Promoting an association, union, society or other members-only group? Use members to demonstrate the benefits of membership.

Or use nonmembers.

Richard L. Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, knew how to tap the power of people. In a speech to the Industrial Relations Research Association, Trumka showed the need for unions through short profiles of individual people:

If you want to bring your topic to life for your audience members, take a tip from Trumka: Try writing a good human interest story about people who aren’t getting the benefits your organization offers.

Use members to showcase your values.

The best way for a communicator to make the organization’s values credible is to show the values instead of just telling about them.

That’s what the Houston YMCA did.

Executives at the Y decided one year to organize the annual report by the organization’s values — concepts such as caring, respect and faith. The association could have chosen to have its chairman write a message about each of those values. I imagine it would have sounded something like this:

Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Sharing. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Responsibility. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Caring. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Respect. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Faith. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Honesty. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah.

Instead, the organization presented its values through the stories of some of the people it had helped — people like Yolanda:

Stories like this make the YMCA’s values more concrete, meaningful and credible.

No wonder news reporters covering natural disasters and other major events include poster people in their news stories. Whether you’re writing for social media or another channel, a feature story focused on people grabs attention and makes readers care.

Use constituents to pass your bill.

When Dan Ponder Jr. needed to flesh out a speech supporting hate-crimes legislation in the Georgia House of Representatives, he turned to his own friends and family members.

The results: a powerful, personal testimonial that illustrates the problems of hate crimes:

Talk about compelling.

When Ponder began speaking, the vote stood at 83 to 82 against the legislation. When he finished, the bill passed 116 to 89 after a standing ovation for his speech.

No wonder the speech earned Ponder a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.

The post Example of a human-interest story about members appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

When Allstate Foundation launched a teen-driving summit to help reduce the number of teenagers killed in car crashes, the company’s PR pros started the press release like this:

Show me one.

Need to call attention to a problem or issue? Don’t lead with the numbers. Find a “poster person” — a single human being who can stand for your point.

Writing a good human-interest story focused on an individual or group of people can raise awareness about your product, service, program or idea. No wonder news reporters use this technique when writing news stories about natural disasters and other issues.

Whether you’re writing a social media post or a piece for another channel, human-interest feature stories can make your point. That’s what Allstate and other Public Relations Society of America Silver Anvil winners did in these award-winning campaigns.

Let Grammy sell knee replacements.

To introduce the first replacement knee for women, Zimmer Inc. ran a campaign that included a series of patient stories like “‘Grammy’ Back to Babysitting Now that Knee Pain Is Gone.” It started like this:

Let patients sell VA centers.

When the Carl T. Hayden VA Medical Center needed to improve its image among community members and employees, communicators developed a campaign that included a series of patient profiles. One included this passage:

Let people stand for policies.

When Barb Farson, corporate communications manager for Ball Corporation, needed to communicate a change in the organization’s volunteer policy, she could have boiled the life out of the story with a hierarchical blurtation of facts.

Instead, she brought the story to life with one employee:

Let people stand for products.

When Gary Burris, national sales manager, Tec Laboratories, needed to promote a new product, he could have lead with the lame “Tec Labs recently announced the launch of its new blah blah blah.” He could have smothered the human interest story in a phrase like “a nightmare ordeal with head lice.”

Instead, he drew readers in with the story of the creator’s moment of inception:

Find a poster person.

It’s The Writing Rule of One: Your readers care more about one person they know something about than dozens or hundreds of nameless, faceless souls.

So find a person to stand for your point.

Whether you’re writing to clients and customers, employees, the community or members, how can you find a poster person to put a face on your position?

The post Check out these human-interest stories [Examples!] appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

What makes one message 46% easier to read and 520% more interesting? Human-interest stories.

Compare this excerpt, from Life …

… to this one, from The New Yorker:

Human interest is easier to read.

According to a measurement tool by readability expert Rudolph Flesch, The New Yorker article is easier to read:

• The New Yorker’s 18-word sentences and 1.45-syllable words, on average, give it a Flesch Reading Ease score of 66. That is very easy to read.
• Life’s 22-word sentences and 1.65-syllable words, on average, give it a Flesch Reading Ease score of 46. That means it’s 20 points harder to read.

And the second passage is also measurably more interesting:

• The Life article had zero personal words and only 11 personal sentences per 290 words. That gave it a human interest score of 7, or dull.
• The New Yorker piece had 11 personal words and 41 personal sentences. That gave it a human interest score of 53, which made it highly interesting.

No wonder news reporters rely on good human-interest stories for their news stories. Want to raise awareness for your product, program or policy? Write stories about a real-life person, group of people or other humans.

How to measure human interest.

Rudolph Flesch is famous for developing the Flesch Reading Ease, one of the most popular and widely used readability tests. It uses word length and sentence length to measure how easy your copy is to read.

Less famously, Flesch also created a formula for measuring “human interest” in your copy. It uses references to people and conversational language to measure how interesting your copy is to read. And interesting copy, Flesch said, is more readable.

“It seems hardly necessary to prove the importance of human interest … People are most interested in other people.”

— Rudolph Flesch, creator of the Flesch Reading Ease formula

“The structural shortcoming of the [Flesch Reading Ease] formula is the fact that it does not always show the high readability of direct, conversational writing,” Flesch wrote in “A New Readability Yardstick.”

So how interesting is your copy?

Run the human interest test on your copy.

To find your human interest score:

1. Count personal words. They include:

• Nouns with natural gender, such as mother, father, Frank and Opal
• Pronouns except for neuter pronouns — he and she, for instance, but not it
• The words people (used with the plural verb) and folks

2. Count personal sentences. These test how interesting and conversational the copy is. Count:

• Quotations, whether marked by quotation marks or not
• Imperative sentences, or those addressed to the reader, including questions, commands and requests
• Exclamations
• Grammatically incomplete sentences whose meaning the reader must infer from the context

3. Do the math. Figure this formula:

3.635 x % of personal words
+ 314 x % of personal sentences
= human interest score

4. Rate your message. Your score will fall between 0 (no human interest) and 100 (full of human interest). If you score:

• 0 to 10: your message is dull, like a scientific journals.
• 10 to 20: your message is mildly interesting, like business-to-business publications.
• 20 to 40: your message is interesting, like Reader’s Digest.
• 40 to 60: your message is highly interesting, like The New Yorker.
• 40 to 100: your message is dramatic, like fiction.

To increase your score, increase the number of personal words and personal sentences.

Increase readership with human interest.

Flesch earned his Ph.D. in educational research for “Marks of a Readable Style,” a dissertation that included early reading ease and interest formulas.

“Publishers quickly discovered that Flesch’s formula could increase readership by 40 to 60%,” writes William H. DuBay, a readability expert at Impact Information, in Unlocking Language: The Classic Readability Studies.

Why not use Flesch’s lesser-known formula to increase readership of your copy, as well?

___

Sources: Rudolf Flesch, “A New Readability Yardstick,” Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 32. No. 3, pp. 221-233, June 1948.

Read the full text in Unlocking Language: The Classic Readability Studies.

The post People like human-interest stories because they … appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Quick! Would you rather spend $10 million to save 10,000 lives from a disease that caused 15,000 deaths a year, or save 20,000 lives from a disease that killed 290,000 people a year?

“If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

— Mother Teresa

That’s the decision psychologist Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon asked two groups of research participants to make, author Shankar Vedantam reports in his new book, The Hidden Brain. Overwhelmingly, the research participants said they’d rather spend money saving the 10,000 lives rather than the 20,000 lives.

Rather than invest in saving the most lives, these folks sought to save the largest proportion of lives within a group of victims.

Are they crazy?! Nope. That’s just how our brains work.

“The reason human beings seem to care so little about mass suffering and death is precisely because the suffering is happening on a mass scale. The brain is simply not very good at grasping the implications of mass suffering,” Vedantam writes.

“Americans would be far more likely to step forward if only a few people were suffering or a single person were in pain. … We are best able to respond when we are focused on a single victim.”

So we don’t feel 20 times sadder when we learn that 20 people have died in a disaster than we do when we learn that one person has died. We don’t even feel twice as sad.

In fact, we may actually care less.

Rokia vs. statistics

Consider another study (PDF), this one by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon University and Decision Research.

In this study, people read one of two letters. The first focused on facts and stats about the magnitude of the problems facing children in Africa:

The second shared the story of a single African girl named Rokia:

On average, the people who read the statistics contributed $1.14. The people who read about Rokia contributed $2.38 — more than twice as much.

“It seems that most people have something in common with Mother Teresa,” write Chip Heath and Dan Heath in Made to Stick. “When it comes to our hearts, one individual trumps the masses.”

Trying to raise awareness of your product, service, program or cause? Tell a good human interest story.

Story + statistics

Next, the researchers gave a third group of people both sets of information — the statistics and the story about Rokia. Perhaps, they thought, the combination of statistics and stories — the power of individual need coupled with the statistical scale of the problem — would inspire a whole new level of giving.

Not so. The people who received both letters gave $1.43, almost a dollar less than the people who read the Rokia story alone. Somehow the statistics — evidence of massive human suffering — actually made people less charitable.

On average, the people who read statistics about mass suffering contributed $1.14. The people who read about one little girl contributed $2.38 — more than twice as much.

“The mere act of calculation reduced people’s charity,” the Heaths write. “Once we put on our analytical hat, we react to emotional appeals differently. We hinder our ability to feel.”

Vedantam agrees.

“We respond to mass suffering in much the same way that we respond to most things in our lives. We fall back on rules of thumb, on feelings, on intuitions,” he writes.

“Our empathic telescopes are activated when we hear a single cry for help — the child drowning in the pond, the dog abandoned on an ocean. When we think of human suffering on a mass scale, our telescope does not work, because it has not been designed to work in such situations.”

‘The identifiable victim effect’

This “identifiable victim effect” is nothing new, write the University of Pennsylvania researchers: People donated:

• More than $700,000 to help “Baby Jessica” when she fell in a well near her home in Texas.
• £275,000 for the medical care of a wounded Iraqi boy named Ali Abbas.
• Some $48,000 to save a dog stranded on a ship adrift on the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.

No wonder newspapers and magazines focus on the human-interest story behind the story, and not just on the news story.

Appeal to the hidden brain

We’re not bad — I mean, Mother Teresa’s brain worked the same way. As humans, it turns out, we’re just not very … evolved.

“Humans are the only species that is even aware of large-scale suffering taking place in distant lands; the moral telescope in our brain has not had a chance to evolve and catch up with our technological advances,” Vedantam writes. “Our conscious minds can tell us that it is absurd to spend a boatload of money to save one life when the same money could be used to save 10. But in moral decision-making, it is the hidden brain that usually carries the day.”

So how can you improve your campaign results?

Show readers one person — not 1,001.

____

Sources: Shankar Vedantam, “The little dog lost at sea,” The Week, Feb. 16, 2010

Deborah A. Small, George Loewenstein, Paul Slovic, “Can Insight Breed Callousness? The Impact of Learning about the Identifiable Victim Effect on Sympathy” (PDF), University of Pennsylvania, 2005

Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick, Random House, 2007

The post What’s the impact of human-interest stories? appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..