Six lessons in public speaking from Obama

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America has elected the greatest political speaker for a generation.

You may think that there’s nothing for you to learn from Barack Obama’s speechmaking skills - that speaking to 200,000 people at Grant Park, Chicago is too far removed from the presentation you might give to your staff, to your management team or to potential clients. Here are six lessons you can learn from Obama’s acceptance speech at Grant Park.

1. Know your audience

It would have been easy for Obama to fall into the trap of talking to the 200,000 people before him in Grant Park. He didn’t. He spoke to Americans in their living rooms, he spoke to those who voted for McCain, he spoke to people watching him across the world - leaders and the poorest of the  poor. He knew who his audience was.

“And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces, to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world, our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.”

2. Envelop your point in a story

The long history of the campaign for civil rights in America made Obama’s election possible. Obama enveloped this point with the story of Anne Dixon Cooper, a 106 year old woman who was born the daughter of slaves, and has lived through the milestons of the civil rights movement.

“She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons — because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.”

That’s far more emotionally engaging than giving us a history lesson.

3. Paint pictures on the canvas of your audience’s mind

Obama used specific and concrete words to conjure powerful images in our minds. Here are some examples:

“Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington. It began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston.”

“Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us.”

“And, above all, I will ask you to join in the work of remaking this nation, the only way it’s been done in America for 221 years — block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.”

4. Get personal

Barack Obama told the whole world that he’s getting his two young daughters a puppy to take with them to the White House. And the world loved it. In his first press conference he remarked that this is the most popular issue on his website.

5. Wait for weight

Obama is not in a hurry when he speaks. He waits for the audience to process and react to what he has just said. And that gives his words weight. You can do the same.

6. Light and shade

Obama’s acceptance speech had different moods - joyful - humorous - serious - intimate - determined. The contrasts keep us engaged - build light and shade into your presentations.

Here’s the full transcript of the speech - it’s worth reading in its entirety.

For more perspectives, here are other posts on Barack Obama’s acceptance speech:

Bert Decker focuses on impressive aspects of Obama’s transformational speech.

Lisa Braithwaite comments on Obama’s speech and McCain’s concession speech.

Nick Morgan praises both Obama and McCain for their speeches.

Max Atkinson analyses Obama’s rhetorical techniques.

5 strategies to defuse the audience

Sometimes your audience needs defusing. You may know ahead of time that the audience is likely to be hostile to your ideas, or there may be a big issue looming over them which distracts them from listening to your presentation. Or they may simply not be that interested in listening to you.

Whatever the issue, it’s best to acknowledge it in the opening of your presentation. Here are some strategies:

1. Acknowledge the audience’s concerns

If your audience is riled about something before you even start- don’t ignore it. For example, public meetings around infrastructure issues can explode in emotion, if the audience doesn’t feel listened to.

You may be familiar with the concept of “reflective listening”  or “active listening” in one-on-one conversation. You can apply the principles underlying active listenting when you’re talking to an audience. By acknowledging the emotions, you can reduce the likelihood of chaos.

However, you do have to have some sensitivity in the way that you do this. Avoid cliches like “I understand how you’re feeling.” That’s a recipe for them to fire back with “Oh no, you don’t - how can you know what’s it’s like to live here”. Add specificity, for example, “I can understand that the idea of huge wind turbines on the hills behind your home is very concerning.”

2. Find common ground

When you’re addressing a controversial issue, start by identifying what you have in common with your audience. Listen to Barack Obama as he touched on what we have in common in his now famous speech on race “A More Perfect Union”:

I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together - unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.

I have seen Nandor Tanczos, previously a Green Party MP in  New Zealand, do this effectively in a debate on drug law reform. He was arguing for the decriminalization of cannabis - but he reached out to all the members of the audience by identifying the common ground in the debate - that we were all interested in reducing the harm done by drugs.

3. Name the elephant in the room

If there’s an issue on everybody’s minds - address it head-on. Else your audience will be distracted from your substantive content.

The classic example of this is now Randy Pausch in The Last Lecture. For those of you new to the blogosphere, Randy Pausch was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Professors at Carnegie Mellon were traditionally asked to give a speech entitled “The Last Lecture” in which they passed on their life’s wisdom to students. In Randy’s case it truly was his Last Lecture - he had recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given 3-6 months to live (sadly he died in July). Every person in the audience knew about the diagnosis. If Randy hadn’t mentioned it right at the start, it would have been swirling around their minds and interfering with their concentration on what he was saying. Randy addressed his diagnosis head-on by showing slides of his CT scans to the audience. He demonstrated that he wasn’t feeling sorry for himself and said he didn’t want anybody else to feel sorry for him. Having dispatched “the elephant in the room” Randy was then able to get on with his presentation.

Note: If you haven’t yet seen The Last Lecture make the time to do so (about 70 mins). Once you’ve seen it you’ll want your loved ones to see it, so make it a family event.

4. Give them a reason for listening

If your audience don’t have an inherent interest in the topic of your presentation, then give them a reason for listening. Identify the benefit to them of listening.

Tony, my co-trainer at Effective Speaking, used to train sound engineers and radio technicians in how to carry out cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR). As they worked with electricity there was always the risk that one of their colleagues might get electrocuted. But none of them looked forward to the idea of doing CPR on their colleagues! Tony would introduce the session by saying “Imagine you come home from work and your wife or your child is lying unmoving on the the kitchen floor. In this session we’re going to look at what you need to do.” Having the skills to save your loved ones - that’s a benefit.

5. Acknowledge weaknesses

Barack Obama spoke to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee at a time that many wild rumours about him were circulating. Here’s how he started:

Before I begin, I want to say that I know some provocative e-mails have been circulating throughout Jewish communities across the country. A few of you may have gotten them. They’re filled with tall tales and dire warnings about a certain candidate for president. And all I want to say is — let me know if you see this guy named Barack Obama, because he sounds pretty frightening.

In Yes: 50 secrets from the art of persuasion, Cialdini and his co-authors report on a study of jury decision-making.

When jurors heard a lawyer mention a weakness in his own case before the opposing attorney mentioned it, they rated him as more trustworthy and were more favourable to his overall case in their verdicts because of that perceived honesty.

Do you have audiences you need to defuse? Let us know in the comments.

How to say nothing in your next presentation

Have you sometimes gone along to a presentation -it may be entertaining and enjoyable - but at the end of it, or a few days later, you think to yourself - what did I get out of that presentation? It’s easy to fall into the trap, as a presenter, of saying nothing in a presentation.

What are some of the traps:

1. Stating the obvious

We were once working with a human resources professional for a large organisation preparing a presentation for an HR conference. His draft Key Message was “People are our greatest asset”. Yawn. Find a novel angle or your personal perspective. In his case, his organisation had recently grown from a start-up type business to an established organisation and his Key Message became “We’ve needed different types of people for the different phases of our growth.” That’s much more useful to the audience.

2. Saying too much

Far too many presenters try and say too much in their presentations. As Garr Reynolds has said:

You can go deep or you can go wide, but you can not do both, and frankly you can’t even go that deep or that wide either.

“More is Less” - the more you try and cram into your presentation, the less your audience will remember. This is a lesson I am still learning. I’ve often been seduced by the great presentation fallacy that “If I say it, they will get it”. It’s not so. In order to get it, your audience needs to hear it in words that make sense to them, and they need to be given examples of how it might apply.

Adding support for each point in your presentation takes time. Therefore you need to include less points.

Cut, cut, cut.

3. Only telling stories

Much is made of telling stories in our presentations. But if your presentation is only stories - it’s a meringue presentation - sweet, light and lovely at the time, but no long-lasting substance. I have seen a few professional speakers fall into this trap - they link together a raft of beautifully crafted stories that make us laugh and make us cry…have a great time…but what was the point again?

Stories are there to support the message - so there had better be a message. You may think it’s obvious, but it needs spelling out. Let your audience know what the point is.

4. Ignoring the audience

About a decade ago, a well-known professional speaker and technology writer in New Zealand was giving a presentation to a breakfast meeting of a networking organisation. Her topic according to the program was “E-mail Marketing”. However, she had recently become enamoured of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and that’s what she wanted to talk about. At the beginning of the presentation, she asked members of the audience how many had websites. Out of the hundred or so people, only 4 put up their hand. But despite this signal - she went on to talk about SEO - a topic only of interest to people with websites. The presentation is not about you - it’s about your audience - you are there to serve them.

5. Speaking only at a conceptual level

Some people are very comfortable at a conceptual and abstract level. They love to pepper their speech with conceptual metaphors. But if there’s nothing to tie down the abstract to the concrete, the rest of us won’t get it. Chief executives and senior managers are often guilty of this. They speak in visionary metaphorical language and staff are left thinking “What does that mean for my job?”

Note: This post was inspired by How to say nothing in 500 words (a lesson in writing) by Maki of DoshDosh, which was itself inspired by an article on writing academic compositions written in the 1950s.

How to establish your credibility without bragging

It’s hard to pull-off establishing your credentials without sounding like you’re bragging. The public speaking blogosphere is alive with stories of presenters who didn’t quite hit the right note. Lisa Braithwaite says in her blog post on establishing your credentials, they haven’t come to the presentation to hear all about you. Dave Paradi also warns against talking about yourself too much.

It’s like we have a braggart alarm bell. We’ve learnt not to trust people who speak too well of themselves. So how can you avoid setting off the braggart alarm bells of your audience while still establishing your authority to speak on the topic?

The secret is to make it look as if it’s not you doing the bragging.

1. Have someone else introduce you

In Yes: 50 secrets from the art of persuasion, Cialdini and his co-authors say:

Arranging for someone else to describe your expertise and credentials to the audience will do wonders to convince them that they should listen to what you have to say, while also avoiding the damage that blatant self-promotion can cause.

Prepare this introduction yourself

Having someone else introduce you, doesn’t mean you leave them to it - very few people prepare properly for introducing a speaker. And there’s also a risk that your introducer says something which is at odds with the message you want to send in your presentation. I have a good friend who speaks across UK, Australia and New Zealand on Values Education in schools. She has a Christian background but strongly believes in Values Education being non-religious in nature. Before one particular presentation, her introducer dwelt on her Christian “credentials”. The audience peppered her with questions about the relationship between her Christian beliefs and values education throughout the presentation.

Tailor your introduction to the presentation

The audience doesn’t want to hear a generic resume. They want to hear:

• Why this topic? How is this topic of benefit to them
• Why you? What special skills/expertise have you got which makes you qualified to speak to them on this topic
• Why now? Why is it important to hear from you at this time.

For more ideas on preparing an introduction check out Taking charge of your introduction from Denise Graveline.

When it’s your turn

Plunge straight into your presentation. Beware of falling into the trap of saying “Well, as the chairperson said my name is Olivia Mitchell, and I’m from a company called Effective Speaking.” Doh!

2. Provide attendees with a written profile

If there’s no-one to introduce you, write a profile detailing your experience and qualifications to be talking on this topic. Ensure the attendees have it ahead of time. Write it in the third person, rather than the first person. For example “Olivia has been teaching presentation skills for ten years” as opposed to “I’ve been teaching presentation skills for ten years”.

It’s a subtle distinction which makes a big difference. Here’s a description of a research study led by Jeffrey Pfeffer, and reported in Yes:

…participants were asked to imagine themselves in the role of senior editor for a book publisher, facing the task of dealing with an experienced and successful author. They were asked to read excerpts from a negotiation for a sizeable book advance. One group read excerpts touting the author’s accomplishments spoken by the author’s agent, whereas a second group read identical comments made by the author himself.  The data  verified our hypothesis: participants rated the author more favourable on nearly every scale - especially likeability - when the author’s agent sang his praises as compared to when the author tooted his own horn.

Even though we know intellectually that personal profiles written in the third person were probably written by the person themselves - it doesn’t set off our braggart alarm bell.

3. Tell a story

Tell a short personal story which serves both as an introduction to your topic and subtly signals your expertise in the area. When I’m introducing myself at the start of our introductory presentation skills course for nervous beginners, I tell the participants about the time I was enveloped with fear giving the first important presentation of my career. They can relate to this and can see that I have managed to overcome that fear. But I don’t come across as bragging. That’s because the information about my credentials is incidental to the main story and so slips through the back door into the audiences’ minds without setting off their braggart alarm bell.

So there’s three ways of establishing your credibility without being a braggart. It doesn’t matter that they audience may intellectually realise that you’ve written all the material, emotionally they’re fooled.

Are there other ways that you’ve pulled off this trick - let us know in the comments.

Quiz: Are you a winger or a stickler?

Is finding the right balance between structure and spontaneity a problem for you? Here’s a quiz:

1. How much preparation do you do before a presentation?

a. I think through the basic ideas in my head and jot down a few keywords.
b. I plan carefully the main message I want to get across and then structure supporting points.
c. I plan everything I want to say and write down how I’ll say it.

2. What are you most concerned about when you’re delivering your presentation?

a. I must be natural and genuinely engage with the audience.
b. Yes, I want to be natural and engaging but also I want to stay on track.
c. I must remember everything I want to say and get it right.

3. What’s the most likely problem you might have when you’re delivering your presentation?

a. Well, I might waffle and go a little off track at times.
b. I’m not perfect but generally it goes pretty well.
c. I come across as rather stiff and artificial. I might end up reading my presentation to the audience.

Mostly As - you’re a winger
Mostly Bs - you’ve got it sorted
Mostly Cs - you’re a stickler

If you’re a winger - what could help you keep more on track? If you’re a stickler what could help you be more natural and engaging?

Two types of presentation content

Think of having two types of content in your presentation:

1. The bones of your presentation - this is the framework of your presentation. It holds your presentation together. It includes your Key Message and your main points.
2. The flesh of your presentation. This includes the stories, anecdotes, metaphors and other supporting material.

If you’re a winger

Focus on planning the bones of your presentation - this will ensure your presentation hangs together with a solid structure rather than being just an entertaining ramble. You can still be at your engaging and spontaneous best during the supporting material.

If you’re a stickler

Let go about getting the supporting material just right. It won’t be fatal if you forget to tell an anecdote or leave out a detail. You’ll be more engaging and natural. To help you let go,  put critical information in a handout.

Will Smith’s keys to a great presentation

Leo Babauta from the blog Zen Habits recently posted his Top 5 most inspirational videos on YouTube. I hadn’t come across this remix of a speech by Will Smith (the remix is by TeamJonny5 - I’ve edited it slightly). It’s only 1 min 19 sec so take the time to watch it because in this short snippet Will Smith showcases the elements of great speech design :

OK, it’s not a corporate or business presentation. But I bet if I asked you in 6 months time “What are Will Smith’s keys to life?” - you could tell me.  That’s because it’s got great design for stickability. What makes this speech so memorable that you can use when you plan your next business presentation?

1. Key Message

Will Smith has a clear key message:

“Running and reading are the keys to life”

It’s short. It’s concrete - you can visualise running and reading. It’s easy to grasp, it’s easy to repeat. The fact that it rhymes may be the reason why. In Yes: 50 secrets from the science of persuasion Cialdini and his co-authors cite research that shows that rhyming phrases are processed more easily. That’s not unexpected - but more surprising is that rhyming phrases are also seen as more accurate!

So see if you too, can make your key message rhyme.

2. Repetition

He says his key message twice near the beginning and uses it again to wrap up. When we’re writing we’re taught not to repeat ourselves - but repetition works great in an oral presentation. In a longer presentation, you can say your key message even more often. Ending with the key message is a great wrap-up which gives the presentation a sense of completion.

3. Flagging

Will Smith tells us to pay attention to his Key message: “I want you to listen closely, I’m giving you the keys to life.” I call this technique flagging, because it’s like you’re waving a flag to your audience to say - pay attention to this next bit -it’s the most important. In a business presentation you might say something like: “Here’s the most important thing I want you to get today.”

If you don’t flag your key message, there’a a risk that it will get lost, like a needle in the haystack of your words.

4. Simple structure

Will Smith has a very simple two-part structure for this speech:

• Running - why it’s important
• Reading - why it’s important

The purpose of structure is to make a presentation easy to follow and understand for the audience. Don’t make it more complicated than it needs to be.

Of course, the speech doesn’t just have great content, Will Smith also delivers it with passion. He’s really intent on getting his message across to his audience of screaming young people.

Four tips from five-minute presentations

Networking events which group together a number of short presentations are creating a buzz.

There’s Pecha Kucha Night, which started out to allow young designers to showcase their work:

Each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each - giving 6 minutes 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter is up. This keeps presentations concise, the interest level up, and gives more people the chance to show.

There’s Ignite which has more of a geek flavour:

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds?

and in Wellington, New Zealand we have 7×7:

It’s an ideas forum and networking evening where seven speakers have seven minutes to present an insight into their work and their vision for New Zealand.

7×7 was originally inspired by TED, the grandaddy of them all:

The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.

What does the popularity of these formats tell us about presenting?

1. Short presentations can effectively cover big ideas.
2. A short presentation is often better than a longer one.
3. Audiences like short presentations (if it’s boring or if the topic isn’t of any interest to you, it’s not going to go one for too long).
4. Audiences like variety.

Why is a short presentation better than a longer one?

More thought has been put into it. That’s because the presenter has been forced to:

1. Think hard about the main thing they want to get across to the audience in that short amount of time. So a short presentation is more likely to have a clear focus.
2. Narrow the scope and/or the depth of what they present. They know they can’t cover everything there is too know about their topic. So they’re less likely to overwhelm the audience with information.
3. Plan what they want to say - rather than just talking to a few bullet-points scribbled on the back of an envelope - because they don’t have the luxury of rambling on till they get to the point.
4. Edit. Editing improves the presentation.

For all these reasons, preparing a short presentation often takes longer than preparing a long one. And that work pays off. So even when you’re giving a longer presentation, start preparing as if you were making a five minute presentation:

• make sure you’ve got a clear focus,
• plan what you want to say,
• narrow the scope/depth, and
• edit.

Your presentation will be the better for it.

4 Reasons brainstorming may sabotage your presentation

Many people plan a presentation by brainstorming. I don’t recommend it. Brainstorming is an attempt to capture everything you know on a particular topic. That’s likely to overwhelm your audience.

Here’s an example of a brainstorm for a presentation on financial planning to small business-owners.

Brainstorming to prepare a presentation leads to many problems:

1. You’re likely to end up having too much information in your presentation

In the brainstorm above, there are heaps of great points and nuggets of information that small business owners might find useful. It’s going to be difficult to decide which to include and which to discard. But if the presenter attempts to cover all these points, he’ll overload his audience with information. The more you include, the less your audience will remember.

2. You’re setting yourself up for a lot of editing work

So you realise that you need to cut down on all the points you’ve generated through brainstorming. It’s going to take a lot of time and effort to do that editing. You’ll have spent time brainstorming points, only to then spend time editing them out. Wasted time.

3. You risk not being able to find a focus for your presentation

All the points and ideas that you generate during brainstorming clutter up your thinking. In the brainstorm above, there are so many areas of interest that’s it’s going to be difficult to decide what should be the focus of the presentation. And a tight focus is the secret of an effective presentation.

4. You may end up with unrelated points in your presentation

In an effective presentation each point contributes to the focus of the presentation and logically follows from what has been before. That’s difficult to achieve if you’ve generated a whole heap of unrelated points through your brainstorming.

An effective way to prepare a presentation

A key skill in planning an effective presentation is to drastically limit the amount of information you include. So instead of brainstorming as your first step in planning your presentation, decide on what is the one thing you want your audience to remember from your presentation.

The brutal truth is this:

Your audience is likely to remember only one thing from your presentation

Don’t leave what they remember up to chance. You decide what the one thing will be.

In the financial planning presentation, the presenter decided that the one thing they wanted people to remember was that small business owners need to save for their retirement and not rely on their business to fund their retirement.

2. Craft this into a Key Message

The one thing should be crafted into a clear and memorable Key Message . It should be easy for you to say and easy for your audience to grasp and remember. Here’s the key message for the financial planning presentation:

Your business is not your superannuation policy

So don’t brainstorm. Work out your Key Message - and then develop the rest of your presentation to support that Key Message. Preparing your presentation in this way, will save you time and effort and you’ll deliver a message your audience will remember.

Are our brains wired to enjoy stories?

Presentation experts extol the power of telling stories in presentations. A recent Scientific American “The Secrets of Storytelling” explores why stories are so powerful. It looks at three theories from the fascinating field of evolutionary psychology.

Stories are simulations for real life

Keith Oatley, is a professor of applied cognitive psychology and a novelist. So he’s got a special interest in the psychology of fiction. He describes stories as “simulations that run on minds”. He says that just as pilots-in-training spend time on flight simulators, stories may act as flight simulators for real life.

Well-known evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker says storytelling may have evolved because it was a useful “thought experiment”. By running a scenario and visualising what happens we learnt what might happen in real life. This equipped us to deal better with real life. So people who were more receptive to stories had an evolutionary advantage over those who weren’t so receptive. (For more on this see Pinker’s article “Toward a Consilient Study of Literature”).

We create stories to better understand other people

In stone-age times, our ability to get on with other people was crucial to our survival. As a result we have what psychologists call “Theory of Mind” - we’re constantly guessing what other people are thinking and feeling. Our tendency to attribute thoughts and feelings to other people, leads us to create stories. In a 1944 study  reported in the Scientific American article, psychologists showed people an animation of a pair of trianges and a circle. The people naturally described what was happening in the form of a story eg: “The circle is chasing the trianges”. We’re naturals at creating stories out of what we see and experience.

Storytelling helps us know what’s going on

Anthropologists note that storytelling is universal across cultures and throughout history. They hypothesise that storytelling about other people helped our ancestors survive and thrive. Our survival was dependent on living with other people - storytelling about others would have helped us learn who we could trust and who we couldn’t. Frank T McAndrew in “Can Gossip  be Good?” says:

People who were fascinated with the lives of others were simply more successful than those who were not, and it is the genes of those individuals that have come down to us through the ages.

The phenomena of gossip magazines and celebrity culture are possibly the modern equivalent of ancient storytelling.

So the presentation experts have got good reason for recommending the use of stories in your presentation. Your audience is wired to listen to them.

The power of anecdotal evidence

In your business presentations, you may be tempted to stick to hard, proven facts and statistics to persuade your audience. But a powerful anecdote can trump objective facts.

The power of the anecdote

1. Vaccinations and autism

A recent Scientific American article by Michael Shermer “How Anecdotal Evidence can Undermine Scientific Results” discusses the medical controversy over vaccinations and autism. Many parents are convinced that their children developed autistic symptons as a result of a childhood vaccination. There is currently no scientific proof that this is so and many scientific arguments that show that it is highly unlikely. Despite that many parents continue to strongly believe in a causative link.

Michael Shermer explains:

The reason for this cognitive disconnect is that we have evolved brains that pay attention to anecdotes because false positives (believing there is a connection between A and B when there is not) are usually harmless, whereas false negatives (believing there is no connection between A and B when there is) may take you out of the gene pool. Our brains are belief engines that employ association learning to seek and find patterns.

So our brains naturally make connections from anecdotal evidence -even though there is no scientific proof.

2. Chronic causes and high-profile emergencies

Further evidence of the strength of anecdotal evidence is the struggle that charities have in funding vital ongoing work such as fighting malaria and AIDS,  compared to the deluge of funds that pour in for high profile crises, such as the Asian Tsunami or Hurricane Katrina.

Here are the statistics for the estimated number of people who die each month from chronic causes:

AIDS   250,000

Famine 150,000

Malaria 80,000

Infectious diarrhea 180,000

TOTAL  660,000 deaths each month

By contrast the number of people who died in the Asian Tsunami was 280,000 and Hurricane Katrina, 1,093. When there’s a crisis, the emotional video footage and tragic stories motivate us to donate money. The sobering statistics can’t compete.

Combining statistics and anecdotes

You would think that combining statistics and an emotional anecdote would be even more powerful.

However, a fascinating experiment reported in Chip and Dan Heath’s book Made to Stick shows that mixing analytical information with an emotional anecdote may nullify the power of the anecdote. In the research at Carnegie Mellon University, George Loewenstein and his co-researchers compared the effect of three different charitable appeals for poor people in Africa:

1. Statistical information on the plight of people     Gave $1.14
2. Story and photo of a 7 year old girl called Rokia  Gave $2.38
3. Both the statistics and the story                           Gave $1.43

So the group who read about Rokia gave twice as much as the first group who only saw the statistics. And the third group gave only slightly more than the first.

The researchers followed up with a second experiment using the Rokia story. Before giving people the story to read, they either primed them to think analytically (had them work out a maths problem) or primed them to think emotionally (asked them to describe how they felt when they heard the word “baby”).

1. Primed to calculate   Gave $1.26
2. Primed to feel           Gave $2.34

An additional follow-up experiment I would be interested in would be looking at the impact of offering statistics after the emotional story. Would that lessen the amount of giving? On their blog, Chip and Dan Heath look at an example of exactly that - a video called The Girl Effect which moves from a story of a single poor girl to the statistics that she represents (I blogged about it a few days ago). Chip and Dan Heath praise what they call the micro-to-macro approach.

So if you’re combining anecdotes with statistics, ensure the anecdote comes first, then follow up with the statistics to give credibility.

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