Stephen Colbert & the Amphibian Question

You know your life is veering dangerously off course when you find yourself obsessing about the Colbert Report. I saw this a couple of weeks ago (damn my insomnia) and have been mulling it over at odd moments ever since.

When Stephen Colbert looked at Mark Moffett and asked, "Why should I care? Why should I care about frogs?" I sat straight up in bed to hear the answer. And then I laid back down again and put a pillow over my head when I heard the tired, "Frogs are the canary in a coal mine."

That answer is true, but it's not the answer that's going to inspire people to care about frogs. Sometimes the only way to answer the "Why should I care question?" is to tell the person asking why you care. You have to get personal.

I preach Audience all the time -- how it's important to start your persuasive copy by understanding your audience, but sometimes you don't know them at all. (Or you're dealing with Stephen Colbert, who isn't going to care no matter what you say.) But for normal audiences, like potential donors who may not know why they should care about your issue, you have to build empathy and rapport and usually, the only way to do that is to tell them something personal and something true.

I think Mark Moffett (whose work I admire) might have had more luck -- and more resonance with the larger audience -- if he'd chucked the canary analogy and just told us why he cares about frogs.

Did you notice how animated he was as he told stories about what was happening while he was photographing? Don't you want to hear more about the John Travolta frog? More about how they got that little frog to sit on someone's cheek?

Don't you want to know what inspired him to do that book? Why did he spend all of the time in the field working on it? And trust me, spending weeks in a tent in the rainforests of Central and South America is not exactly a trip to the Playa Conchal Resort in Guanacaste.

With respect to Mark Moffett, he was never going to convince Stephen Colbert of anything that didn't come wrapped in an American flag and dipped in jingoism. That's part of the deal when you go on the Colbert Report. But there's still something to be learned from this -- especially for those of us who work with non-profits.

Next time you find yourself agonizing over how to inspire someone to care about your issue -- whether its frogs or children, hunger or unspayed pets -- back up a step. Put aside your faceless statistics of catastrophe, step away from the "Canaries," and think about telling us something personal and true. Don't tell us why we should care, tell us why you care. We really want to know.

PS:  For a great post on how "Gloom and Doom are Downers," see this post on Katya's Non-Profit Marketing Blog.