Inspiration and persuasion require emotional engagement, so why do presenters think they can bombard their audiences with information alone and expect that to lead to action and results?
Throwing statistics, data and hypotheticals at people at the expense of reaching them "in the feels" will not motivate them to take the action you desire.
So, what actions do you want your participants to take at the end of your presentation?
🌀 donate
🌀 volunteer
🌀 attend events
🌀 make a major gift
🌀 engage in research
🌀 join fundraising efforts
🌀 become mentors/mentees
🌀 share stories about working with you
🌀 refer others to your organization
🌀 contribute to scholarships
🌀 follow on social media
🌀 join your membership
🌀 amplify your message
🌀 join your mailing list
🌀 sponsor programs
🌀 share resources
🌀 advocate
🌀 partner
🌀 vote
These are examples from my nonprofit training clients, depending on the context and the audience they're speaking to.
Information, inspiration, and persuasion are all necessary pieces of the puzzle.
🧩 People need information, but just *specific* information to help them make a decision. Not ALLLL the information. Just the information that is specific to their particular needs and concerns, and is clear, concise, and relevant.
🧩 They also need inspiration to help them see how actual humans are affected positively by the action you want them to take (or animals or oceans or trees ↬↬↬ and then connect it back to humans). They need inspiration to help them feel connected to your cause and to WANT to help.
🧩 And they need persuasion in order to move past the inspiration and feelings, to take the concrete action step(s) you're requesting.
And regarding action: You actually need👏🏼a👏🏼call👏🏼to👏🏼action. You need to tell them what you want them to do next.
And it's not "go to our website." 🤦🏻♀️
🎯 Give them the exact action they need to take to do the next thing.
🎯 Give them a specific link to donate - and tell them exactly what their donation might cover.
🎯 Give them a specific link or phone number to volunteer with specific opportunities, descriptions and time commitments.
🎯 Give them a specific link or phone number to reach out to their congressperson *with a script* so they know what to say or write.
🎯 Give them a specific date, place and time to show up for the thing you want them to do, and tell them exactly what's required.
Information + inspiration + persuasion: You need all three if you want people to do something and do it NOW.
Need support to put the puzzle pieces together in your next presentation? Contact me!
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Sharing some soundbites and rough thoughts about making nonprofit messaging more clear, relevant and practical, from CalNonprofits annual policy conference.
"'Democracy is at risk.' What does that even mean?" State Senator Anna Caballero
"Misinformation is free; digging into policy is behind a paywall." Jodi Hicks, Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California
"Don't obey in advance." Anand Giridharadas, journalist and author
The conference was sobering and exhilarating at the same time.
I attended in order to gather intel on how upcoming policy changes will affect my nonprofit training clients, and what support they might need in the next year to continue #SpeakingUpForChange.
How might Californians be affected by the new administration and how will the nonprofit sector adjust and take action?
I wasn't surprised to hear the following takeaways regarding both messaging of candidates and of nonprofits in helping their communities understand the election process and outcomes (from my perspective as a communication professional):
🔴We need better messaging that meets people where they are (climate change impacts everything from insurance rates to energy bills - people don't know this)
🟣We need to speak their language (not give high-level policy reports or make existential claims like "save democracy")
🟡We need to actually ask people what it means for them personally
⚫There is huge disconnect between policy and people's actual lived experience
🔵People do have an appetite to be better informed: We need to make accurate information more accessible - not hide it behind paywalls
🟠We need to teach people how elections work, to help combat apathy and overwhelm, and get voters out for midterms and off-year elections (remember Schoolhouse Rock?) Check out America the Possible, a new site that promotes civic engagement and understanding how our country works "one simple, tiny MicroByte at a time."
🟤Communities need to invest in nonprofit and local media because people don't trust national outlets
🟢Nonprofits and media need to show people doing good work in their communities to illuminate a pathway for those who don't know what to do and how to help
⚪Organizations need to improve their communications overall - talk to their communities in a way that they can hear, learn and retain
🔴Collaboration and communication are essential to fill in gaps of information and services
Where do we go from here? Now that the problems have been acknowledged, will we take action?
Several of my nonprofit clients use "ambassadors," volunteers who are the clients of the organization, for community outreach and legislative advocacy. More need to be doing this!
P.S. The quote "punk rock time" is from Henry Rollins. "This is not a time to be dismayed, this is punk rock time. This is what Joe Strummer trained you for." ~ Henry Rollins
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Rachel Maddow gave an impassioned speech after the election last week. This is what I needed to hear and what many of use need to hear, internalize and act on. Let's go, pirate energy!
"If you are an American citizen who does not want to ash can the American system of government, who doesn't want a
strongman, authoritarian system where the whole government is one guy and
everything else just exists to serve him—if that is not the kind of country
that you want—then yesterday's election means you have more to do for your
country than you have ever done before.
Because now is when the rubber really
hits the road, right? We don’t just flip a switch, and the American system of government
is gone. Democracy is gone. It doesn’t work like that. I mean, not to be boring
here for a second, but just getting very real.
We are now just another one in the list of countries that
has decided to, you know, hey, what the heck, let’s try the strongman thing.
Let’s let democracy go. Let’s put in an all-powerful guy instead and see how it
goes. There are many more countries in the world governed by that kind of a
system than there are governed by ours.
We are the only 248-year-old,
multiracial, pluralistic democracy in the world. And shall we keep it? A lot of
our fellow Americans say we shouldn’t. Now we know. Now we know for sure. But a
lot of Americans, tens of millions of Americans, say we should keep that
system—which means it’s time to fight for it.
And yes, Americans did fight for it by working on this
election, by trying to get the candidate elected who was both the Democrat and
the small-d democrat. She didn’t win. The strongman candidate won instead. But
now history doesn’t end. Time doesn’t stop. Now, we have the benefit of
knowing, you know, how this has gone in every other country that has been
through a democracy-to-authoritarian transition. And sadly, there are a lot of
them. We have the benefit of seeing what’s happened in those other countries
though. And what we know is that the more ground the authoritarian takes, the
harder it is to ever get that ground back.
And so the first order of business is to stop them from
taking any uncontested ground, right from the outset when it comes to what our
system of government is and what our democracy is, right? We know from other
countries' experiences that, quickly—I mean, now, in the next few weeks, if not
the next few days—they are going to start pushing to see how far the country is
going to let them go without pushback, without protest. And part of this is
because it’s just psychologically advantageous for them to do this now, right?
They’re counting on the half of the country that voted
against them, the half of the country that doesn’t want to give up our system
of government. They’re counting on all those tens of millions of Americans to
be despondent, to feel powerless, to check out—which, of course, would mean
letting them do what they want, letting them run the table.
What they really
don’t want is for the half of the country that voted against them, the half of
the country that wants to keep our democracy. What they really don’t want is
for those tens of millions of Americans to wake up tomorrow feeling scrappy as
hell.
Feeling sure, regretful about the election outcome, but
also, frankly, freed up from having to spend all of our time working on the
election. So now we can work full time on being frickin’ pirates, on being a
thorn in the side of anyone who now intends to try to turn this country into
some tin-pot tyranny. What they want least of all is to realize that half the
country went to bed sad tonight but then woke up tomorrow fired up with a new
sense of purpose, knowing that apparently this is what we’re on this earth to
do as American citizens in this generation.
Because history did not just end.
Time did not just stop. We just got marching orders from the universe and the
Electoral College that, as of today, American citizens who do want to hold on
to democracy, we know exactly what we’re going to be spending the next days and
weeks, and likely years, of our lives working on.
And the strategic first moves come into focus quickly when
you think about what other countries have shown us about how hard it is to
regain democratic ground once an authoritarian leader has taken that ground.
And the work has to be done now. The work that has to be done now—it has to
happen in sort of every aspect, every corner of our society.
The U.S. military
needs to give the American people binding assurances that they will not deploy
U.S. military force against the civilian population in this country. They can
give those assurances, and now they should.
The free press needs to give the
people of this country assurances that they will not become state TV, that they
will stand and fight together. They will put aside rivalries and petty professional
differences. They will stand and fight together as the free press, as the
fourth estate, as an institution that is a pillar of our democracy as these
guys on the other side inevitably start picking off individual journalists,
individual publishers, individual news organizations to try ultimately to turn
us all into some American-accented version of RT.
If the Democratic Party takes
the House, expect Article I of the Constitution to come under attack—by which I
mean, expect efforts to hollow out the power of Congress, to make Congress a
just-for-show institution, right? There’s a reason actions of the Russian Duma
never make news, right?
Expect efforts to attack Article I, to make it a
just-for-show institution that has had its real powers taken over by the
executive, by the dear leader. We are going to need a plan and some steel spine
inserts among elected officials in Washington to head that off. We’re going to
need the whole country to recognize that risk in advance, to call it what it is
when they try it, and to actively resist it.
Depending on whether the courts can provide a check on this
administration, expect Article III of the Constitution to come under attack as
well. It is already a fetish and a laugh line on the right to brag about how
court orders really mean nothing and physical force and violence is what
ultimately really decides what’s allowed. Well, we have to decide if that laugh
line from them is going to become our reality or whether we’re going to resist
that.
We need a plan and some steel spine inserts among members of
the judiciary to head that off. We’re going to need the whole country to
recognize that risk in advance. We’re going to need every lawyer in the country
to recognize it as their calling to fight it. We’re going to need to call it
what it is when it inevitably happens. And we’re going to have to actively
resist it.
And then there’s civil society. Is there a more boring term
in the world that doesn’t include the word "committee" or
"budget"? No, there isn’t. Civil society, though, is kind of where
the rest of us are at, right? Civil society is one of the things that I think
of as soft food for authoritarians. They often don’t even have to bite that
hard to crush it. All the organizations, membership groups, advocacy groups,
professional associations, every voluntary group of every kind in the country,
everything in organized American life and culture that is not business and not
the government either—that is civil society.
And authoritarians need to crush that because it’s not about
them. Strongman leaders have a tendency to become not just leaders of the
government, not just dictators, but totalitarians because they can’t have
anything going on in the country that isn’t about them or for them. And a
strong civil society, therefore, must be crushed, right? If you have a strong
civil society, that gives people breathing room to think for themselves, to
organize in their own interest, to speak with the power of more than just one
person.
We need assurances from civil society leaders today that they’re not
going anywhere and that they will fight for our democracy too.
And frankly, it’s not just the leaders. We all need to
participate in more civil society things than we have before to make sure that
we are taking up space that otherwise they’re going to try to take for the
government and the dear leader. And what I mean by this in short is: join
something. It doesn’t really matter what it is. But you want right now to be
connected to other Americans and not isolated on your own.
So, deep breaths, hydrate, maybe time to get back in shape.
Do you have any burned bridges in your past? Un-burn them. Reconnect with
people, whether it’s your family or the people on your block or in your town,
your old friends from school, that book club, that Indivisible group maybe.
Reconnect or connect for the first time.
Join something, join something.
If
this election was about one candidate who stood for the American form of
government and another who stood for getting rid of that because America is a
garbage can and "I alone can fix it, just give me all the power, and I’ll
do it all." If that was the choice in this election, then the aftermath of
the American people making the choice they did in this election is not just the
end, right? It’s not just, oh, it’s over. It means we’re now entering into a
contest.
It will now be an effort on his side to put that into
practice, right? To put strongman, authoritarian government into practice. And
it will be an effort on the other side, an ongoing, continuing, and now newly
urgent effort on the other side to let him know that it’s not going to be easy.
These next few days and weeks, if they really are going to try to dismantle the
American form of government, including firing all federal employees, right,
including rounding up their enemies, including opening internment camps to hold
millions of people, threatening military force against their perceived enemies—if they really are going to try to undermine the American
system of government, which is what they’ve made this campaign about, then in
the next days and weeks, they are going to be testing to see what they can get
away with without pushback.
They are going to do the things they can do easily, and they
will have to put off the things that turn out to be hard. So, what’s going to
be hard for them? That’s where the American people come in. We do not only work
for our country and for our democracy in elections; we work for our country and
for our democracy against anyone, anywhere, anytime who seeks to do it harm.
And so there’s, there’s a lot to do.
Time doesn’t stop. History doesn’t stop. We have stuff to
do. Millions of Americans woke up today to the realization that, although you
worked as hard as you could to try to bring about the election outcome you
wanted, you did not get the election outcome you wanted. And so now what that
means is that there is a whole new raft of stuff to do.
Hope you are feeling scrappy. Hope you are tapping into your
inner pirate energy because it is one thing to be a defender of the realm. It
is another thing to be in opposition. And opposition can be a lot of things. It
can be dangerous. It can also be fun. It would have been nice to win the
election. Didn’t. OK. Time to save the country."
Watch the video here:
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Sure, you're an esteemed expert and authority in your field.
You're sought out for the value you bring to conferences.
You have knowlege and experience that's not easy to find in a speaker.
But...
🟢 You looooove to hear yourself talk.
🟣 Your ratio of lecture to engagement is wayyyy off.
🟡 You're so verbose that your audience can't even breathe.
🔵 Your language is anything but plain, and way over their heads.
You've been doing this so long, that you've forgotten the most basic concepts about giving a presentation:
🟣You can't expect bored attendees to learn or retain your material.
🟠You can't just pour information into people like they're empty vessels.
🟢You have to tailor your content so it's relevant, practical and useful to them.
🔴You have to balance what you need and want with what they need and want.
Some of my "windiest" and driest clients have been academics, CEOs, healthcare professionals, financial advisors, and lawyers, who realized that the piece missing from their presentations was engagement.
✅They know their stuff.
✅They're highly experienced.
✅They're not nervous about speaking.
But they're missing that critical element that creates a complete experience for their audiences—and by the way, the element that creates a more fun experience for themselves!
Are you missing the audience engagement piece? Reach out and let's talk!
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If you're not nervous, your presentation might suffer.
It doesn't mean you have to be shaking in your boots to give a good performance (because that's not good for anyone), and it doesn't mean that you can't experience incredible energy and a sense of flow and connection during the performance.
What it means is that, in order to do a good job, we have to *care.* We have to be committed to delivering our best AND delivering what the audience needs, wants, and cares about. And there is ALWAYS uncertainty when you're getting in front of a group for the first time.
I'm giving my first significant keynote in December. Yes, I'm nervous! That doesn't mean I don't have 100% confidence in my ability to deliver an amazing experience. It just means that I care!
Top speakers, athletes, and entertainers will always be nervous before an event because they're committed to excellence, and they don't rest on their laurels of previous successes.
Here's a snippet of a conversation between Eddie Murphy and Jerry Seinfeld, from Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee:
Eddie: "The times I've gotten on stage and felt totally loose with no energy of being uncomfortable at all, I would do shitty. I wouldn't have as strong a set."
Jerry responds.
Eddie: You gotta have a little bit of "What if this shit doesn't... what if they don't get all of this shit?" I always do best when I have a little bit of that.
And here's a conversation between Conan O'Brien and Chris Farley, after Chris Farley took a pratfall in his character of motivational speaker Matt Foley:
Conan: "The falling down helps, right? Always gets a laugh."
Chris: "Yeah, it breaks the ice a little bit...."
Chris: "....It's like a first hit in football. It takes the butterflies away. 'Cause I was backstage like, going, 'Oh God—they're gonna know I'm dumb!' So I just fall down, try to do something physical."
Some people are so petrified that they avoid public speaking at all costs. Some get a little stage fright right before beginning their presentations, and it goes away quickly.
And a manageable amount of nervousness is beneficial to a speaker. For one thing, it's a signal to your body that you're in a heightened state of awareness. (I'll be talking more about this in my new course, FYI!)
Nervousness is a part of public speaking like crashes are part of the Tour de France. The best way to deal with nervousness is not to try to eradicate it, but to learn to manage it as a tool and use it to your advantage.
🧪🦠🧠Want to learn more about the biology, chemistry and psychology behind public speaking nerves, and also learn how to manage your nervousness, channel the adrenaline, and work on your mindset around the adrenaline rush?
I've got a new course coming out JUST on public speaking nerves and stage fright. Comment below or message me to get the link when I make it available for pre-order at a special rate.
(Pic: Here I am feeling super relaxed AFTER speaking on a panel.)
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When we were in LA recently, I made my husband drive around the block into an alley with this blue wall, and then take about a hundred pictures of me so I could make graphics like this one. 📸
Do I feel foolish doing these poses in public while people walk and drive by?
Maybe a little. 🤷🏻
My husband is very patient with my requests; he knows that any time we go somewhere together, I might ask him to stop in a weird place and take some weird pictures.
But taking silly pictures and videos in public is probably the LEAST embarrassing thing I do on a regular basis.
I make a fool of myself practically every time I give a presentation. And every time I learn from it.
I learn what works, what doesn't work, how to recover from mishaps, and how to engage my audience more effectively.
I put myself out there because that's how I grow as a person and as a presenter.
Every time I enter a microfiction contest, I risk embarrassing myself with a story that readers don't get, or that doesn't place, even though I thought it was good.
Or maybe I didn't think it was good, but entered it anyway because it was the best I could do given the prompts and the 24-hour constraints.
Some thoughts on a Sunday: Stop worrying about embarrassing yourself. Just get out there, make mistakes, look foolish. Get out of your comfort zone, push past the discomfort and create learning experiences for yourself!
P.S. Also, if you have a chubby gut and a double chin, take the picture anyway.
What have you done lately to look foolish on purpose? Share your thoughts below! 👇🏼
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I was once reading a conversation started by a Black person about anti-Black hate crimes, and I thought it would be helpful to mention antisemitism and the hate crimes that Jews experience.
Why did I think that would be helpful? 🤷🏻
Maybe I thought Black people needed to know that Jews are also victims of violence? (Nope, they already know that.)
Maybe I thought I was offering solidarity? (I wasn't. I was making it about myself.)
Maybe I thought the conversation needed "different perspectives?" (It didn't. It was a conversation meant to educate and bring awareness about people's lived experiences, not to ask for different opinions.)
This was a huge learning experience for me, realizing that sometimes it's not actually about ME. Sometimes my opinion or perspective is not needed or relevant. 🤯
As a communication junkie and natural-born opinionated bigmouth, I have spent my life inserting myself into conversations that were not meant for me. I tend to think my opinion is incredibly valuable and worthwhile and that everyone should hear it. 📢
Now, if I want to create awareness of antisemitism, I can make my own post. I can share my own resources. I don't need to hijack someone else's post about their lived experience and try to insert my own, when it's not relevant.
I'm unlearning some things. Just because people are talking publicly about something on social media doesn't mean they want to hear "my side of the story."
Sometimes a topic is open for discussion and different perspectives.
Sometimes there's only ONE SIDE and we need to just shut up and listen. 👂🏼
To clarify:
Men: learn from the experiences of women.
White women: learn from the experiences of Black women and WOC.
White people: learn from the experiences of Black people and POC.
Straight people: learn from the experiences of LGBTQ+ people.
Cisgender people: learn from the experiences of trans and nonbinary people.
Non-disabled people: learn from the experiences of people with disabilities.
Etc.
Most of us have multiple identities, so listen to the ones you are not a part of!
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