TACTIC:

Advanced leafleting
COMMON USES Leafleting is the bread-and-
butter of many campaigns. Its
If youre doing
To get important
information into the also annoying and ineffective, standard leafleting,
for the most part. How many
right hands.
times have you taken a leaf- youre wasting
PRACTITIONERS
let just because you forgot to everybodys
pull your hand back in time,
Center for Tactical Magic
Institute for Applied only to throw it in the next time. What you
Autonomy
WAG
available trash can? Or youre
actually interested and stick it
need is advanced
in your pocket, but then you leafleting.
FURTHER INSIGHT never get around to reading
Institute for Applied Autonomy, it because its a block of tiny, indecipherable text? Well, if
Little Brother
http://www.appliedautonomy.com/lb.html
thats what a committed, world-caring person like you does,
just imagine what happens to all the leaflets you give out to
Center for Tactical Magic,
The Tactical Ice Cream Unit
harried career-jockeys as they rush to or from work.
http://trb.la/y0mgjs In a word, if youre doing standard leafleting, youre wast-
ing everybodys time. What you need is advanced leafleting.
CONTRIBUTED BY In advanced leafleting, we acknowledge that if youre go-
Steve Lambert ing to hand out leaflets like a robot, you might as well have a
Andrew Boyd
robot hand them out. Yes, an actual leafleting robot. In 1998,
the Institute for Applied Autonomy built Little Brother
a small, intentionally cute, 1950s-style metal robot to be a
pamphleteer. In their tests, strangers avoided a human pam-
phleteer, but would go out of their way to take literature
from the robot.
Make it fun. Make it unusual. Make it memorable. Dont
just hand out leaflets. Climb up on some guys shoulders
and hand out leaflets from there, as one of the authors
of this piece did as a student organizer. (He also tried the
same tactic hitchhiking, with less stellar results.) The share-
holder heading into a meeting is more likely to take, read and
remember the custom message inside the fortune cook-
ie you just handed her than a rectangle of paper packed
with text.
Using theater and costumes to leaflet can also be effective.
In the 1980s, activists opposed to U.S. military intervention
in Central America dressed up as waiters and carried maps
of Central America on serving trays, with little green plastic

8 TACTIC: Advanced leafleting

toy soldiers glued to the map. They would go up to people in Related:
the street and say, Excuse me, sir, did you order this war?
When the no response invariably followed, they would TACTICS
Creative petition delivery p. 22
present an itemized bill outlining the costs: Well, you paid
Creative disruption p. 18
for it! Even if the person they addressed didnt take the Mass street action p. 68
leaflet, theyd get the message. Street theater web
The point is, leafleting is not a bad tactic. Its still a good Electoral guerilla theater p. 40
Guerrilla newspaper web
way to tell passersby what youre marching for, why youre
making so much noise on a street corner or why youre set-
ting police cars on fire. But people are more likely to take CASE STUDIES
New York Times Special Edition web
your leaflet, read it, and remember what its all about if you
deliver it with flair. Or ice cream.

KILL THEM WITH KINDNESS: Nuff said. Pissing people off wont KEY PRINCIPLE
do your cause any favors, so dont piss people off. Disarm at work
with charm, and maybe your audience will let their guard
down long enough to hear what you have to say. OTHER PRINCIPLES AT WORK:
Show, dont tell p. 174
Consider your audience p. 118
Balance art and message p. 100
Stay on message p. 178

TACTIC: Advanced leafleting 9