This is part of a multi-article series on the book Made to Stick.

Photo by Paul L. Nettles

Last week, we talked about how you can use surprise to get people’s attention. But how do you keep their attention once you get it?

Today, we’re going to talk about another emotion: curiosity.

Keeping People’s Attention

Curiosity is what happens when there’s a gap in our knowledge. These gaps actually cause mild psychological pain. It’s the reason why people keep watching crappy movies – they want to know how they end!

When you’re presenting an idea, you can actually use knowledge gaps to keep people’s attention.

Creating a Knowledge Gap

Imagine that you’re the fund-raising manager for a local theater company. Your job is to increase donations to help support the theater. Every year, you give a presentation to the Board of Directors.¹

The typical presentation around this type of topic is usually something like this:

This year we targeted support from theatergoers under thirty-five. Our goal is to increase donations from younger patrons, who have traditionally composed a much greater percentage of our audience than of our donor base.

To reach them, we implemented a phone-based fund-raising program. Six months into the program, the response rate has been almost 20 percent, which we consider a success.

Is that informative? Sure. It’s also pretty boring!

Here’s a different approach you might take to keep people’s attention:

This year we set out to answer a question: Why do people under thirty-five comprise 40 percent of our audience but only account for 10 percent of our donations?

Our theory was that they didn’t realize how much we rely on charitable donations to do our work, so we decided to call them with a short overview of our business and upcoming shows. Before I tell you the results, let me remind you of how we set up the program…

When’s the last time you went to a business presentation like that? I’m betting never.

But this approach: Creating a knowledge gap that people want to fill, is far more effective at keeping people’s attention than the traditional approach.

Ideas in Action

So how can you start putting these ideas in action today?

Keep people’s attention by creating knowledge gaps. Provide a little information for context, create a gap, and then take people along on a journey before you fill it.

Don’t forget to check out last week’s article on getting people’s attention. You can learn more about Made to Stick by reading the full series of articles.

Buy Made to Stick (Amazon affiliate link)

Footnotes

1. Made to Stick, pp. 86 – 87 ↩