Better Than the Current Reality

Do you ever wonder why you can’t get your audience to do what you ask them to do?

Yesterday, I saw a friend who was asking passerby’s to fill out a survey for her health clinic. For every survey that was returned, the clinic would receive an additional $93 of funding. The only problem was, not a lot of people were taking the time to answer the surveys. Many of those that graciously took a survey from her hands threw it in the first trash receptacle that was available.

So the health clinic revisited their idea. In hopes of better results on day two, the clinic put the following disclaimer on top of the survey:

STOP! Do Not Throw This Survey Away

Not surprisingly, the results on day two were the same. You probably know why, too. Even though the clinic modified their message, they did not change the fundamentals of their approach. The survey in its current state of promotion was only beneficial to one party in the transaction, the clinic. The audience perceived that the completed survey would do nothing for them.

If I were to envision this give and take relationship between asker and audience, it would be as a scale:

with one party on either side. Often times, the asking group asks for the audience to do something, and fails to communicate what that “something” will do for the audience. To the audience, the perception is that the scale is tipped in favor of the asker.

Here are three more examples of how this plays out in business:

• Marketers send emails to prospective and current customers in hopes that the customer or prospect will (1) open the email, and (2) better yet, complete the call to action in the message (buy the product, attend the event, read the article, etc.)
• A manager asks her employees to “work together as a team” for the utilitarian “good of the department” or company.
• A sales person asks one of his top customers to refer his company or product to her colleagues.

Do you see how action taken on these requests has tremendous benefit for the person doing the asking? But the audience being asked is left to wonder, “What’s in it for me?”

Your audience wants maximum benefit for minimum cost of time and/or effort. To get compliance from your audience, you’ve got to promise an outcome that is better than their current reality.

Take the little boy watching this survey petition unfold, as an example. His mother, also a nurse at the clinic, wanted to re-use the surveys that were thrown away. So she told her son that she would give him $5 if he dug through the recycle bin to find the unopened surveys. Was that tantalizing promise better than his current reality? You bet. The result? Last time I checked, he was head first in the bin, holding 15 surveys and digging for more.

So what else could the clinic have done to increase responses? Two of many very simple examples:

• Compensate respondents for time: Offer a choice of a $5 credit to the coffee shop next door or the bookstore for every completed survey. That’s a spending of less than 10% of the $93 the clinic would get in return, and they’ve more than doubled their response rate.
• Increase value and/or lower cost: Tell the audience “Every survey you fill out gets us $93 of funding, which means that the money we receive will help us stay open longer hours and on weekends, and lower the price you’ll pay for visits from $50 to $25”. Or something of that nature.

Promise ease, benefit, higher value or lower cost to your audience when you want them to do something for you. Whatever you do, promise and deliver something. Otherwise, you’re going to get little more than “no” for an answer.

Filed under: Management, Marketing