159. Interview with communications director and persuasion expert Paula González Carracedo
Show notes
This week we were delighted to be joined, all the way from Madrid, by Paula González Carracedo: a self-described “fellow communications nerd” who has spent twenty years working at the sharp end of the social impact sector. Paula is an executive communications director who built and grew her own agency, leading campaigns for organisations including the Humane Society International and Mercy for Animals, and securing more than 2,000 global media features along the way. She’s also an academic, lecturing in the theory of communication, oratory and debate at several Spanish universities, where she designs curricula and runs workshops on science-based communication, rhetoric and ethical persuasion. What makes Paula such a fascinating guest is that she has a foot in two worlds, both the hands-on craft of running campaigns and working with the media, and also the theory of how persuasion actually works. For the last couple of years she’s turned her attention to “narrative friction”: the gap that opens up when rigorous, data-driven organisations are brilliant with evidence but struggle to tell a story that moves people.
Join us for a fascinating conversation about Paula’s winding path into communication through animal activism and competitive debating, how to translate complex data for a general audience without losing academic precision, balancing logic and emotion in a way that’s intellectually honest but still moves people to act, communicating across languages and cultures (be curious, not judgmental), and why the medium is always part of the message.
You can follow Paula and find out more about her work here:
Paula’s agency, The Vegan Agency: theveganagency.es/en
Paula on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/paulagonzalezc
The Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication (University of Cambridge), which Paula recommends for frameworks on communicating risk and evidence: wintoncentre.maths.cam.ac.uk
Paula’s article on how AI is helping us understand other species — the English version of her El País piece: read it here
And, as promised, Paula’s fantasy reading recommendations: Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree, Sarah J. Maas’s Throne of Glass series, and When the Moon Hatched by Sarah A. Parker.