Audiences will pay attention: you just have to show them why

Communication is good; collaboration is good; persuading people is good (or at least necessary sometimes).

And so you try “communicating”. You make a message:

• “Here’s what our team has done this quarter” or;
• “Can I pick your brains on something?” or;
• “Can you do these ten steps to get ready for the IT migration?”

Yet you don’t get the responses you want. There’s no reply, or the reply seems to be about something you didn’t write.

You suspect that people are not engaging with your messages. You suspect that sometimes, even in a presentation, the words are not going in… what’s that? You need to check your notifications? I’ll wait…

This piece isn’t about grabbing attention in the first place (I talk about that elsewhere .) It’s about keeping the audience and engaging them in the thing you need them for. Something that needs some thought.

Not a quick instruction, not a “click here if you’re coming to the office party”, but some message to trigger a change, an action, some brainwork.

Brains are lazy by nature, so you need to push hard enough to overcome that. Yet, you can’t make it feel like you’re pushing too hard (as we’ll see).

3 basic motivations for attention — not just the obvious!

The standard advice to keep people listening is to think “What’s in it for them?” This advice is half right. To motivate an audience, they do need some sense of gain. But the half-wrong part is that “gain” sounds obvious and immediate. And audiences are more complicated than that. They are not mere transactional machines.

For a start, the “gain” doesn’t have to be some immediate benefit for the reader. For example, we like to help others. It feels great to be helpful. And that in itself is a gain (though if we take ourselves too seriously as “helpers” then the effect is reduced).

We like to learn — we love to learn. That is, if we feel it’s our own learning journey and not someone cramming facts into us. As a communicator, if you have an interesting problem that you’d like the audience’s thoughts on, it can become an interesting puzzle or a thing to discover together.

So, there needs to be “something in it for the audience”. But that something can be an emotional or intellectual reward as much as a material or power one.

Let’s go through these 3 motivations in more detail:

1. The audience gains some advantage, or avoids some risk

It is certainly easiest to motivate the audience in this situation. And so, the message is easiest to craft. For example:

A friend from another department kindly agreed to help run a launch project. The reward for me is very clear: I get help with the logistics and administration of a complex, multifunctional project, freeing me to provide domain expertise and “roaming troubleshooting” as needed.

The friend nominated one of her team to act as project manager (he gets some useful experience from this, and I will of course share with him what tips and tricks I can). So to kick things off, he had an easy email to write — just asking me to supply some details on project goals, deadlines, participants, and risks.

Messages that sell something may also fit in this “obvious” category. (Either regular selling with real money changing hands, or internal selling of your team’s value to another team.) When the audience has a problem and knows it, and when you have a good solution and know it, selling is almost* a case of joining the dots.

*Almost joining the dots: Of course selling is never quite that easy!

There may be an “incumbent” to unseat, that is if the audience already has some kind of “good enough” solution.

Even though your solution may be clearly better, the audience still needs to go through the pain of change. (The actionability of your message is therefore crucial — how easy is it for them to do something about it?)

2. You’re asking the audience for help, and they can expect a return, now or later

Even when there isn’t an immediate gain for the audience when they pay attention, there could be an indirect gain when they help you.

For example, perhaps you frequently help someone from another department, and you’d like their help on something now. Or you’re asking for help from the audience and you will be able to help them in the future. Perhaps your team is the first to adopt a new process, but they’ll be later. So if they help you think through the process now, they are better prepared when they adopt it (and perhaps they’ve had the chance to shape the process more too)!

In these cases, the audience needs to understand clearly what the reward is. (In the first case, if the other department has forgotten the help you give them, now’s the time to diplomatically remind them!)

Just be careful not to sound too mercenary, as if you think the only reason your audience would help you is if there is some immediate benefit for them. Whenever people are helping, they like to feel appreciated. And in this moment, you are the one asking for something, so be gracious about it.

3. The audience will learn something by engaging

This is actually an easy motivation to work with when crafting a message. If the audience understands what they’ll learn, and how that is useful to their job or their wider life, you just have to make it clear that they need to engage now to get going.

For example, if you have some training material for your salesfolk about the benefits of an upcoming feature, that’s a good reason for them to listen to your whole message and engage further. You still need to work to make those benefits clear! But the basis for communication is there.

It’s harder when the need for learning is not so immediate or compelling. Let’s say there’s a technology change coming in a few months. If people learn about it now, it will help them prepare. But somehow, other things seem more urgent and easier to get started with.

You can’t force them to engage. It might help to make the message more immediately actionable though. If it’s extremely easy for the audience to start learning, they might be tempted to do it even if the need is not immediate. But this belongs to another guide — that I’ll write sometime — on making messages actionable. For now let’s concentrate on motivation.

One thing that does increase motivation is if the message itself sparks curiosity and a sense of discovery. In fact, that can be powerful enough to keep your audience’s attention even when there is no direct gain for them of any kind. Next month, I’ll show how you can use that. Subscribe to get that post as soon as it comes out.

Recommendation: Make payoffs clear

Whatever the reward is for an audience in paying attention to your messages, you need to make it clear.

Sometimes it’s very clear by nature, for example if you frequently help someone, and this time you’re asking for their help. As long as what you’re asking seems clear and not too difficult, they’ll try to help you back.

What’s harder is if you want to engage them when they don’t recognize the challenge you’re facing. Or, at least, they haven’t thought that there might be a solution.

Imagine that you have a new software product. It solves a problem that people have not really put into words yet. To gain their attention and keep it, you’ll need to quickly paint a picture of the problem, a picture that clearly shows that the problem is worth solving. The audience has to appreciate the value of solving the problem before you can convince them that your solution is good. The potential solution is their reward for engaging with your message.

Caution: Don’t be crass about payoffs for attention

The hardest rewards to communicate are those that you maybe shouldn’t communicate too directly. What does that mean? Shouldn’t we always make the payoff clear?

Say you’re asking for help, and there’s no obvious chance for you to pay the person back directly. Perhaps you’d like someone to act as a temporary mentor. Of course, many people generously give their time as mentors, partly because it helps them learn, but partly just for the good feeling they get from helping. All good, but when you’re asking them for help, should you say “You need to do this because it will make you feel good?” That could make them feel as if you’ll be ungrateful and even unreceptive to their ideas. (Perhaps you might say it as a joke? I wouldn’t.)

Rather, to engage a potential mentor, you could talk about their skills. Not “you’re so great!” but “I admire the way you solve these kinds of problems, and would love to learn from you.”

Summary

To engage the audience in your “problem”, and make them want to listen and act, always follow these three steps:

1. Understand the payoff for the audience, whether direct or indirect, a material gain, an increase in knowledge, or a sense of achievement or having helped.
2. Make the payoff clear (but not vulgar). You need to motivate the audience without making them feel mercenary, as if they’re only in it for the reward.
3. Always spark curiosity. Whatever the payoff of listening, still create a believable scene that you draw the audience into.

Once the audience are interested, how do you pace your message so they stay to hear it all? Whatever you do, don’t “tell them what you’re going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them”. This classic advice kills attention. See why in “Tell Them What You’re Going To BORE Them? ”