An air of Goebbels

Joseph Goebbels was the propaganda Minister of Adolf Hitler. As the fortunes were changing camps and the German people were losing faith in the regime, Goebbels gathered a huge crowd in Berlin and made a famous speech. During this speech, he used all his skills and expertise to convince people to continue supporting Hitler. It was so effective he said afterwards to his friends “had I told them to jump through the window (the speech was made in the upper floors of a building) they would have said yes.”

Goebbels during his speech at the sportpalast

I have always admired Goebbels for his skills and success in his job. Don’t get me wrong: what he did was horrible. He better had himself thrown through a window than doing his evil deeds. But still he was very good at what he did.

Here’s how I relate my experience to this:

My organisation (MAM) was organizing a meeting with young adults in the area to encourage an initiative of forming people about sexual education. I was asked by my supervisor to do all the communication part for organizing this event. She told me that all the previous attempts to organize such events resulted in failure, as people were not interested in coming to these kinds of meetings.

I told myself I had to be realist: if I just send mail invitations of a meeting about sexual education to young adults on a Saturday afternoon, no one would come. Therefore I decided to adopt another approach. I called different NGOs who shared common interests with MAM, asked if we could meet, and went to meet them to invite them for a possible collaboration. An amateur drama club was also invited, as I told them our organization would like to work with them to pass our messages through drama. A personal approach meant that the presence of each one of them at this meeting was important, and also they had something to win from it. All of them responded positively to the invite and the meeting was a success.

Of course this is thousands of miles away from Goebbels’ sad accomplishments. But I saw here the power of communications and public relations: choose wisely your words, angle and way to communicate your messages and you can perform miracles.

Nicolas Chaillet