Persuasive: 40 Lessons in Communicating for the Common Good

by Marrianne McMullen

A novel model for planning effective communications campaigns

Communications is a fast-growing profession. The need to create, edit, translate, and disseminate information through a variety of different platforms is creating an increased demand for people with these skills.

Persuasive introduces the Persuasion Matrix, a model for planning communication campaigns based in persuasion research. Marrianne McMullen draws on her wide-ranging and high-profile career to share her hard-earned wisdom gleaned from her work as a journalist, with labor unions, with DC public schools, and on President Barack Obama’s campaigns; she also served as an appointee in both his terms. McMullen tracks decades of research, providing a series of intricate and diverse case studies about workplace and relevant social issues. Persuasion theory and research is woven throughout the professional narratives and each career story closes with key lessons in communications. Persuasive guides researchers and practitioners to a point of reflection on the true value of engaged scholarship and communication activism.

Highly engaging and concise, Persuasive is a professional memoir that provides 40 lessons in communications for managers, communicators in public or nonprofit sectors, and students of communications.

192 pages, Hardcover

Published August 1, 2024

Reviews

[Bonni McKeown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marrianne McMullen and I went to the same journalism school—West Virginia University, 10 years apart. As our profession has slowly realized, there’s no such thing as objectivity. Every human’s experience is uniquely our own and everybody evaluates things differently. Although the cover looks like a business how-to book, "Persuasive" is really a memoir with 40 stories from her career, each with a communications tip attached.

But the thing that readers will remember is not always the tips, right on target with good common sense. Rather, we become engrossed in Marriane’s small but significant roles on the stage of our times, from the 1970s through the 20-teens, and how she coped with her career choices personally.
Marriane spent many of her years covering local news, in both mainstream and alternative newspapers, operating in her native Western Pennsylvania and in Dayton, Ohio as industries closed and laid-off workers, deprived of a future, descended into opiate drugs. The wave of depression affected many young people including her foster daughters.

Marrianne and her husband Jeff kept their popular alternative weekly Dayton Voice afloat at great cost to their personal finances, and the paper survived almost a decade beyond their ownership. Strategically they considered the well-being of themselves, their family and coworkers, and rather than get bogged down in the Rust Belt, they moved on.

As the 21st century opened, Marrianne began working in communications inside organizations and government. She served on the communication staffs of service workers’ unions AFSCME and SEIU in Chicago, then in the DC school system where staff tried to save Supt. Michelle Rhee from her own disconnections with parents and teachers. Then she went on to DC, serving in the Obama administration promoting citizen signups for Obamacare.

McMullen drew up a realistic model, the Persuasion Matrix, which diagrams who need to persuade to act to influence your given political target to do what you want them to do. Did you persuade the right persuader? Great. If not, you can use her diagram to see where the chain of action broke down.

This book is not an expose. Marrianne is not describing events where she’s being asked to tell outright lies, beyond spinning her bosses in a good light. My prediction is that, if asked to lie for a living in today’s insane political scene, she’d use her common sense and extensive contacts to ease her way out of that job and land, catlike, on her feet.

It would be interesting to hear her newest communication tips based on such experiences. Topic: How does one not lose one’s soul while doing communications for a living?

[Deborah James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whether or not you are a communications professional, excellent communications skills will help you achieve your work or personal life goals. In Persuasive, Marrianne McMullen shares decades of wisdom in advocating for myriad education, labor, community, health and human services, and other issues with enlivening stories. Each concise tale illustrates a specific gem of carefully honed wisdom. Her Persuasian Matrix is a widely applicable, brilliantly compact strategic guide. But this book goes beyond just professional communications skills per se. It is also about learning lessons from life, as a working class person and a mother especially, and bringing those life skills to bear authentically and in ways that will help you become a better leader, colleague, advocate, and friend. You will be the best communicator you can be when you bring your full self to the table - and make space for others to do the same, and listen to what they have to say. McMullen's illustrious career is full of high impact achievements. But there are also enough setbacks included to demonstrate that this book was not written for self-aggrandizement, but to assist readers looking to improve their communications for the betterment of humanity. Three cheers for this excellent and thoroughly enjoyable roadmap!

[Gordon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone can read Persuasive as a memoir about a life in communications and journalism as well as one about Marrianne's personal journey as a working class kid who ends up working with folks from the White House (who turn out to be as self important as you'd imagine) — and beyond. But people who work in the field of communications, advocacy, nonprofit or government work will get more juice from this book through the ideas about how to be persuasive that are embedded in the stories.

Chapters present a specific story from McMullen's experience— which is varied from producing an alt weekly newspaper to working for the federal government to leading communications for a human services think tank — with a communications idea presented as a sort of 'moral of the story.' They also hang together to tell a larger story. It's kind of like a miniseries - very Netflix of the author to organize it this way.

McMullen says the book started with notes she was drawing up with the idea of teaching a class on communications and public relations, but the ideas were each attached to a story. It's a successful combination that makes the book and ideas easy to engage with.

[Julia A Kruse · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is wonderful, principally for the engaging storytelling where the author's long, varied career in...well...storytelling, told in 40 chunks, lets you slowly get to know her from her working class background to the halls of power in DC, and then secondarily for the clear lessons in using stories in effective communication and advocacy. So many of the communications tips are common sense but put together they are a powerful reminder that telling stories can change minds, and history.