Yale Program on Climate Change Communication

Knowing your audience is key to successful communication. This is especially important when communicating climate change: a topic that elicits different responses from different people. This means your communications strategies and messages should be tailored for your audience. Our research identifies six unique audiences within the American public who perceive and respond to climate change in their own distinct ways: Global Warming’s Six Americas — the Alarmed, Concerned, Cautious, Disengaged, Doubtful, and Dismissive.

In 2018, we created a simple 4-question survey tool, called “SASSY” — the Six Americas Super Short Survey — that helps communicators quickly categorize any individual or group of respondents. Since then, a growing number of campaigns, educators, and researchers are using this tool to better understand their audiences, screen participants for their research, and measure the effectiveness of their communication campaigns.

Today, we are excited to release the new Guidebook: Using the Six Americas Super Short Survey (SASSY) in Campaigns and Education. The guidebook is designed to help teachers, communicators, advocates, pollsters, and researchers use the SASSY tool. It includes case studies of communicators using the tool in diverse settings. It also highlights the varied benefits of using SASSY, such as:

• SASSY helps users better understand their audience, which can then inform their communication strategies.
• Identifying common misconceptions about one’s audience, such as the tendency to underestimate people’s levels of concern about climate change.
• Targeting: SASSY saves users time and money by helping them target the specific audience that will help them achieve campaign goals.
• Measuring the impact of campaigns: SASSY helps with measurement, evaluation, and learning to support evidence-based communication. Many YPCCC partners, from museums to advocates, have greatly improved their communication campaigns using SASSY.

Example: The Wild Center saved a year of exhibit planning by using SASSY to better understand its visitors. In 2020, the Wild Center, a natural history museum located in a rural, conservative-leaning part of New York, started thinking about a climate-focused exhibit. However, the Wild Center’s staff were concerned that their visitors would react negatively to an exhibit about climate change. To inform their decision, the Wild Center used SASSY to investigate their visitors’ views about climate change. The SASSY survey found that 82% of their visitors were Alarmed or Concerned about climate change, and only a small proportion of visitors were Doubtful or Dismissive. By first learning about its audience, The Wild Center was then able to tailor their exhibit for their audience. Their exhibit — Climate Solutions — is now a master class in climate communications as it helps visitors connect to real stories of climate action, and visitors leave the exhibit with hope and motivation to act for a livable future.

“SASSY saved us about a year in exhibit development because we did not have to spend as much time as we normally do in prototyping and front-end evaluation. With SASSY, we were very quickly able to check our assumptions, understand our audience’s needs, be precise in our targeting and focus our attention on the Alarmed and Concerned. It gave us the confidence to quickly home in on a solutions frame for our exhibit.”

– Stephanie Ratcliffe, Executive Director, The Wild Center

Example: Campaigns, pollsters, and researchers are using the 4 SASSY questions in their climate and clean energy surveys. They often find that the Six Americas segments respond differently to different messages. By including the SASSY questions in surveys and message tests, campaigns can develop tailored strategies to engage these different audiences.

Want to learn more? Download our new Guidebook: Using the Six Americas Super Short Survey (SASSY) in Campaigns and Education.

For partnership inquiries and to explore how to apply SASSY in your communication campaign, please contact Joshua Low (joshua.low@yale.edu).

SASSY in other languages

SASSY is available in many major languages of the world. Translated questions and responses for Spanish, French, Swahili, Indonesian, Tagalog, Arabic, Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Portuguese, and other major world language versions of SASSY are available upon request. Please reach out to our Partnerships team at ypccc.partners@yale.edu for access and guidance on applying SASSY outside the United States.