After a decade working in NGOs and politics, I got a massive eye opener when I joined a media organisation and learned how to analyze data and how digital media distribution works.

My huge takeaway is that almost the whole NGO community is accidentally making polarization worse.

It’s a problem with targeting hardcore fans vs trying to spread ideas through wider society. Almost always, organizations choose to go after their fans.

With almost every issue, from climate to refugees to trans rights, campaigning organisations try to keep getting good engagement from their most enthusiastic fans.

Over time, the ideas they share get more and more hardcore and less and less accessible to anyone who’s not a fan already.

The whole conversation gets dumber and more extreme. Agreement, consensus and solutions become impossible.

But, if we rethink how we target – and try to spread our ideas instead of just keeping fans engaged – we can be an important part of reducing polarization and regrowing consensus.

The common objection to that, though, is that orgs such as Greenpeace have to cater to their own base to get funding.

So here's the really interesting question: is there more funding potential in the smaller niche of extreme fans or in the bigger but less extreme niche of people who agree with your values and are worried about their decline in society (but who have got more going on in their lives than politics or activism)?