiences, like, to power map toward.

Mm-hmm.