The son of migrant farmworkers, Robert Pérez is the founder and chief exploration officer at Wonder. He has dedicated more than 30 years to working with changemakers to accelerate progress by fundamentally changing how audiences relate to emotionally complex issues.
Beginning in 2009, he developed and tested messaging strategies — grounded in people’s faith, values, and lived experiences — to persuade Christian audiences to be more supportive of LGBTQ issues. The messaging persuaded mainline Christian denominations to change their church constitutions to allow LGBTQ people to be ordained as clergy and to be married within the church.
That experience — developing and testing messaging interventions that meet the emotional needs of tough-to-persuade audiences — was the origin story for Wonder, which he founded in 2014. Since then, he has worked with changemakers across the globe to better understand what leads some messages to be successful at persuading audiences while others fail to do so.
With support from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Robert co-authored Heartwired: Human Behavior, Strategic Opinion Research and the Audacious Pursuit of Social Change. The influential strategy guide for changemakers chronicles how the Heartwired approach to audience research and messaging interventions has supported historic wins — from the freedom to marry for same-sex couples to making medical aid-in-dying a legal option for terminally ill people.
In Heartwiring Your Messages, Robert shares a roadmap for communicating effectively with conflicted audiences — five evidence-based strategies that Wonder strategists have nurtured, pressure-tested, and refined for over a decade in partnership with advocates and activists.
When he’s not developing Heartwired strategies, Robert can be found out on an urban hike in San Francisco with his husband, Robert Francoeur (yep, two Roberts!).
What motivates you to do this work?
“Progressive social change begins with getting to the heart of how people feel, think, and act when it comes to tough social issues. I’m motivated to do this work because I’ve seen how a Heartwired understanding of conflicted audiences makes it possible for changemakers to develop successful messaging strategies that influence audience behavior, change policies, and transform cultural narratives.”
What’s your superpower?
“My superpower: Developing successful Heartwired messaging and narrative interventions. At Wonder, we refer to our messaging and narrative strategies as interventions because they help to untie the psychological and emotional knots that prevent people from supporting a cause or thinking differently about an issue. Successful messaging helps people to manage their conflict — leading to an emotional denouement that releases audiences from the binds of their conflict and makes it possible for them to listen to the better angels of their nature.”
