What we've learnt

When you know a lot about something close to your heart it’s hard to hold back and not tell everyone everything you know. But the reality is that most people you speak to will only remember a limited number of key points from what you say – however clever and informed it is. This is especially important to remember when you’re talking about such a complex subject as asylum where you really want people to take stuff in.

So try not to bombard people with lots of complex information, make sure you decide what you can and cannot cover in the time available. Decide what key points you want participants to remember, and make sure these are reiterated throughout the session in different ways.

A famous professor found that what audiences perceive and remember from any talk will be 7% verbal (the actual words you use) 38% vocal (how it is said) and 55% visual (how you behave and look). This means that the person setting the story straight about asylum is just as important as the information they’re diligently giving.

It seems obvious, but you’ll find it a lot easier to win people over if people actually like the cut of your jib. Here’s some of the ways that you can get the crowd listening to you just by them liking you.

Crowd pleasers:

• Smiling – don’t under-estimate the power of a smile
• Humour – not dad-gags (please no…) just a lightness of touch will do, it’s not all doom and gloom
• Inclusiveness – it’s all about making issues relevant and local. Say ‘we’ and ‘us’ to make people feel part of the issue

Turn-offs:

• Lecturing and finger wagging – it’s not nice being told off when you’ve made an effort to turn up for a session
• Guilt trips – it didn’t work when your mum did it and it won’t work now
• Getting geed-up – no-one wants someone being all morally superior and a bit aggro

Refugees are just ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. People often only get this once they’re face-to-face with the speakers themselves and see that yes, they really are just normal human beings with interests and feelings just like them. This face-to-face human interaction and real life stories are really persuasive in humanising the asylum debate.

Our workshops are often the first time that someone has ever spoken to a refugee or an asylum seeker, or at least spoken to them about what it’s like to uproot everything and seek refuge in a foreign country. And it’s often also the first time that they’ve seen asylum seekers and refugees in a professional role, delivering a workshop and speaking knowledgably.

Don’t soften the facts to make them easier for your audience to swallow. Research shows that hard-hitting information about someone’s experiences has a massive impact on people’s attitudes. That said, it’s vital that volunteers living in exile do not feel pressured to speak about distressing aspects of their experiences. Make sure your team are supported to decide what they do and don’t want to talk about and when, so that these boundaries are respected.

Bored people are not exactly sponges waiting to soak up new information. Instead they drift, start planning what to have for tea and then settle down for a nice cosy snooze at the back of the room. If you want people to get stuck into a subject, you need to make it mean something to them personally.

Since the project started, we’ve used an interactive, discussion-based format as much as possible to get people talking and thinking. The activities and groupwork are geared towards letting people come up with the answers to their own questions and analyse things from different perspectives.

So avoid telling people what to think. Respond to questions and opinions by opening them up to rest of the group: ‘What does everyone else think about that?’, ‘Does anyone think they know the answer to Joe’s question?’, ‘What do you think the answer might be?’. Even if you’re doing short talks to larger groups, you can still get the audience involved by using techniques like straw polls.

Once people actively engage in discussing an issue, they usually realise that it’s far more complex than they originally thought and therefore deserves a more thought-through response than a simple pro/anti, good/bad stance.

At RAP we’re all about giving people a safe space to ask any burning questions and discuss their concerns. We’re not about preaching, ranting on our soap-box, or making people feel foolish when they ask us questions that we don’t like the sound of.

Don’t disagree with everything that someone says. Instead try to find 1% of what someone says and agree with it 100% (a clever trainer we know calls this the 101% rule). If they feel you’re being a supportive listener, then they’re that much more likely to listen to what you have to say and take it on board.

Try phrases like ‘That’s an interesting point… I also find it interesting that…’ or ‘Yes, indeed… and did you know that…’ So try to add to their knowledge, don’t try and take away from what they already believe. And as we all know, body-language can be equally powerful as words so rolling your eyes, folding your arms or shaking your head despairingly are out of bounds too.

Listen with interest to what people say, treat their opinions with respect. If people think that you’re attacking their views then they’ll just hold onto them more tightly. And don’t expect that people will change their opinion in two hours (although sometimes they do!). Try to see the process as a journey. If you’ve made someone think twice or given them a new nugget of information, then you’ve set them on a journey that over time, may get them thinking differently.

Like the saying goes, it only takes one bad apple to spoil the barrel. Well, the same applies to workshop participants. If there’s one person there who disagrees with everything you say and heckles and smirks throughout the whole session, it’s very tempting to focus all your energy on winning them over.

But sometimes there are people who aren’t willing to listen to you no matter what you say. Don’t let them dominate your workshop. By focussing on them and their questions, you may neglect the majority of participants who are silently disagreeing with the mouthy person in the corner. These people need your attention and their questions answered just as much.

It’s pretty much impossible to chat about asylum without chatting about immigration. People are forever confusing asylum seekers with EU migrant workers, foreign students or third generation migrants from the Commonwealth. Therefore projects like ours should be prepared to answer questions about other types of migration but without trying to be experts on an area that’s outside our specialism.

In doing our jobs by increasing people’s empathy for refugees, there’s a danger that people then project their fears about migration onto another group of people like irregular migrants or EU workers. So the refugees become the ‘good guys’ and the rest become the ‘bad guys’.

Be clear as a team how you will approach the broader topic of migration and respond to people’s questions about associated issues like EU expansion or multiculturalism. If you’re not prepared, you may find yourself caught off guard and swerving questions that you can’t answer. If you don’t know the answer to a question, simply say so. We know it’s hard to admit you don’t know, but people will respect you for saying it. No-one wants to come across like one of those shifty politicians on Question Time.

Once people have heard about the grim reality of seeking asylum in the UK, they often get all fired up about it. Which is great, it means we’ve done our jobs.

So make you sure you channel all of this positive energy by giving them ideas about how they could make a difference as individuals and as a group. Encourage them to chat to friends and family about the issue or give them ways to make their communities a nicer place for asylum seekers and refugees.

If you’re pushed for time, this is the first thing that you’ll be tempted to cut out from your workshop or talk. But if you fail to harness the beautiful power of their new-found inspiration, they’ll be left feeling flat and probably won’t bother finding out more about the issue or getting involved in the lives of refugees.

If you’d like to run your own workshop or start your own RAP-like project, and would like more pointers and a bit of extra support, please get in touch.