Therefore, it's crucial to have a recruitment strategy and focus on building a diverse audience for each dialogue. Recruiting means actively looking for future participants and convincing them that they should spend 3 hours in an unknown event.

To do that you will need to:

• Imagine an ideal group of participants. Who should be part of the conversation on that topic? People of what age and gender? Which walks of life? What are the dividing lines on the topic? Who might be the people on both sides of the divide? The answers will point you to potential sources of participants.

• Write an engaging but short invitation message. Emphasize the benefits of participation. When thinking about these, describe them in ideologically-neutral language to avoid discouraging potential participants from the outset. For more on communication please see Step 7: Be careful about communication.

• Devise a simple registration process. At a minimum you will need a landing page with your invitation message and a simple registration form. Keep it short and intuitive. For more on managing participant data please see Step 8: Be mindful of privacy and GDPR.

• Launch a recruitment campaign. This can involve organic posts on your organization’s Facebook and Instagram channels, posts in Facebook groups, paid social media ads, putting out leaflets or posters. You can go as far as asking influencers active on the topic to re-post, engaging the media and partner organizations to promote your dialogues. All depends on your resources and access - but you can go a long way with basic tools if you use them in a smart and engaging way. All your recruitment efforts should drive traffic to the registration form. 

• Be prepared to pick up the phone. Recruitment does not end when your future participants have registered. Internet users tend to sign up without final certainty about taking part - and no-shows are a big problem if you are to assure 10-12 participants. A phone call from your team might be crucial to address doubts and thus to secure attendance.

• Recruit well ahead of the dialogue. Many potential participants are not ready to join the dialogue at first contact. For those you should consider producing educational content and activities to build awareness and share skills – for example on how polarization hurts family relations and local communities or how to talk with colleagues holding opposing views. It is also worthwhile to record and publicly share a dialogue (after securing necessary consent from participants) to give people an idea what you are inviting to. All this will build a pool of people who might engage in dialogues at a later stage.