When Getting Their Attention is Bad
Getting the attention of your supporter in an uber-cluttered world seems like a win. And certainly a donor’s ignoring the Crate & Barrel promotional discount email to process your appeal email is a big plus.
But, what about the attention within your email? Might some content get their attention and make them less likely to respond?
What about a statistic about the size or scope of the problem?
- X million children going hungry
- Y million living in refugee camps
This isn’t another post about the identifiable victim effect or the psychic numbing of large numbers.
Instead, what if those stats grab their attention? And what if it causes them try and process the size and scope of the problem and perhaps get lost in those thoughts?
And then they crash their car…
Many US states display year-to-date fatality statistics on digital signage that can be updated. This is easy to implement and seems like a no-brainer. After all, it’s a ‘nudge’ designed to seize people’s attention at a time when they can take desired action – e.g., slow down or drive less distracted.
The counter-intuitive finding from researchers looking at crash data found that not only do the messages not help, they actually increase crashes.
This isn’t just a function of the message or any message of this size being distracting. The number of crashes went up as did the number of fatalities when the signage was displayed in more complex traffic conditions. This only makes sense if folks are processing the content versus being more generally distracted.
Why is this happening? The statistic isn’t being ignored or tuned out; to the contrary, it’s seizing too much attention and mental processing time. And it’s a negative framing, just like all the charity statistics we tend to use.
This interferes with the driver’s ability to respond to changing road conditions and it may very well interfere with your donor’s ability to get beyond the mental attention devoted to a negatively framed, impossibly massive problem.
Kevin
Behavioral Science Q & A
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