How dating apps, cults & charities can inspire climate activists to get people to do stuff without paying them.
This article reflects on the lessons climate activists like the See Through Network can learn from others, from Tinder, Scientology, the Dodgers and the Dogs Trust, who seek to convert expressions of interest into effective action.
Covering the bases
Even if you’re familiar with baseball and American dating shorthand, bear with us.
This climate activist version of ‘The Four Bases’ does involve baseball, but not kissing, touching above/below the waist, or penetration.
The TIED model (acronym explanation to come) uses baseball to illuminate the tricky issue of motivating, convincing, scaring or encouraging folk to do stuff, for a common purpose, for free.
Like the US high-school dating version, TIED is based on a baseball hitter’s progression around the diamond: home base to first base, first base to second, second to third, third back to home base, to complete a run and score a point.
For this analogy to be useful, non-baseball-nerd readers need only know:
- Player Glory: Progressing up to third base benefits an individual player’s statistics to some degree, but scores their team zero runs.
- Winning: Teams only benefit from players completing a full circuit, as runs are the only way to score points and win games.
- No Short Cuts: A player must progress via the bases to score. Even hitting a ‘home run’ in a single hit requires the player to go from base to base in sequence.
The process
All teams exist to score runs.
The nature of these runs, and the batter who scores them, depends on the particular ‘team’ to which you’re applying the TIED baseball metaphor:
- Dating: an individual seeking a lifelong partner or a new friend
- Cult: a follower who contributes some of their income or builds a church
- Political party: a door-to-door canvasser or policy researcher
- Climate activists: a coder building a website or celebrity hosting a fundraiser
All journeys follow the same basic stages:
- Target audience: pluck a stranger from the crowd
- Engagement: convince the stranger to try on their uniform and hold a bat
- Recruitment: induce them to proceed around the bases
- Score: induce an action benefiting player and team
The baseball model may appear predictable and mechanistic, but in the real world accounts for a lot of messiness and noise.
For one thing, squidgy, sweaty humans aren’t logical automata, but emotion-driven primates.
Moreover, the journey from first encounter to effective volunteer could be rapid and short (a home run) or take many years and hundreds of interactions.
However long the journey, it passes through the same fours bases.
Titilated, Inquisitive, Educated, Doing: TIED
This baseball diamond analogy labels these bases Titillated, Inquisitive, Educated and Doing, giving the acronym TIED.
These terms mean different things to different entities (‘teams’). Here are some examples for each base, featuring:
- A generic definition
- Definition for people using dating apps
- Definition for religions/cults* seeking converts
- Definition for NGOs/charities seeking volunteers
By connecting the dots between these entities, the TIED model may tease out some of the alchemical secrets of getting people to do stuff.
In particular, it seeks to distinguish those who say they’ll do stuff, from those who actually take action at a meaningful ‘cost’ to them.
*this article makes no attempt to distinguish religions from cults. The only reliable disambiguator being circular, i.e. ‘receives government tax breaks’.
First Base: Titillated
- Generic: ‘target audience’ becomes named individual
- Dating: swipee drops protective pseudonym (‘BubblyBlonde69’/’StudMuffinXXL’) and reveals their real name
- Religion/Cult: someone comes in from the street and introduces themselves
- NGO/Charity: someone ‘signs up’ for anything, like a petition or newsletter
Second Base: Inquisitive
- Generic: named individual expresses interest
- Dating: multiple communications, via message, phone or video call
- Religion/Cult: potential convert attends, participates in multiple meetings
- NGO/Charity: potential volunteer extends interest beyond original sign-up
Third Base: Educated
- Generic: firm expression of interest and intent
- Dating: both parties declare interest in an ongoing relationship
- Religion/Cult: potential convert formally embraces your credo
- NGO/Charity: potential volunteer becomes familiar with full range of activities
Fourth Base/Home Run: Doing
- Generic: teams gain a long-term active contributor who advances their cause
- Dating: life partner, with all the trimmings
- Religion/Cult: active convert who regularly contributes
- NGO/Charity: active ‘do-er’ volunteer, reliably performing mission-critical tasks
Whatever the context, each phase is distinct, and contingent on its predecessor.
Advertisers and marketers focus on getting customers to buy products. Their version of TIED is known as ‘The AIDA Principle ‘ (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action).
TIED follows the same four-step process as AIDA, but is optimised for activities other than selling products like cigarettes, fast food or gadgets, including abstract ideas.
Perspectives
The TIED baseball diamond model emphasises different perspectives.
- The Individual: lonely hearts, heathen and the politically inactive all start as a face in a huge crowd. A team somehow persuades strangers to try on their uniform and swing a bat. Most bail out at some point or other, but some stay on, advancing round the diamond. A few end up experiencing the euphoria of scoring a home run.
- The Team: lonely hearts, cults, charities and environmental activists all need players to score the runs required for victory. The more strangers plucked from the crowd and conveyed to home base, the more runs you could score.
- The Audience: people attend baseball games for all sorts of reasons: channel-hopping invalids, divorced Dads taking kids to a ball game, baseball-curious cricket fans, season-ticket-holding baseball superfans etc.. All watch the same game, but see and respond to different things.
But sports fans know there’s much more to a baseball game than runs scored. If the result were all that mattered, few would bother showing up.
The fascination is all in the subtleties behind these basic mechanics. The complex interplay of sub-narratives.
The devil is all in the detail.
Venture capital, gyms & mustard
The art of converting a stranger into a do-er is central to anyone engaged in business.
Entire industries depend on exploiting subtle gaps between attention, engagement, intent and action.
Charity fundraisers, entrepreneurs seeking investment, filmmakers seeking budgets, lonely hearts seeking life partners all start out seeking clear and transparent alignment between what they want to receive, and what their targets want to give.
These can all be expressed as some sort of win-win transaction:
- Fund my NGO, I’ll tick your Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) or Environmental, Sustainability and Governance (ESG) boxes
- Risk your capital with me, I’ll deliver a high return
- Pay for my film, I’ll attract viewers whose attention you can sell to advertisers.
- Live with me, I’ll support you.
Transparent & opaque transactions
These transactions are not always transparent to both parties.
For businesses, the final ‘Doing’ run-scoring action pay-off is a purchase. A business scores when a customer concludes a mutually satisfactory transaction. The exchange money for goods or services. Both parties are happy.
Such transactions are often not what they appear to be. Sometimes, it’s not even what the participants think it is.
- Mustard: Victorian condiment entrepreneur, politician and philanthropist James Jeremiah Colman famously explained his fortune came ‘from the mustard that people throw away on the sides of their plate’. Colman understood that Colman’s Mustard customers, whether they knew it or not, were not buying mustard but the idea of having an abundance of it.
- Gyms: Brits pay half a billion pounds a year to not go to the gym. One in five Americans who sign up for gym membership never even go once. Gyms appear to be in the business of selling access to exercise facilities, but real life cases demonstrate some customers pay for the possibility of accessing exercise facilities.
The TIED baseball model works whether or not both parties fully understand the actual transaction that’s taking place to get to home base. The AIDA version is applied to buying goods (like mustard) and services (like gym subscriptions).
But what about when people transact their services in return for abstract ideas?
The allure of ideas
Ideas turn out to be far more powerful motivators than goods or services.
The recruitment steps – getting a stranger to first base, a curious person from first to second, and a convert from second to third etc. – are identical.
The consequences of scoring a run, when converts complete the transaction to get them to home base, can be radically different.
The price of entry, after all, can’t be any higher than death.
When ideas are the reward, players routinely pay to reach home base with their lives.
Buddhism, Scientology, Catholicism and Islam all promise life after death. They label this reincarnation reward differently – spirits, souls, Thetans etc., but their baseball diamonds offer similar paths to immortality.
Idea-scores don’t even require the explicit promise of reincarnation. For every saint or bodhisattva, there are Marxist and fascist martyrs, army deserters, or civil rights activists who died in the service of their ideologies.
Some football ultras may have died supporting their teams, but few deliberately. There are not many Pepsi fans or Honda Civic aficionados who’ve traded their lives to demonstrate their devotion.
Philanthropic home runs
Apply the TIED model to ‘philanthropy’, and it becomes clear that ideas can outbid objects even for the wealthiest.
Billionaires, having devoted their entire lives to adding zeroes to their net worth, and paying as little of it as possible in tax, can blow the lot on their final run to home base.
By voluntarily donating their entire fortunes to charitable foundations that bear their name, they buy home-made tickets to immortality.
In the TIED model, philanthropists are owner-players co-opting animal welfare, disease-eradication, malaria-elimination or xenophobia in their final negotiation.
Every tax-collector’s loss is a donkey sanctuary, malaria programme, or racial puritan’s gain.
Ideas make powerful home base magnets.
Cheats & frauds
Anything with rules, like baseball or life, produces cheats.
There’s an important distinction, however, between outright cheating, and transactions that while they may appear lopsided, are really just psychologically complex.
Whether the home-base transaction involves gym memberships, Colman’s mustard, or billion-dollar donations, the key point is transparency.
Fraud is defined by information asymmetry. Fraudulent transactions are zero-sum, coming at one party’s cost.
In the short term, the fraudster ‘wins’ by causing the victim to ‘lose’. In the long term, even the most successful fraudsters tend to get exposed.
Whether you consider a fraudster who’s only exposed after their death to have ‘won’ or ‘lost’ reveals your personal interpretation of the rules of life.
Win-win transactions aren’t cheating, because they’re transparent. Or rather, each party walks away happy.
Gym members don’t sue their gyms. Colman’s customers don’t demand refunds, because both parties get what they want from the transaction.
How aware both parties are of the real transaction may be fascinating for students of self-deception, but is functionally irrelevant. Motivations and intent make no difference to the outcome.
Reaching home base may involve a degree of deception, but if this deception is welcomed by the player, it’s indistinguishable from a transparent transaction.
Batter/team/audience asymmetry
TIED model users should be aware of another asymmetry – perspective. What you see depends on the angle from which you’re viewing it.
Baseball’s scoring system carries an inherent tension between the selfish interests of the batter and the collective interest of the team. On top of this, the audience seeks something quite different.
Baseball’s peculiar sequencing merits further examination of each of these perspectives.
Here’s the game theory from each angle.
Batter’s glory
Having unexpectedly found themselves in a uniform with a bat in their hand, what might motivate a player to have a swing and try to get to first base, rather than walk away?
There’s much to motivate a batter. Should they choose to up from home plate, Titilation, Inquisitiveness and Education are all in their field of vision.
As they progress around the diamond, a third-base-and-no-further player has many chances for glory. They can whack the ball deep, sneak a cheeky bunt, steal a base, revelling all the while in the crowd’s rapturous applause.
A batter has many ways to thrive without reaching home base, and scoring for their team. They can have fun, acquire a stock of great stories to tell their friends and family, leverage their deeds into sponsorship deals, enjoy a post-playing career as coach, commentator or pundit, without ever scoring a run for their team.
It gets better. If their teammates score enough runs to win games, even someone on first base can bask in their reflected glory, and pop champagne corks on the victory parade bus.
Team’s frustration
For the team, a player who never scores a run might attract sponsors and crowds, but is ultimately a source of frustration.
They’re also a wasted opportunity. A player who always promises, but never contributes anything that aligns with the team’s actual needs, represents a considerable investment of time and resources.
For the team, investing in players is a numbers game. When a player bails out between bases and disappears, you save the cost of training, attention and resources. Each remaining player requires more training, attention and resources as they progress around the diamond.
Score more runs than it costs you to train and retain the players who score them, and you have a viable franchise.
Run a deficit, you lose.
Your target pool of potential players is huge, but only a small fraction will reach each successive base. Fail to get enough players back to home base, you also lose.
Each team’s job is to minimise the attrition percentage at every stage in order to maximise productivity. A team manager is like:
- A sculptor who starts with a huge pile of marble lumps, knowing only a tiny number will end up as an artwork of any value. They hope not to waste too much time on the rejects.
- A premium coffee bean boss, whose profit margin depends on rejecting as few beans as possible at every stage of the harvesting, de-fruiting, hulling and roasting processes.
- A cult leader who only starts benefitting from a convert after a long investment in capturing their devotion.
Audience interest
No one says you have to watch baseball. Most people don’t.
We all have many other things vying for our attention: football, doomscrolling, basket-weaving, sudoku.
To attract an audience to watch baseball, you need to put on a decent show.
To bring it back to the point of this elaborate (but we hope illuminating) analogy, not everyone is interested in climate change.
To get bums on seats, and give yourself a chance to attract more than just fellow climate activists, you need to wrap your activism up in something more obviously appealing.
A community Facebook group, say.
Or a YouTube channel.
Or a fun, friendly, factful newsletter.
Or some games.
Back to Dating
Some things don’t change.
For climate activists like The See Through Network, the TIED baseball metaphor may be most instructive when compared to its origins – American culture’s escalating intimacy index of kissing, touching etc.
Modern online dating and 1950s American teen culture share a common source of frustration.
How to measure the gap between what people say they want, and what they actually want?
So it is with climate activism.
- Effective Activists seek measurable change by engaging with Unwilling Inactivists.
- Ineffective Activists are content to engage with people who already agree with them, or will never agree with them, about outcomes that can’t be measured.
Online dating accounts build your profile by presenting you with a checklist of acceptable outcomes, ranging from ‘Friend’ to ‘Spouse’. Most people tick many boxes, many all of them.
Yet as anyone who’s tried online dating knows, most of its challenge/trauma/fascination comes from working out which of those ticks are true and false.
In reality, most people are only looking for one particular kind of relationship. Many of the most common real-world preferences aren’t even accurately described in the checklist, e.g.:
- Strictly ‘Spouse’ only
- ‘Anyone to talk to on lonely evenings’
- ‘Up for online flirting, nothing more’
- ‘Multiple sexual partners in series’
- ‘Multiple sexual partners in parallel’
Self-deception makes determining the truth harder still.
Like the gym club membership, the actual transaction can be much more complicated (and interesting!) than merely separating ‘truth’ from ‘lies’.
If we lie to ourselves about our desire to lose weight, it’s hardly surprising that we lie to ourselves about love, friendship and sex.
We won’t even start applying Jeremiah Colman’s insights into dating.
The notion of meeting strangers with an idea of having an abundance of intimacy, but in all likelihood leaving most of it on the plate, might stretch this metaphor beyond its useful limit.
Climate activism, like modern romance, benefits from a clear mind.
The cognitive dissonances we hold regarding climate change are every bit as complex and contradictory as the ones held by online daters.
TIED lessons
So what are the TIED baseball model’s useful lessons for climate activists?
In particular, what can the See Through Network, operating 100% pro bono without the complication, distraction and encumbrance of money, glean from this metaphor?
Define each base
Without sacrificing the Network’s flexible, responsive culture and flat hierarchy, be absolutely clear what each base means for your purposes.
Develop verifiable, objective criteria to understand, in the See Through Network context, what distinguishes a Doing member from their Titillated, Inquisitive and Educated colleagues.
Clear tariff for each base
Internally, maybe even externally, evaluate the transaction for each stage.
For members and Network, what does each give/take to reach each base? Defining the cost/benefit of each Titillated, Inquisitive, Educated and Doing colleague will benefit both parties, avoiding misunderstandings and disappointments on both sides.
Be clear & consistent
Clarity benefits everyone, particularly a Network based on the principle of Radical Transparency.
The transaction for each base should be transparent, and understood by both parties. There’s nothing to be gained, and much to be lost, by dishing out Doing rewards to the Titilated, or vice versa.
Climate activism involves the same complexities and contradictions as any other human endeavour, from baseball to commerce, relationships to religion.
So let’s learn the rules.
*
To join the See Through Network and its Goal of Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active, email: volunteer@seethroughnews.org