Currently reading Shreedhar et al. (2026) on “Tell don’t ask: how to use social media to mobilise local collective climate action”

Shreedhar et al. (2026) is a really important study on climate action and social media strategy: When you want to get people to do something (for example sign up for a talk), it’s much better to tell them to do it (“do not stand by idly!”) than to ask them for support, and it is most effective when combined with photos of local climate change impacts (rather than protest or diversity images).

This is the outcome of a study using sponsored posts by Extinction Rebellion on Facebook, where they used A/B testing of invitations for community events in three UK cities and varied the imagery and call to action. Even the most successful combination had a 2% click rate in the most successful city and around 1.5% in the other two, though (just to keep expectations in check….). Also the most successful message-image combination depended on the city.

Interestingly, in focus group interviews participants mostly said they would like the polite request better than being told what to do, so maybe people aren’t so good at predicting how they will react to different messages! So it is important to test communication strategies in the real context.

It’s also important to consider the target audience: While this was done to a general facebook populations of adults in a radius of 30km from the events to do a first steps (click on a link to get information about a local event), different messages might be more effective if you were trying to reach people who are already interested or engaged.

Right now, we don’t know if clicking on an ad on social media has any real-life consequences of actually going to the event. Also people might just have clicked out of curiosity or to confirm prejudices, not out of intention of attending the event and joining the climate activism movement. So more research is needed! But it’s nice to see this research coming out, and that it is being done on real campaigns, thus professionalizing climate action.

Shreedhar, G., Hinton, J., & Thomas-Walters, L. (2026). Tell don’t ask: how to use social media to mobilise local collective climate action. npj Climate Action, 5(1), 21.

Featured image: Now it has started to rain, so weeks and weeks of snow are coming to an end…