Alright, so I’ve had an awesome couple of days hearing all about different ways to understand through storytelling, through asking questions, what’s motivating people, what’s driving them. I’ve tried to talk about this in a little bit of a different but I think still highly compatible way. So I want to take a step back and talk about how the mind works. Collective sigh. It’ll be okay. It’ll be fun. So back in the Donald Draper days that we saw earlier, the dominant way that we used to think about advertising and communications was that you took your message and you sort of inject it into the mind of your target audience and it lives there exactly the way you wanted it to. How glorious. If that happened, my four year old would eat his vegetables because I told him that they’ll make him strong like Superman. Clearly doesn’t happen that way. So what happens is that people hear your communication, see your ad and it activates different neural biological connections between different existing ideas in their mind frame. And I do mean biological. This is not, framing is not just this like lingo that gets flipped around all the time. It’s a biological process of different areas and different ideas and different emotions getting activated by the communication you’re presenting to people. So you take your message and their existing framework and voila, meaning. It’s not the meaning you wanted. It’s not the meaning they wanted. It’s something entirely new. We call that incognitive neuroscience co-creation. So to create communications that are being interpreted and understood the way you want, you have to understand how the brains of the people that you’re talking to work. She’s crazy. You can’t, you can’t understand what exactly what’s going on in someone else’s brain, right? But we can get a heck of a lot closer than we have been. And that’s what I’m going to talk to you about today. So before I start, I’m going to ask you, think about your childhood home. Just for a second. So I’m going to tell you what comes to my mind. These are the stained glass windows that are all around my parents’ house, an old house with leaded stained glass windows. This is the kilbasa that I smell when I think of home because I come from a Polish Russian mother and the holidays were that smoky smell of kilbasa, which may be gross to some people, but it was home and holidays to me. I think about, which I don’t think you can tell here, but it’s this perfectly hideous shade of peach that my mom painted all of the house in. So James and the Giant Peach was my life. I also think of the library because home for me as the daughter of an ex-monk and a preschool teacher of the children of migrant Mexican workers, this was the only place that I could get the books that I so desperately wanted to read. What I don’t think of is this. I don’t think of a list of words to describe my childhood home. Though they may be true, that’s not my home. And this is the point that I’m getting at. The mind does not think in words. We think in images and emotions and senses. That’s not to say words aren’t important because ultimately we have to translate all of those ideas into words, but that’s not how the mind actually works. We don’t think in lists like this. We think in terms of images. And so all of the testing that we do, most of it, is testing based on surveys and images, surveys and words, when we’re actually thinking in images. The basis of what I’m going to talk to you about today are styles of getting at that deep knowledge, how the brain works by using images. And what we do is we ask people to collect images that act as both a starting off point for what we actually call storytelling, to get them to tell us the story of what actually happens to them, what they experience in any given topic. And then we also use them as metaphors. Because the other way that the mind makes meaning is through metaphor. Like I said, when you’re confronted with this communication, you’re bundling it with something that you already know that’s a metaphor. This is like this thing that I know. And the way that we do this is we look at three levels of metaphor and communication. So we’ve got surface. It’s estimated that in English we use two to three metaphors a minute. Things like it flew over my head. I saw it out of the corner of my eye. I was stuck in a rut. Things that you don’t even recognize are metaphors. But once you start listening for them, you can actually start laddering down to much deeper frames. And that’s what I’m going to talk about. We call them deep metaphors. You can call them deeper frames, whatever you’d like. But it’s the idea that in order to simplify all of the decisions that the mind has to make, we use these very deep underlying frames called deep metaphors. And they come from the experience of our body with the world around us. So at a young age, we learn to walk. So we tip this way. We tip this way. We eventually acquire this deep idea of balance. In that sense of balance and those connections, we actually use it at a cognitive level to understand different things. So different groups may understand different issues using balance. Others may understand them using journey. Others may understand them using control. So different segments at a deep level do have commonalities in how they think about given topics. So I know this all seems really abstract. So I’m going to go to a case study. Sorry. We all love case studies. So this is Harvard, if anybody recognizes it. They had a big problem. They were hemorrhaging their major donors. And when I say major donors, I mean donors in the tens of millions of dollars, their biggest donors. Nice problem to have, right? But we all know in the nonprofit world, your donors are critical. Like it or not, good or bad, you have to keep them on. So they asked us to come in and figure out how are their donors experiencing Harvard? How are they framing, giving to Harvard, giving to nonprofits more generally? And how do they improve their communications? So what we found is that there were three deep frames that underpinned all of the people they wanted to talk to. And they wanted to talk to a group of donors who were capable of contributing great psalms and were, and donors who were capable of contributing great psalms to Harvard and were not. So the first metaphor that they talked about through our analysis of their language was that of journey. And there was sort of this sense that you almost had to shed a little bit of your past to go on this new journey at Harvard. And that throughout this journey and the experience and having this sort of world class education, you were transformed. And like the C.S. Lewis quote, you sort of broke out of your egg and you were able to fly. And it changed you in really profound ways, really changed the path of your life, changed who you were. So much so that they actually talked about it in terms of sort of sacred language, that it was something that was really hard to explain, it was really hard to describe, it was something greater than you but that you were still part of, it sort of all worked together. So then we went in and we talked about their images and we looked at what images they had brought in. So one of these is one segment and one of these is the other segment. One is a segment that donates more and one is a segment that donates less. Any guesses at which is which? All right, I don’t have time to wait. So these are more generous donors and these are the images that they brought in, some of the huge battery. And you’ll see that for the more generous donors, there is a lot, for both, there’s a lot of church imagery, a lot of sort of that sacred imagery. And but for the more generous donors, it’s sort of more of a lay church, it’s a community of people that work together. There’s sort of this diaspora notion with the globe there or like a community of soldiers working together, you have this enduring connection. But for the less generous donors, you’ll see we’ve got the Roman Catholic Church, the Cardinals, this castle in the corner here. They talk about, it’s like this elite clergy with bonds that you can never get into, that they’re secretive, that they issue these edicts and you just have to follow them. There is a strong authority, you have a lot of obligations, but it is still mystical and eternal. So we still see some of that sort of that deep root of the metaphor sacred coming through, but it’s a much different, when we look at that pyramid that I had, that middle layer where it’s the same deep frames, but then the interpretations at that middle level are different. And that’s really important. So you know, these are more images that they brought in. So if this is your frame that Harvard, the community, is like a small congregation, then it’s your responsibility to help people in your community and it fulfills you. Critically important. You get an emotional benefit from donating to Harvard. If you are framing it as this small community, it makes you feel good and all communications have to resonate at an emotional level. For the less generous, like this castle image here, it felt like it was almost like a tax or a tithe that you had to pay to the king. It was something you had to do. And so they didn’t really want to. They did it, but not in great degrees because they weren’t getting an emotional payoff. And so you have to figure out, how do you get these people to have an emotional payoff? What do they want when they’re given? They want to be the hero. Okay? These are really powerful people. We sat down with the CEO of Goldman Sachs, people who were at the top of their fields. They and their humble opinion were the most powerful people in the world. So they want to be the hero. When they’re donating, they want to feel like their power is helping people who are needy, not that they’re giving to something that’s greater than themselves. They want to feel like they can leave a personal mark on an organization. How can you do that at Harvard? You get a plaque? Big deal. I have a million plaques. If I’m giving to a small arts program, I can have a lot of influence over how that goes and what the benefit is or a community program. They want to have this. This is a form of personal expression to them. They also want to have a personal bond that they often don’t get in the workplace. They want to feel like a warm and nurturing parent, whereas when they give to Harvard, they feel like Harvard’s the parent and they control me. They’re a cold parent. So what we found was that their current communications were actually reinforcing all of these things. They were talking about how powerful Harvard is, the legacy, the history, the global outreach. It was just reinforcing everything that we are the heroes and you just need to give to us. So what did we do? We went in and we decided to try to recreate their own transformational journey at Harvard. So we talked about not giving to Harvard. We talked about giving through Harvard. So give to this child who has leukemia through funding research grants at Harvard for students. Give to the children that are starving in Africa by giving through her and forming a program that’s going to fund students to go abroad and do good work. And we didn’t just talk the talk. We walked the walk. We actually had them do this. We had them connect with the students and the people that the students were benefiting so that they could see that they were transforming Harvard students’ lives and that then the Harvard students were transforming the lives of other people so that that journey kept going and there’s something really special and sacred in that. So in some in order to really create communications that are effective you have to understand the people you’re talking to. Not understanding them at a deep level would be like a doctor prescribing a prescription to a patient without ever actually examining them. You really have to see at a deep level how is their brain working? How are they thinking? How do they frame this topic? And then how does my communication work within that? And this applies to any kind of topic that you can think of. Here are just a few. Whether it’s donating or just understanding how climate change we’ve talked about quite a bit. We’ve worked on some of this with the Alliance for Climate Protection. Your messages have to be able to resonate with your audience. And to do that you have to really understand your audience at a level much beyond the sort of surface survey level.