The Research Behind Personifying Grace

By now, you’re probably familiar with Dear Grace®. What started in 2023 as an advice column now also includes a wide range of social media videos that allow us to speak directly to our audience where they are, with content they want to return to. This content integrates prosocial, pro-democracy messages to help them make sense of the world and build up to actions that make our country a better place for everyone. We do this by having Grace authentically model prosocial behaviors and showing that if she can do it, so can you!

Every part of Grace’s work is deliberate and driven by research. Now we want to give you a look behind the scenes to see the why and how of our content.

Why Personify Grace?

When we started Dear Grace® back in 2023, the online communication landscape wasn’t what it is today. Back then, a text-based advice column was a familiar and popular format among our audience, but things have shifted and our audience now spends 54% of their time on social media watching videos. Personifying Grace was a natural response to reach our audience where they scroll and build an even stronger relationship with them, allowing our audience to feel like they really know Grace and are learning alongside her.

We know from our research that trusted, values-aligned messengers are able to reinforce a sense of identity and belonging that helps messages resonate and stick. A personified Grace retains the things our audience loves about her. She’s open, honest, and kind, and above all someone who’s always trying her best to do what’s right, all things our audience values. She’s also someone our audience can relate to. She’s a woman in her midlife, a mother, a grandma, sister, a friend, just like many of them.

Personifying Grace allows her to step outside the confines of an advice column and speak more openly about her life and her struggles and model the kinds of prosocial actions we want our audience to take. Moving away from text and still images and toward short-form video increases the number of people who see our prosocial messages, and therefore the number of people who these messages resonate with. 

This isn’t just a hypothesis: data shows that posts with Grace personified perform significantly better than posts that do not feature Grace on both Facebook and Instagram, our two main platforms. 

Modeling Prosocial Behavior

Personifying Grace also allows her to form stronger parasocial relationships with her audience. We are deliberate about ensuring that Grace is taking a journey alongside our audience and is someone they can always relate to. Grace isn’t an influencer trying to present a perfect life, she’s a regular person with her own authentic struggles and anxieties. She gets nervous about trying new things, she struggles to ask for help, she doesn’t always have the time or energy to do everything, but she never lets this stop her from trying. She isn’t someone to put on a pedestal, she’s someone our audience can grow alongside. 

One of the ways we’re showing this is through our “Trying to be a better villager” series, which is designed to promote civic engagement, specifically improving our audience’s self-efficacy and self-esteem. In these videos, Grace explicitly talks about going outside her comfort zone to help those around her. She makes it clear that it’s not always easy, but it’s worth it, validating our audience’s fears and modeling how they too can do hard things. The villager framing also introduces them to the idea that if we all take small actions, we can ladder up to collective positive change. 

We are especially proud of the video where Grace makes a halal meal for someone going through cancer treatment. 

Here, Grace hits on several of the key messages we hope our audience takes away from their engagement with her. The first is what we’ve already talked about, that it’s ok to do new and hard things. Grace begins the video proud of herself because she was able to do this right, showing that helping others isn’t always easy, but it’s worth it. This helps our audience build self-confidence and self-efficacy. 

We also tackle the issue of “othering.” We know that our audience is often exposed to harmful narratives that seek to pit them against marginalized groups and that for many of them, this is their only engagement with members of these communities. Showing Grace make a halal meal can help promote social cohesion and decrease othering. 

This video was one of our top performing posts, with an 11.7% engagement rate on Instagram (3% is generally considered very good) and a 12.4% engagement rate on Facebook, including many comments from members of our audience talking about how they are also helping their communities and how much they loved watching Grace try something new. When this video was tested in the lab, we saw that it caused statistically significant positive movement toward self-efficacy and belief in collective action!

We are also really excited about the positive comments that came from our poll worker video. 

Framing Grace’s decision to volunteer as something she was invited to do helps show that being a villager can help overcome loneliness and bring you closer to the people you love, something our audience often talks about struggling with. It also gives her the space to be unsure and model doing research and making informed decisions. Talking through her decision helps our audience become more familiar with what being a poll worker means and lessens fears they might have about doing something totally new.

So many people showed their support for her actions and spoke positively about their own experiences, extending the behavior modeling that Grace is doing by showing that she’s not alone; other members of our community are taking a step outside their comfort zones to help out too.

“Thank you for posting this important reminder about how volunteering is a major aspect of our democracy! I’ve been a poll worker for a number of years and highly recommend doing this! Good luck Grace! Have a great time!”

“I have been a poll worker for nearly a decade. Very satisfying being a part of this civic process.”

This kind of positive civic modeling is important, especially during an election year, when a lack of civic self-efficacy can be a barrier to our audience’s participation.

Stay tuned for more Grace and more insights into how she is continuing to build and support a community of women working together to build a country that works for everyone.