How can you Motivate your Audience to Take Action?

In the final part of our blog series, “The Art and Science of Crafting Persuasive Messages,” Jamie focuses on how you can motivate your audience to take action. He shares how you can ‘map the gap’ between your audience’s beliefs and what they need to believe to act. By identifying these gaps, you can craft persuasive messages that effectively bridge the two and drive your audience towards the desired action.

In the first part of this blog series, I discussed how focusing your initial efforts on engaging with the most receptive audience can create a ripple effect that enhances the effectiveness of persuasion.

In part two, I took this a step further. I shared how the key to unlocking this effectiveness is to ask for something small and easy to do, requiring minimal motivation, like how tech companies get us to repeatedly engage with our smartphones.

And in part three, now that you know who you are asking, and what you’re asking them to do, we can start exploring what would motivate them to actually do it – and how you can motivate your audience to take action.

It comes down to this: their decision to act will be driven by their beliefs and wants. So, we need to identify what beliefs and wants we need them to have in order for them to decide to act.

For example, perhaps you are a charity that provides support to homeless people and is looking for a corporate donor to sponsor you.

You’ve identified the right profile of corporate donor and are now approaching them. You’ve also thought carefully about your specific request and have decided to ask for an ongoing monthly sponsorship of a certain amount.

That corporate donor would need to believe that:

Your cause is worthy of their support
You are a credible charity
Their money would be used effectively.

They would also need to want to:

Sponsor a charity like yours
Support homeless people
Donate the amount of money you want them to every month.

Motivate Your Audience to Take Action: Map the Gap

Now that we know what beliefs and motivations we’d need them to have, we can map the gap between those and their current beliefs and motivations.

To do this, we’d need to do some investigating. We’d want to speak to them and look at publications, interviews or any kind of media they’ve put out into the world, and maybe even try to guess what’s driving their thinking. There are several ways of doing this, which I guide people through in my workshops.

Coming back to the example, after analysing this potential corporate donor, we conclude that their current beliefs are:

They should donate to some good cause (they just don’t know what that cause would be)
They can afford to donate a certain amount
They don’t have much time to spare.

And they currently want to:

Support the local community
Show their customers that they are a responsible business that cares about making a positive impact
Help their business grow.

We can now see any gaps between their current beliefs and wants and what we need those to be. And it’s the gap specifically that will form the crux of our message. So, for this potential corporate sponsor, the gaps we need to bridge are:

That they should focus their contributions on your particular cause
You are a credible charity and their money will be used effectively
That their donations will be within their constraints and help grow their reputation in the local community.

Through this analysis, we’ve identified the most important information we need to include in our message; now it’s time to structure it.

Motivate Your Audience with the Right Message

Identifying the right audience and crafting the right ask make up the bulk of the work when crafting a persuasive message. Now we come to the actual message itself. Thankfully, if you’ve done a good job of identifying the right audience and crafting the right ask, you’ll find this next bit very easy.

Here, we can use my storytelling framework “Relate, Challenge, Resolve”. But instead of using it to tell a story, we use it to shape the stories they currently believe in:

Firstly, we relate to their current stories. In this part, we say things that make them nod their heads.
Secondly, we challenge their current stories. In this part, we provide information that helps them think differently.
Thirdly, we resolve any barriers to action. In this part, we clearly explain what our ask is, leaving them with no uncertainty as to what to do.

Relate

So, for example, when we are trying to persuade a corporate donor to sponsor our charity, we first want to relate to them by saying things they agree with.

We could say something like:

“As a business that depends so heavily on the local community, we understand how important it is for you to give back to the community to strengthen your trust in them. And in an age where consumers are increasingly concerned about the social impact businesses have, it’s important to show your customers how you are making a positive impact on the community.”

You could then build on this point by showing examples of how increasingly concerned consumers are about the social impact businesses have and the impact this has on business.

Challenge

Then you can bridge the gap we looked at in the previous section between what they currently believe and want and what we need them to believe and want. This is the “Challenge” part of our message, where we provide them with insights that show them a different way of thinking. So, here we could say something like:

“What better way to give back to the community than by supporting its most vulnerable members: the homeless? This is what our charity does; we work with homeless people in the local community and provide them with all the support they need to get back on their feet.”

Here, you could include a story of how your charity has helped homeless people recover. You could show specifically what you are asking for from this corporate donor, and the impact that would have on your charity work.

Resolve

Finally, we move to the Resolve part of our message. This is where we tell them exactly what our ask is:

“All we ask, is a monthly donation of £300. To start donating, I can help you complete this form right now, it will take less than 5 minutes.”

Remember, our ask should be so simple that it requires little to no motivation to do, basically a no-brainer.

And there we have it, our persuasive message. By the time we get to this section it tends to be very straightforward, because we’ve already done the hard work in the first few steps of identifying the right audience and the right ask, and then mapping the gap so you can motivate your audience to take action.

How can you Motivate your Audience to Take Action?

Motivate Your Audience to Take Action: Map the Gap