Amid ruthless ICE raids in the U.S. this year, Resource Media and our La Madre Tierra Initiative have run a range of digital campaigns aimed at engaging different audiences in supporting justice for immigrants. We’ve worked with a variety of advocacy groups, and in this post we’ll focus on projects with three partners — Presente, United We Dream, and National Immigration Law Center.
While some framing and messaging insights echo what we’ve seen work in the past, others suggest pathways to meet the moment we’re seeing unfold in the public discourse on immigration now. We’ve had particular success with these three approaches:
- Showing and describing how immigrants in schools, hospitals, homes, and neighborhoods are being attacked, and calling out the detainments and deportations for how they rip apart communities, families and workforces in ways that affect everyone, not just immigrants.
- Connecting to other topics of concern that intersect, such as the cost of groceries or climate impacts like extreme wildfires.
- Exposing corporations and billionaires as the bad actors who profit from immigrant injustice and incarceration.
We’ll dive a little deeper into each of these learnings, and also note a few approaches that didn’t work as well. As always, we urge continued exploration and testing amid ever-shifting ground.
Just in the months since our online outreach work with these advocacy groups, there has been growing disapproval of what the Trump Administration is doing to immigrants. The Administration has also pivoted to open new fronts in its immigration crackdown through further deployment of troops under the guise of dealing with “crime.”
The imperative only grows to expand the base of Americans persuaded and motivated against these injustices and in support of immigrants and a far better system for immigration overall.
Show the ICE violence, which is a threat to all
With United We Dream — the nation’s largest youth-led immigrant advocacy organization — we set out to reach and engage younger folks on the immigration issue, namely people of color and more progressively minded people aged 18-35. It was a multi-organizational team effort involving influencer engagement by Social Currant and using creatives by Neta Collaborative that centered around themes that fared well in persuasion testing conducted by Wonder Strategies for Good.
Out of all the approaches we tried, one sparked more interest and productive engagement than any other — the ad featuring a photo of a person’s hands tied behind their back. This visual conveyed a very explicit charge about ICE creating chaos and violence by going after individuals who are integral to our communities, whether in schools, hospitals or homes.
It’s a theme that held up across multiple waves of the campaign and across audience subgroups, as breaking news videos of ICE raids and weaponization of the IRS against immigrant neighbors likewise broke through the noise on people’s feeds and drove interest to United We Dream’s landing page and recruitment.
Highlight intertwined interests
In our social media campaign with the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) — the nation’s leading immigrant rights advocacy organization — we sought to reach and engage people living on low incomes specifically, including people of color, low-propensity voters, as well as political moderates and conservatives who are likely open to a pathway to citizenship for immigrants.
With each of these audiences across six states, we saw strikingly similar results. The themes – developed by NILC and Wonder Strategies for Good – centered the outdated immigration system, connected the issue of immigration to housing prices and the cost of groceries, and demonstrated how working class Americans have more in common with immigrants than they do with billionaires.
The ads villainizing billionaires and making the link to grocery prices were the top performers, and the highly effective approach on grocery costs also tied in corporate greed: mega food companies are already gouging us at the checkout counter, and deportations of farmworkers will create further harm while corporate exploitation continues.
We saw a similar ‘intertwined interests’ takeaway in another campaign as well, with Presente in California. In outreach to build allyship on immigration among Californians who are interested in other progressive issues (like climate and reproductive justice), it proved effective to tie climate and migrant justice together — to assert the importance of community and togetherness in the face of climate-fueled disasters (the devastating fires in California) and the ICE raids. See the creative from that campaign below.
Name billionaire benefit & corporate greed
Back when Elon Musk was the public face of firing workers and gutting health care and social security, the post below from our campaign with NILC came in close second overall with audiences living on low household incomes — so still quite effective. While Musk may have faded from the spotlight for now, an “us vs. them — who you have more in common with” approach may still be worth communicating. A common enemy turns the table on the Administration’s divide-and-conquer strategy that seeks to pit working people against immigrant working people.
That post in the NILC campaign wasn’t the only one where we saw the effectiveness of going after a common corporate or ultra-rich enemy. Among seven different influencer videos featured over the course of the campaign, it was the creator who centered the billionaires vs. immigrants frame that netted the best performance overall.
We’re always interested to hear from you about what you’re seeing working well — or not working as well — in your outreach and organizing to build solidarity and strength to win justice for immigrants, climate resilience, workers and community health.
Stay up to date on our work through the La Madre Tierra initiative and connect with us.
