No This Wasn't The Top Story of the Day
A six-sided pyramid with a stairway up the side i(and 12 of them at that) is what was kept under wraps until Tuesday morning (no wonder).. I haven't had time to digest it all yet, but I'll be running out tomorrow to do just that (groan here). It seems to work pretty decently in the digital world as an interactive piece, but don't ask me how it plays in the low tech world yet.
Pope Benedict XVI
Which did blow everything off the news from noon on Tuesday (poor Brian Williams sitting in OK City couldn't tell that story, the obvious preselected lead, until 1/3 though the nightly news and the CNN "political" commentators all day were mostly priests and faculty from Catholic University). Roadblock coverage began once the smoke started and I had to watch. Not being Catholic it was still a sight to behold and, borrowing from St. Patrick's Day, today it seemed like everyone was Catholic.
But the point is that the stirring of such broad religious sentiments reminded me that when we are engaging in social change, sometimes the "competition" is defined as people with strong religious beliefs - think AIDS, contraception and sex education to begin with. When we think about asking people to change behavior how often do we, as the social marketeers, take into account values and religious beliefs as we profile the audience (I'm sure it happens, but how often)? I've been involved in a number of programs going back to the mid-1980s where church-based - now referred to as faith-based - programs were demonstrated as effective ways to reach out to certain population groups. But we left the "religion" to the priests and ministers.
How much more efective could we be if we worked with these beliefs rather than ignored them? We're quite comfortable working with the Health Belief Model and the like, but a "God Belief Model?" Perhaps the bigger question for the day is what happens when the people with religion start understanding and using social marketing themselves [a point I made in an intervew in Social Marketing Quarterly last year]? The first take on the new Pope is that he is a "conservative's conservative" and very smart. "Decades from now many conservative Catholics will see the war against the "dictatorship of relativism" as their central mission." link
Another perspective is offered by Eugene Robinson in a Wash Post op-ed piece Tuesday who also reminds us: "The Roman Catholic Church is unique in its size, complexity and reach. It is able to deploy people with enough stamina and self-denial -- and, yes, enough faith -- to spend years in the middle of the jungle, bringing worldly succor to people who otherwise would perish."
I don't know that I'll get up at 4 AM ET to listen to his first homily live at the installation, but you can bet I'll be reading it on Monday. I think of it as environmental scanning. I'm sure others will just roll over.
9:11:25 PM 
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