If you are in the business of changing worlds, then you're in the business of persuasion

There are many areas of persuasion that can be discussed: sales, delivering a speech etc, but the area I want to focus on is marketing - driving more awareness, advocacy or donations.

Think of marketing as a tactic that triggers an emotional response. Everything we do in life triggers an emotion from people, whether it's that habit our spouse doesn't like, or staying late at work which impresses the boss - everything has an emotional response.

What happens after the emotion (the response) depends on what emotions are triggered. From a marketing perspective, we want to trigger the correct emotion to our target market in order for them to commit to an action.

The emotions we want to trigger depends on the goal. In politics, for example, the candidate may want votes, so she may want to associate her competitor with a specific event - with scary sounding music - that makes people angry or sad, and then say that her rival is "soft on crime" or "soft on defense".

The keys here are association, context and a specific event. In your marketing pieces - whether your website, mail or TV - focus on an event (such a story) in the context of the bigger issue and associate that with your organization as the issue solver (perhaps through statistics or a happy ending to the story).

I believe the Red Cross, Amnesty International and Politicians excel at this, check out their sites and their marketing materials - you will learn much!