The Short Answer

1. Appeal to their sense of right and wrong.

2. Appeal to their self interest.

Full Answer

(1) Appeal to their sense of right and wrong: Improving the well-being of children and families is the right thing to do. Doing it in a disciplined way is the right way to do it.

(2) Appeal to their self interest: If people don’t care because it’s the right thing to do, the best way to get people to care about anything is to understand and appeal to their self interest. When it comes to the well being of children and families one clear area of self interest for most decision makers is the enormous amount we as a society pay when things go wrong. Unless we take actions now to invest in children and families, we will pay and inevitable escalating cost when things go wrong. This is not just good social policy, it’s good fiscal policy. See 2.17 How do we create a Cost of Bad Results report and what do we do with it?

3) The “Partners Profiles” tool provides first person reasons to “invest” in children and families from the perspective of over 20 different partners. Some of these paragraphs, or the document as a whole, may be helpful in winning support.

(4) See also the answer to 1.7 : What do we do with people who are cynical and burned out from the last time we tried this?