Local Groups

Maybe it’s all the excitement about setting up The Warblers – Glasgow P4Indy music group – now we’ve also started tweeting!! Our first tweet was from in George Square, Glasgow, at the Hope Over Fear Rally last weekend.

Sheena, one of our stalwarts at the stall, wrote this about being at the Rally:

“Despite a miserable rainy morning we decided to go for it & the sun shone. Mary, Neil & dug. Heather, Valerie & myself. Rather gusty winds but the atmosphere was happy and positive – which cheered me. There was a big range of age groups including many 50+ men & women from all over central Scotland. And further afield. One American lad over on a visit asked if we were celebrating our Independence Day! People were very generous with donations and went off with our Saltire earrings, flags, and leaflets. The painted stones Heather had made were popular with children (these were made to hold down our leaflets in the wind)! Apparently we have been viewed by over 50,000 people – courtesy of Valerie our Twitter expert.”

That tweet now has 867 likes, 69 replies and 407 retweets. That’s a very encouraging start. The more we raise P4Indy’s profile, the more people see what we are doing to encourage older folk to engage with the Yes Movement.

An hour after our first tweet, we had 100 followers. Overnight that grew to about 1000. We’ve had lots of appreciative tweets and mentions. Five days on and our Twitter feed has 1740 followers. There’s obviously a good few folk out there who appreciate what were doing in Pensioners 4 Indy! Some of them were speaking to us this morning in Argyle Street at our regular Thursday spot from midday.

If you’re a Tweeter, follow us @P4IndyGlasgow for P4Indy news, updates from our website, photos, and news from around the Yes Campaign. There is also @P4Indy which is the Twitter feed for our National Group P4Indy.

Last month the Glasgow P4Indy had a visit from Bill Mills talking to us about Reframing. This month we wanted to explore his ideas from different angles so we created a workshop format looking at the values we associate with an independent Scotland. We did two workshops – one about values we as Yes voters associate with independence; and another about values which led No voters to reject independence.

Of course we’re Yes voters so we might not be correct in the values we think influenced No voters! But we’ve got experience of talking to No voters in our family, in meetings, on buses, and at our stalls. it was interesting to see what came out of this. We could understand why people were / are influenced by these things.

We’ve put the results of these workshops into word clouds.

Values & Ideas We Associate with Becoming Independent:

Values & Ideas We Think Led People to Vote No:

These are not definitive results. We could do the same workshop with a different group of people and get a different word cloud. But we think there would be a big overlap with what we came up with.

This is not in any way to denigrate the values we placed in the No cloud. Actually there is overlap between the two clouds. Some are sort of mirror images of each other. There is definitely a relatedness between the two and we think being more aware of that relatedness is helpful.

After going through this, we had a better sense of where our values and thinking overlaps with No voters. Of course there’s not a neat match. But it did suggest things that could help us in reframing our conversations.. Ways in which we might reframe our own thinking. And ways in which we might manage to suggest new frames for their thinking.

It’s not easy to change frames. This is definitely a work in progress!