Ronsley Vaz - Amplify your message

3 July 2019

 

As someone who is not a transport professional or even someone with an interest in the field, Ronsley started the session by asking the audience why people should walk or cycle more. Of course, the audience responded promptly with multiple reasons from reducing air pollution to improving equity. For Ronsley, these were unknown reasons. As he explained, the facts we know are not a matter of fact for everyone!

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The goal is to reach people who are not in the know, and convince them to change. We need people to join the movement! For Ronsley, the secret to creating a movement is to access the connections and encourage conversations. Converting people generally happens in conversations.

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We must reach the people who may agree with us but are keeping quiet and we also need to listen to others who disagree. Conversation is not just about explaining ourselves better but about listening better.

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A few other key ideas for the session:

• Encourage people to tell us their stories; what is the problem that they are trying to solve

• We should have a pitch that we can use to readily explain why walking and cycling is critical

• The explanation should be simple enough for others to repeat – make it simple

• Many in the audience couldn’t imagine not using active travel, so how did we get here

• Audio content is growing in popularity

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The session sparked discussion and debate but what was clear was that, although the attendees all have different backgrounds, we all want the same thing. We are a movement and we benefited from considering how the message could be amplified.

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Thanks to WSP for the space which was the perfect location, styled as it is to encourage story telling and collaboration.

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