Made to Stick

open gaps before we close them. Our tendency is to tell people the
facts. First, though, they must realize that they need these facts. The
trick to convincing people that they need our message, according to
Loewenstein, is to first highlight some specific knowledge that they’re
missing. We can pose a question or puzzle that confronts people with
a gap in their knowledge. We can point out that someone else knows
something they don’t. We can present them with situations that have
unknown resolutions, such as elections, sports events, or mysteries.
We can challenge them to predict an outcome (which creates two
knowledge gaps—What will happen? and Was I right?).
As an example, most local news programs run teaser ads for up-
coming broadcasts. The teasers preview the lead story of the evening,
usually in laughably hyperbolic terms: “There’s a new drug sweeping
the teenage community—and it may be in your own medicine cabi-
net!” “Which famous local restaurant was just cited—for slime in the
ice machine?” “There’s an invisible chemical in your home—and it
may be killing you right now!”
These are sensationalist examples of the gap theory. They work
because they tease you with something that you don’t know—in fact,
something that you didn’t care about at all, until you found out that
you didn’t know it. “Is my daughter strung out on one of my old pre-
scriptions? I wonder if I ate at the restaurant with the slime?”
A little dollop of the news-teaser approach can make our commu-
nications a lot more interesting, as we’ll see in the Clinic.
U N E X P E C T E D
85

---

A n   I n t e r n a l   Pr e s e n t a t i o n   o n   F u n d - r a i s i n g
T H E   S I T UAT I O N:  
Imagine that you’re the fund-raising manager for a
local theater company. Your job is to help raise donations to support
the theater. It’s now the end of the year, and you’re preparing a sum-
mary presentation for the theater’s board of directors.
• • •
M E S S AG E   1 :  
(Both messages in this Clinic are made up.)
This year we targeted support from theatergoers under thirty-five.
Our goal is to increase donations from younger patrons, who have tra-
ditionally 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.
C O M M E N T S   O N   M E S S AG E   1 :  
This message is a classic summary ap-
proach. I know the facts. I’ve put the facts in a logical order and I will
spoon-feed them to you. As a presentation format, it’s safe and nor-
mal and thoroughly nonsticky.
In improving this message, we need to think about how to elicit
interest rather than force-feeding facts. We’ll try to add a dash of the
news-teaser approach.
• • •
M E S S AG E   2 :  
This year we set out to answer a question: Why do people
under thirty-five, who make up 40 percent of our audience, provide
only 10 percent of our donations? Our theory was that they didn’t re-
alize how much we rely on charitable donations to do our work, so
C L I N I C
86
M A D E   T O   S T I C K

---

we decided to try calling them with a short overview of our business
and our upcoming shows. Going into the six-month test, we thought
a 10 percent response rate would be a success. Before I tell you what
happened, let me remind you of how we set up the program.
C O M M E N T S   O N   M E S S AG E   2 :  
This approach is inspired by the gap the-
ory. The goal is not to summarize; it’s to make you care about know-
ing something, and then to tell you what you want to know. Like the
Saturn rings mystery, it starts with a puzzle: Why don’t young people
donate more? Then we present a theory and a way of testing it. The
mystery engages the members of our audience, causing them to
wonder what happened and whether our theory was right.
The improvement here is driven by structure, not content. Let’s
face it, this is not a particularly interesting mystery. It would never
make an episode of Law & Order. But our minds are extremely gen-
erous when it comes to mysteries—the format is inherently appealing.
S C O R E C A R D