I’m a nerd. There’s no two ways about it. Movies? I love seeing the latest. Video games? Sign me up for the raid group. Cartoons? They’re not just for kids in my case. But one of my favorite subjects to nerd out about is space. Nebulas, Quasars, Supermassive Black Holes, I love it all. (Just don’t get me started on the Millennium Falcon making the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs. Parsecs are measurements of distance, Lucas! Sorry, sorry).

Throughout the years, I’ve found that many people don’t share this fascination with space. So it’s somewhat frustrating when I read an article about how a specific comet stinks (that’s true, by the way) and tell my friends about it, only to have them stare off in the distance in boredom before changing the subject. It’s because they don’t care about the subject like I do. And no amount of interesting facts is going to change that.

This is the same problem that faces all non-profit organizations and many for profits. This is going to sound harsh, but it’s a fact: not everyone cares about your cause or business the way you do. I think most organizations know this. But what they might not understand is how to effectively get more people to care about your cause. So what do some do? They present facts to people hoping they’ll start to care. But facts alone won’t do it. They have to be presented correctly. Over the next few weeks I’ll be discussing some common mistakes people make while presenting facts. Here’s the first mistake:

The numbers are incomprehensible.

I’ll just say it: While amazingly powerful, the human brain is quite limited. When I say that, I mean in terms of quantifying. There seems to be a point where the human brain hears or sees a number, and any actual understanding of what that number means ceases to exist.

No other subject exploits this limitation of the brain like space. Objects and distances are on such a massive scale that they lose all meaning. Scientists got around this by creating new measurements. We’ve all heard of a light year, the distance light travels in one year. Well, one light year is actually almost 5.9 trillion miles. And when you consider that our own Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000 light years in diameter*, you can understand why they had to come up with a new measurement. All these numbers, while large and significant, are meaningless. My mind literally cannot comprehend how long a trillion miles is. It has no real frame of reference. (To illustrate this even more clearly, go to this website, scroll through and see how long it takes your brain to stop comprehending the actual size of things.)

So when a non-profit tells me that 1.2 billion people are affected by “X”, I understand that “X” is bad, but my mind has no reference for that number of people. They become faceless and I don’t truly understand how far reaching it is, which ultimately is the most important thing. I, as the target audience, need to understand just how wide spread and pressing the problem is if I’m going to feel the need to take action.

It’s important to scale these numbers down to something people can understand, just like scientists did with light years. If the same fact were presented as “Nearly 1 in 6 people are affected by ‘X’”, then suddenly that becomes much more impactful because I can comprehend it easily. And once I understand the severity of the situation, I can act accordingly.

Obviously, there is more to increasing engagement than just reducing the numbers on facts you present, but it’s one less hurdle that potential donors and customers have to overcome. And nobody likes hurdles. Especially nerds like me.

*If you’re like me (and why wouldn’t you want to be) it was bugging you, so here it is. The Milky Way galaxy is around 587.85 quadrillion (587,849,981,000,000,000) miles in diameter.

 

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