All my communications training says the same thing. Have three key points. Include a call to action. Reinforce the points. Then reinforce them again.
For the last twelve months I have been presenting to local service groups and doing my very best to stick to the rules. And I have learned something important. No matter how impressive the talk is, nobody takes up the call to action. My presentation is usually followed by lunch and I invite people to come and talk to me about it over lunch. What I get instead is “wow, your presentation was great.”
After each talk I kept asking myself the same question. What is wrong with me? Why is nobody sitting down to talk about the call to action?
Then I finally woke up. It’s the audience, Lynne. They want to be entertained.
How old do I have to be before I start asking the right question first? Who is my audience? What do they want from this presentation? The reason I keep getting invited to present is that people talk about how entertaining the talks are. Facepalm.
It took me a while longer to see what the answer meant, and it started with admitting what I am actually there for.
I am not in that hall to win commissions. I talk about life story writing because I want people to create living memories, the kind that last well beyond the last person who remembers them. The lunch invitation was never the real call to action.
The real call to action happens later, at somebody’s kitchen table, without me. An entertained audience goes home and tells someone about the talk. And somewhere in that retelling, a son or a daughter decides to capture a parent’s story before it is too late.
If that happens at one kitchen table, the talk has done its job. Nobody needs to ring me. The memory does not need me to survive. It needs a family who decides it is worth keeping.
So the training was half right. Three points, yes. Reinforce them, yes. But the call to action belongs to the audience, and this audience’s job is to enjoy the hour and carry the idea home. If I do my job well, they do theirs, and I will never see it happen.
The number one question for anybody doing anything is this. Who is the audience, and what do they want from me? Not what do I want to tell them. What do they want from me. I have spent a working life in communications and I still needed twelve months of puzzled lunches to learn it.
This is the point where I would normally give you a call to action. I know better now.
