3 Ways to Keep Your Message from the Wrong Audience

Estimated Reading Time: 13 minutes

All content strategies that win do these three things

1. Show the right message…
2. to the right people…
3. to inspire them to take the right action.

But now we also have to think about communication strategy in terms of security. It’s not enough to get the right message in front of the right person. We also need that message to stay away from the wrong person so that they do not harm our communities.

What’s the threat?

In this year alone, we have seen several billion dollars’ worth of funding cut, including to grants whose proposals included terms like “Black,” “LGBTQ,” “equality” and more. With these actions, they aim to demobilize the left while controlling our speech. And now, even people who say they want to fight the right are advising us to change our language.

We hear movement partners wondering, Will our social media content get our grant applications rejected? Should we wash these words from our websites?

We know the dangers of obeying orders like these in advance. And many of us couldn’t comply even if we wanted to—not without giving up who we are. This leaves us with no choice but to improve our content strategy by sending different versions of our message through different channels.

How do we keep the wrong people from seeing our message?

Below we outline three ways to keep your message from the wrong audiences, and one bonus way you can show them that these words and their meanings are here to stay.

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Strategy 1: Hide Sensitive Language From Search Engines

What Google doesn’t know is less likely to hurt you.

While you may not want to hide your entire web presence, you can choose which of your website’s pages show up in searches. This will help you keep content on your site without advertising it in a way that makes you or others vulnerable.

Advantages

• Your sensitive webpages won’t appear in search results, meaning they are more difficult for bad actors to find.
• You can include direct links to specific webpages in your newsletter, in text message, or as a QR code at an in-person event, so only your intended audience gets the message.

Disadvantages

• If changing public narrative is part of your mission, you might miss an opportunity to make an impact.
• This strategy can get pretty technical. If you don’t have a dedicated website person on staff, it may be easier to outsource this task to an expert.

Step 1: Create an “orphaned” web page

Normally, you want lots of other pages to link to each page on your website; this makes them easier to find. In this case, we are trying to make certain pages harder to find, so bad actors can’t stumble upon them.

Step 2: Hide your orphaned pages from search engines

Depending on your site infrastructure, there are at least 3 ways you can hide the orphaned pages from search engines.

On WordPress

Easily hide WordPress pages using Yoast SEO plugin

1. First, download the Yoast SEO plugin.

Go to the Plugins section on your WordPress site, click Add Plugin, and download Yoast SEO.

2. Use the Yoast SEO tool to keep search engines from showing your page in their results.

While editing a webpage, click the Yoast SEO logo in the top right menu, next to Settings.

Under “Allow search engines to show this content in search results,” select No.

Under “Should search engines follow links on this content?” select No. This tells search engines––if they do find this page––to ignore links on the page.

On Squarespace

Hide a webpage on Squarespace using the page settings

1. From the Pages archive, click the Settings icon (shaped like a gear) for the page you want to hide.

2. On the SEO tab, select “Hide Page from Search Results.”

On any website

Hide a webpage using robots.txt and an FTP Manager

1. Open up your FTP Manager.

One way to think of your website is as a collection of documents in a folder. Using an FTP Manager (“FTP” means File Transfer Protocol), you can look at the directory structure of your website and see that it looks just like the files on your computer.

2. Open the file called robots.txt.

3. On the line labeled “Disallow:” enter the URL for the page you want to hide.

For example, if you are trying to hide the page designaction.org/private-url, then you would type:

Disallow: /private-url$

Nevermind the dollar sign at the end for a moment, but know that you will need it if you are manually hiding content page-by-page. If you want to hide several webpages at the same time, you can disallow an entire directory.

For example, if you want to hide any webpage with /private/ in the URL, such as designaction.org/private/secret-resource, you would type:

Disallow: /private/

One benefit of disallowing an entire directory is that bad actors who find your robots.txt file will not know what you’re hiding. They’ll only see the directory name, not the individual page names.

Step 3: Remove the orphaned pages from search results

Let’s say Google has already indexed your webpage and is showing it in search results. How do you tell them to remove it?

First, pretend for a moment that you are trying to abolish the prison industrial complex. You want to change narratives about policing, prisons and surveillance, and to do that you’ve written some articles about alternatives to policing and the dangers of prisons. How do you know that anyone is going to read your articles?

One way to understand what people are interested in reading is to use tools like Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. With these tools you can see the questions people typed into a search engine before landing on your webpage.

We will dig into that in a future article. For now we want to use these tools to remove pages that have already been indexed.

1. Sign in to Google Search Console.

Follow these instructions (or reach out to your developer) if you need support setting up Google Search Console. Once you have an account and have connected your website, continue the steps below.

2. Select Removals from the toolbar on the left.

3. Type in the URL for the page you want to remove.

If Google has indexed versions of the page with http, https, and www prefixes, remove each one individually.

And like that, you can remove a webpage from Google search results!

TIP: You’ll need to do this for each search engine, like Bing, Duck Duck Go, and others. Reach out to an experienced web development team if you need support.

Strategy 2: Password Protect Pages That Have Sensitive Language

Even if you ask search engines to remove targeted content from search results, there’s still the chance a bad actor will find what they are looking for. If the information is sensitive enough, you might consider using password-protected pages to make the content available only to people you trust.

Advantages

• You are in greater control of who gets access to your content. You can still give your intended audience direct links to your protected pages. The added barrier of a password ensures that only people who are meant to see your content can.
• You can change the password if your security is ever compromised.

Disadvantages

• Having a password will make it harder to share your work broadly or spontaneously with people who may need it.
• By including more barriers, you can anticipate that fewer people will read the content, even if you want them to. Even people with access to the password may sometimes feel the barrier is too high.

Password protect your webpage on WordPress

Password protect your webpage on WordPress

On WordPress, from your post or page editor, go to the Page tab in the sidebar. This might also be called “Resource,” “Blog Post,” or whatever the page type is called. In the example below, it’s called “Resource”

Click on the Status  button. In the example below, the status is set to “Published,” but yours may be set to Draft, Pending, or Scheduled.

Select Password protected and create the password.

Finally, click save to apply the password.

Password protect your webpage on Squarespace

Password protect your webpage on Squarespace

To password protect your webpage on Squarespace, first go to your Pages archive. Then select the settings icon for the page you want to protect.

From the General settings you will find the password field.

Finally, don’t forget to click Save.

Whether on WordPress or Squarespace, you can password protect a page to make it easier to hide sensitive content from bad actors.

Strategy 3: Use Images Instead Of Sensitive Language And Tell The Same Story

Okay, there might be times when you actually do want to change the words you use. Not all communication happens through words. In some cases, you might find that you can still get the same message across—maybe even more clearly—by relying on visual storytelling.

Advantages

• If it doesn’t impact the work you’re doing, then changing your external-facing language may help you keep access to funding without much risk.
• Communicating through images, infographics, or other visuals may actually make your narrative more accessible.

Disadvantages

• If not using certain words limits the goals you can aim for, or loses the trust of the communities you’re working with, this strategy may not be worth it.
• How quickly will the political right adapt to any new language or symbols we use? Given the speed we’ve already seen from them, this strategy alone may not be enough to keep you ahead of their attacks.

Step 1: Remove sensitive language from your web page

Make sure you’ve checked that they’re gone from all the pages that you want them to be.

Step 2: Consider removing sensitive language from The Internet Archive

The Internet Archive, also known as The Way Back Machine, stores partial copies of websites and indexes them by year. This gives visitors a handy way to see what a webpage looked like 5 or even 15 years ago. If you are afraid of how your website or social media may impact your access to funds, you may also want to consider what people can find on The Internet Archive.

There’s no guarantee they’ll do what you ask, but they offer this easy form where you can indicate the webpages you want to remove and for which time period.

Step 3: Tell the same story using new language and new images

If an image or infographic is able to speak for itself, the words you use to describe it may be secondary. Working with artists, photographers, designers, or data visualists can help you tell a story that relies more on context and visual narrative than on words alone.

Consider if the example below would succeed for your context.

Original text (in bold are two words that people are wary of using in federal grants):

“We are reducing bias against women in the workplace.“

Reframed text (in bold are the replacement words):

“We work to ensure all people have power and respect in the workplace.‘

In this example, even though you are changing some words, you use images to help tell the same story.

Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide who your target audience is, what impact you want to have on them, and which words and messaging will resonate most with them.

Thank you to Mia Bolton from Mixte Studios for exploring these cases with us!

Bonus Strategy: Ramp Up Your Grassroots Fundraising And Use Whatever Language You Want

Based on our conversations with movement organizers, we imagine a lot of you can relate to this frustration:

“We are told time and again that resources […] are limited and shrinking, and on a particularly bad day, a grant even disappears in the middle of a three-year award. Struggling community-based organizations are at an extreme disadvantage.”

Stephanie Guillotine and William Cordery, Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide from INCITE! The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-profit Industrial Complex

This story is familiar. In the last 8 months, several of our movement partners have told us, We just lost a third of our funding. Now we have to restrategize our entire year.

But you might recall that during Bernie Sanders’ presidential bid, his average campaign gift was just $18. That sounds small, but when you have 1.8 million donors then it turns into $32.4 million. This is the power of a grassroots fundraising campaign––raise funds to do good work without relying on the wishes of foundations or the federal government.

The elements of grassroots fundraising campaigns will be familiar to any seasoned organizer or fundraiser. Examples of grassroots tactics include hosting peer giving circles, running community fundraising events, collaborating with local business as well as other organizations.

“Project South receives 40 percent of its income from grassroots fundraising. Our goal is to increase that percentage every year through publication sales, fee-for-service, community collaborations, and membership.”

INCITE! The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-profit Industrial Complex

And the best part is? We have our community cheering us on as we use the language we want to use.

To learn more about grassroots fundraising, check out Media Justice’s Grassroots Fundraising Principles and Best Practices Toolkit.

Are you pursuing a grassroots fundraising strategy? Help us learn by sharing your success stories and challenges.