By Mike Wellman

Unlike some of the folks I work with, I feel like I’ve always been a “math” guy.  Numbers speak to me, motivate me, and make sense to me.  It’s one of the reasons my colleagues decided I would be a good fit for handling the day-to-day of our diagnostic and communications benchmarking efforts, and probably the reason I’ve been given the nickname “Dr. Frugal” by my family –hey, I love budgets, okay?  Before you start commenting and calling me names like “philistine,” “Hamlet hater” or “the great non-communicator,” hold on a moment.

After spending a fair amount of time with you communicators, I’ve become a convert and learned to appreciate the true power of words.  It’s IMPOSSIBLE to not appreciate the art of communications and how you’re able to move markets with a 5-minute message, let alone a 5-word message.  The pen is truly mightier than the sword, and it’s fascinating to hear stories about how a smart tagline, crystallized brand, or clear and personal strategy was ultimately responsible for a company’s success.  In my experience, there are three words that organizations can use, but often don’t, to effectively motivate their stakeholders to act.  I’ll give you a hint – it’s not “We’ve Got Booze,” “Want More Money?” or “Free CEC Insights.”  (Though that would be nice!)….

It’s “Can you help?” Isn’t that funny?  There’s no promise of money, booze, or Corporate Communications insights, and yet it’s the thing that’s most likely to grab people.  As you can see in the diagram below, there’s a big difference between when we’re asked for something by a person and asked for something by an organization.  When it’s an organization that wants something, we start thinking about our paycheck, job descriptions, and our commitment to the company.  When it’s a person, though, we’re more likely to think about whether helping is the right thing to do and we weigh things in terms of right and wrong – not our 401k contributions.  So, staying that extra two hours to translate that presentation for the company may not be worth the extra fifty dollars, but it might be worth it so that Ted can go to his daughter’s basketball game.

By humanizing interpersonal communications, helping people ask larger groups, and thinking about our big “asks” in terms of personal conversations, we’ll be much more likely to actually accomplish our goals.

On that note, I’d like to personally ask, “Can YOU help?” Our team is in the middle of our resource benchmarking season, and we’re hoping to be able to report back data that will be as helpful to you and your peers as possible.  As we collect more information, we’ll be able to report back more specific data.  As an example, we’re only a couple of companies away from being able to report data cuts for Financial Services and Energy/Utilities companies.  We’d also love to be able to provide a cut for our Canadia and Australian members this year!

If you’re able to fill out the 30-minute survey online or can convince someone who can before we close the data collection window on July 30^th, we would appreciate it and think you will too.  Who knows?  Maybe we can help you love budgeting conversations too!