Policy Dinners Services
Researchers in Bangkok, Thailand just released a new study that found exposing children to Popeye the Sailor Man has a strong impact on their eating habits.
New scientific research found that children who watched Popeye shoveling spinach into his mouth before fighting his rival Bruto, doubled their vegetable intake. Watching episodes of the cartoon was just part of a larger experiment, conducted by researchers at Mahidol University. Children also engaged in planting vegetable seeds, fruit and vegetable parties, and cooking with vegetables.
The research concluded that the 26 child volunteers maintained a more visibly healthy diet following their exposure to Popeye. Experts recorded the four and five year olds eating two portions of vegetables in the days before the study and four portions after watching the cartoon.
Popeye the Sailor Man is credited with saving the spinach industry during the Great Depression. Perhaps re-runs of Popeye is just the policy prescription we need today.
Policy Dinners Services
I recently met with a possible client, and as part of a larger communications strategy, I suggested his business consider hosting a small policy dinner with an elite group of writers and scholars. I was met with a strange reaction – laughing. He understood op-eds, speeches, even conferences. But a dinner? How is that going to help advance our issue campaign?
White House Writers Group has been organizing policy dinners for years, but using a meal as a platform to influence opinion has a much longer history in the nation’s capital. Dinner parties in Washington have been the source of politics and politicking since the days of Thomas Jefferson. As Catherine Allgor, the author of Parlor Politics writes, “Historians have long recognized the political advantages of Jefferson’s dinners, calling them part of his statecraft.”
Jefferson was strategic with his dinner parties, giving them throughout the political “season,” or Congressional session. He typically hosted guests from one political party at a time, careful not to mix Republicans and Federalists. But these were not official state dinners, the way we’re accustomed to hearing about today. Rather, they were intended to be much more “democratic” and generally reflected the president’s casual, Virginia hospitality. Jefferson’s dinners espoused democracy, always using a round table, for instance, to encourage easy conversation, intimacy, and equality.
The act of breaking bread with others helps merge the personal with the political, engage in debate, bridge differences, and move opinion. And in Washington, it appears, we have a long tradition of using food to advance political change.
Policy Dinners
When considering communications strategy, most people think of television, radio, publications, and the Internet — this even though research has long found that face-to-face communications is often, perhaps always, the most effective.
When targeting elites, we at WHWG are big fans of policy dinners. We gather between 10 and thirty of the kind of people our client wants to reach. They may be D.C.-based journalists, or part of the Washington policy world (usually not current office holders but people office holders consult), or industry elites around the country (high tech or financial leaders for example), or even policy and political leaders in London or Brussels. We hold the dinners at private clubs or fashionable homes or in the private dining areas of first-class restaurants. We attract guests with a featured speaker (usually the client’s CEO or a globally acknowledged expert on the issue we want our guests to think about). At least one member of the client’s staff is present, too. Read