The LibreOffice

C ommunications Playbook

Why just telling people facts doesn’t change them

(This is interesting but skippable, if you’re in a hurry)

Those WordPerfect 5.2 people have been offered alternatives — many times, by many people, some of them professionals — and declined them all, because they have used WordPerfect to write thousands of documents over two and a half decades, and they want nothing to do with typing in anything that doesn’t need many keyboard shortcuts memorising.

Logic is demonstrably not working on them, at least not in the obvious way of adopting something new because it’s objectively better. You can blame evolution, which requires animals to avoid being eaten for long enough to pass on their DNA. The survivors are the ones who’ve found a successful strategy to avoid being eaten, and stuck with it long enough to breed. If they had changed habits, they would have to be certain the new one would have to work, and the people who were inclined to take risks got eaten.

So the survivors and their descendants (us) shared suspicion of anything unfamiliar.

Daniel Kahneman — who won a Nobel Prize for establishing that humans are considerably less rational than they imagine themselves to be — describes the brain as operating two systems. System 1 is fast, automatic, and emotional: the two-hundred-thousand-year-old not-getting-eaten equipment, extremely good at its job. System 2 is slow, deliberate, and analytical: the part that can evaluate a software licence and construct a seventeen-point rational case for change. System 1 is the heuristic version of System 2: fast and low overhead and Good Enough for most things. It’s why we flee from snakes instinctively rather than taking five minutes to work out from first principles why letting them bite us is almost certainly unwise. Running from harmless snakes means you get to have descendants, and evolution hard wires this into brains over the generations.

System 2 has, according to Kahneman a somewhat exaggerated sense of its own importance and believes, sincerely and at all times, that it is in charge. It is not, mostly. It’s just is a very articulate spokesperson for conclusions that System 1 reached earlier by a completely different process and for reasons it has chosen not to share. The part of you that feels like it’s driving is frequently in the passenger seat writing a convincing account of a journey it didn’t plan.

And then someone comes along and tells both of them they’re wrong. Of course they’re going to resist.

So dragging people from WordPerfect or MS Word with logic is never going to work. System 1 will keep providing System 2 with ‘reasons’ that are superficially plausible and absolutely unshakeable, but also stupid and wrong. It’s like an LLM when you challenge its vehement claim that bananas are a kind of shark.

Which brings us to getting people to adopt LibreOffice. Evolution has been around longer than software (even COBOL) and it’s left the non-nerds avoiding new software with the same commitment their ancestors avoided new ways of avoiding hungry lions. The skill set that kept your great-great-grandmother from being eaten by a lion is not optimally configured for evaluating office software.

In practice, this means that when you show someone a carefully prepared case for switching to LibreOffice, before they have processed a single bullet point, the older and more powerful part of their brain has identified the situation as one involving potential danger, registered this as a threat, and quietly begun generating reasons why the current arrangement is probably fine actually. The neuroscientist Tali Sharot found that presenting people with evidence that contradicts their existing beliefs doesn’t just fail to change their minds — it entrenches the beliefs deeper. The brain, confronted with a good argument it wasn’t expecting, treats the argument as an attack and responds accordingly. The more they know, the more LLM style counter-arguments of wrongness they can formulate.

Take a long running geek jihad: vim and emacs — two text editors that do largely the same things, neither of which has shifted its opponents’ position in over forty years of trying. It is not a rational debate. It is an identity-based, emotionally-driven, occasionally theological dispute conducted in the language of technical merit, and everyone involved knows this perfectly well, which has not noticeably slowed it down. The preference for a particular language, the quiet contempt for certain frameworks, the very specific expression that appears when someone mentions they use Windows: this is System 1 dressed in System 2’s clothes, and it is recognisable to every developer alive.

We all do it. I do. Even you. Yes, you do. WordPerfect 5.2 diehards aren’t outliers. So how do you solve the problem? You cannot argue your way past a two-hundred-thousand-year-old threat response with facts because feelings over ride them. But you can work with the feelings.

Infodumps play to System 2, and System 2 gets over ridden by System 1. So we work on System 1. This is not manipulation. It is the difference between designing for the brain people actually have and designing for a theoretical brain that nobody has and which, if it existed, would already be using LibreOffice.

This playbook starts from that premise and takes you all the way through to the bullet points for your next presentation.

The lions, for what it’s worth, are not in any of the slides. They seemed scary.

Your Kobayashi Maru moment

Faced with a paradox, this is how we hack the problem.

Humans all share the system 1/2 architecture, but exactly what the heuristics are driving at differs from person to person, and situation to situation so there’s no one infodump to rule them all.

We come up with some broad groups of different use cases for communicating why LibreOffice is a good thing. It’s a version of using personas to analyse UIs. The different groups get versions of the same messaging, based on what they’ll assign more value to.

It’s an efficient way to not reinvent the wheel.

There are four contexts for the messages:

• Pitch (elevator) – short, pithy, as though your only chance to talk to someone is in an elevator journey. You can’t give all the facts, just the headline. The job is to get them to want to know more. It’s the big picture, to orient noobs.

• Presentations – sentences and bullets to drop into slides

• Posts – for Reddit, BlueSky, forums

• Print – leaflets and handouts

Obviously, they overlap. Mix and match to suit what you want to do.

Pick the right combination of persona and message for the context, and your message stands a massively better chance of getting across.

The Make Your Own Adventure bit

• I just want the text to cut and paste. SKIP TO THE LAST FOUR PAGES.

• I’m not convinced. Persuade me. TURN TO THE NEXT PAGE.

Personas: who are those guys?

What to do with this information

Before you’re doing any communication about LibreOffice, figure which of these personas is closest to your audience and use it to shape how you talk to them.

1. Conscious Switcher

2. Pragmatic Veteran

3. Reluctant Adapter

4. IT Decision Maker

5. Public Adminstrator

The key question for each person is not ‘what can I tell them’ but ‘what are they worried about’ — because that is what you need to address first.

1. The Conscious Switcher

Younger home user, typically 18–35

2. The Pragmatic Veteran

Older, tech-savvy home user, typically 45+

3. The Reluctant Adapter

Older, less tech-savvy home user

4. The IT Decision-Maker

Corporate / SME context

5. The Public Sector Administrator

Government / local authority context

Core messages

What to with this information

These four ‘contexts’ are at the core of what you’re trying to get across, in different ways to different audiences. We’ll use them to create text of different length and tone for different contexts (posts, presentations, conversations, etc)

The Four

1. Your data stays yours

No AI training on your documents. No cloud account required. No company reading your files. LibreOffice runs on your machine and sends your data nowhere. This is the strongest opening with almost every audience — it addresses loss aversion directly by framing the switch as keeping something, not giving something up.

2. Works with your files

LibreOffice reads and writes .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx natively. Colleagues and partners don’t need to change anything. It also opens formats Microsoft Office has quietly abandoned: MS Works, WordPerfect, Lotus, and others. This pillar addresses the most common practical fear: ‘will I lose something I can’t recover?’ It should also address the question specifically: “If I’m not paying, it’s because I’m the product, right?” The answer is that LibreOffice doesn’t need to charge because it’s created by volunteers, and The Document Foundation covers server costs. Nobody’s selling anything.

3. Built to last

LibreOffice is not dependent on any single company’s pricing decisions, product roadmap, or server uptime. It works offline. It has been in continuous development for over a decade, used by millions including governments. The Document Foundation is a non-profit: no investor to satisfy, no exit strategy, no business model that requires changing the deal.

4. No subscription (consequence, not pitch)

LibreOffice costs nothing. But this is most persuasive when it arrives as a logical consequence of the model — ‘it’s non-profit, so there’s nothing to charge for’ — rather than as an opening claim. Leading with ‘it’s free’ triggers Sharot’s backfire effect in sceptical audiences: they generate objections faster than you can answer them. Let it land after the first three pillars have been established.

What works with whom

What to do with this information

You need to attract and keep people’s focus by engaging with their concerns, not yours. You may not have long, and they don’t owe you their attention.

This grid is how you prioritise the messages for each persona. The aim isn’t to tell them everything, it’s to keep them engaged.

Personas and messages

Which pillar to lead with per audience. ★★★ = open with this; ★★ = strong supporting message; ★ = mention if relevant.

Five hacks the comms people hate you knowing

Except they don’t. They really, really want you to know them.

1. Lead with the concern, not the product. Most people don’t care about LibreOffice — they care about their data, their subscription, or their frustration with Microsoft. Start there. ‘Most people switch because of the privacy or the vendor lock-in’ is a better opening than ‘LibreOffice is a free office suite.’

1. Don’t be preachy. The open source community trends toward righteous framing. This activates exactly the defensive response Sharot describes — people dig in rather than open up. State facts. Let people draw their own conclusions.

2. Specificity beats sincerity. ‘Opens WordPerfect 5.2 files’ is more convincing than ‘we respect your data.’ Concrete, verifiable claims work because they give System 2 something to examine after System 1 has already accepted the premise.

3. Don’t lead with ‘free.’ It sounds too good to be true before trust is established, triggering the ‘I’m the product’ objection. Let it arrive naturally once you’ve explained the non-profit model.

4. Know when to hand off. A community forum is not a value proposition for a 500-seat IT department. Refer corporate and public sector audiences to the certified commercial ecosystem for support conversations.

Tone Guidance

• Confident, not defensive. You don’t need to apologise for what LibreOffice isn’t.

• Specific, not abstract. Numbers and names beat values language.

• Empathetic first. Acknowledge the concern before introducing the solution.

• Never: ‘Actually, Microsoft is evil because…’. Always: ‘The reason most people switch is…’

What if they’re just not that into you

What to do with this information

You know the Reddit trick of posting a wrong solution to get people to solve the problem for you because nobody can resist finding fault? When someone proposes something, we all tend to be thinking of ‘yeah, but...’ responses. Same thing will often happen with your first line messaging here, so here are the responses. Again, they’re focussing on what will work with the person, not beating them over the head with logic and facts.

Handling Common Objections

Context Changes Everything

Conference presentations and talks

• Use the Presentation Boilerplate block as slide copy. One section = one card or bullet.

• Open with a pain point or a question, not a feature list. Give System 1 a reason to stay in the room.

• Identify your audience persona before you walk in and match your opening to their primary concern.

• Avoid architecture slides for non-technical audiences. Save them for Q&A.

• End with one clear call to action: libreoffice.org.Social media, forums, and online communities

• Use the Post Boilerplate block as a starting point. Adapt the first line to the conversation already happening.

• Engage with concerns rather than broadcasting features. Respond to what the person actually said.

• Don’t start with ‘LibreOffice is...’ — start with the concern or the situation.

• On Reddit and Hacker News: honesty and specificity outperform enthusiasm every time.

Printed materials

• Use the Print Boilerplate block. It works standalone — no presenter, no link required.

• Include one URL and one call to action.

• Assume zero prior knowledge.

In-person conversations

• Use the persona profiles to read your audience in the first 30 seconds.

• Default opener: ‘your data stays yours’. Works with almost everyone.

• Follow their questions rather than delivering a rehearsed pitch.

• If possible, have a working demo. Watching it open their file format closes more conversations than any argument.

TLDR: text to cut and paste

The next five pages pull together the personas, messages and context in simple-to-cut-and-paste format.

What To Do With This Information

The important thing with these is the underlying thought, not the wording. They work best if you find your own words for that underlying thought. Tweak as needed.

Elevator Pitch

So called because it gives a top line summary short enough to deliver it to someone if you happen to find yourself in an elevator with them.

However tempting, don’t plunge into detail and don’t infodump.

Your audience will home in on what they want to know about after you’ve given them the general framework. Be guided by them, regardless of whatever you think is important. The instinct to add more information is System 2 talking, and it will undo the work System 1 has just done.

If you were buying a car and the salesperson kept telling you how fast it was when you just wanted to know about fuel consumption, it would put you off. Same thing here.

Social Media

Designed to be dropped into conversations organically. For instance, on BlueSky as part of saying you’re presenting about LO/TDF at an event, or when a Redditor asks about free alternatives to Office 365. The URL at the end is important. Obviously they could Google LibreOffice but why put the extra friction in the way. (Insta and Twitter can be weird with URLs in posts, so finishing with a “search ‘LibreOffice’ for more info” would work better.).

Presentation slides

Two short sentences, again very much up for tweaking based on specific context. In general for presentations: they’re visual, so use visuals to underline what you’re saying, rather than reading from a text-heavy slide.

Leaflets and Posters

Printed materials – leaflets, posters, etc – take time and money, and can be a bit longer (not much) than a post or bullet point, so they can cover all the bases more easily.

It’s not an infodump though. Keep tightly to the broad messaging to pique interest, not overwhelm with detail.

Keep the wordcount down. People are going to grab leaflets or see posters in passing, so they won’t absorb detail. They work best by steering readers to more information, so always include a URL, QR code, or at an event, a presentation time or stand location.

1. The Conscious Switcher (Younger, Ethical/Privacy Focus)

Primary Concern: Data privacy and corporate ethics.

2. The Pragmatic Veteran (Older, Tech-Savvy, Continuity Focus)

Primary Concern: File compatibility and long-term data safety.

3. The Reluctant Adapter (Older, Less Tech-Savvy, Simplicity Focus)

Primary Concern: Frictionless migration and "not losing files".

4. The IT Decision-Maker (Corporate, Budget/Uptime Focus)

Primary Concern: Vendor independence and infrastructure control.

5. The Public Sector Administrator (Government, Compliance Focus)

Primary Concern: Data sovereignty and compliance.

One Text To Rule Them All

Leaflets and Posters

LibreOffice: your documents, your way.

LibreOffice is a full-featured office suite — word processor, spreadsheets, presentations, and more — that runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It works with the same files as Microsoft Office and Google Docs, opens formats Office no longer supports, and requires no cloud account.

Your documents stay on your device. No company is reading them, sharing them, or using them to train artificial intelligence. There is no server you don’t control.

LibreOffice is developed by a global community of volunteers and professionals, overseen by The Document Foundation — a registered non-profit based in Germany. It has been in continuous development for over a decade, used by millions of individuals, businesses, and governments worldwide, including [INSERT: relevant example].

Because it is run as a non-profit, it costs nothing to download and nothing to keep using. No subscription. No trial period. No change to that arrangement.

Download free at libreoffice.org

Social Media fragments and hashtags

These can help where you have to watch the character-count:

Most people who switch to LibreOffice do it for one of two reasons: they’ve decided they don’t want Microsoft’s servers holding their documents, or they’ve had enough of paying a subscription for software they used to own. Both are fine.

LibreOffice is a full office suite — word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, the lot — that runs on your computer rather than in a cloud. It handles .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx natively, so your colleagues won’t notice any difference. No account required. Nothing leaves your machine unless you put it there.

It’s built by a global community and governed by The Document Foundation, a German non-profit. That’s why there’s no subscription: there’s no company with shareholders to satisfy.

If you’ve been half-thinking about making the switch: libreoffice.org

#LibreOffice #DataPrivacy #OpenSource #DigitalSovereignty