Laugh a Little!
Humor is powerful. But the humor you enjoy in your favorite TV shows and YouTube videos or that book you're laughing out loud at is just a hint of the impact humor can have.
Humor's value goes far beyond entertaining to help people deal with pain, stress and other challenges. Clown Care, Big Apple Circus' community outreach program, is a classic example. The program brings the delight of classical circus to hospitalized children at 16 leading pediatric facilities across the U.S.
There's more. Humor is also the WD-40 of relationships, soothing the bite of criticism and sparking connections among people from different backgrounds and points of view. Laughter can transcend age, race, gender, belief or class barriers.
When it's done right, that is.
A classic 1993 Journal of Marketing study on the impact of humor worldwide found that humorous messages are "more likely to secure audience attention, increase memorability, overcome resistance, and enhance message persuasiveness."
But humor works only when it's:
- A strong match with your objective and call to action
- Relevant to your objective, and
- Seen as appropriate.
You know how challenging it is to integrate humor into messages focused on issues and causes. We see a lot more of it in consumer marketing, where the issue covered isn't so serious or meaningful.
When we take ourselves too seriously, an occupational hazard for nonprofit staffers, we're unlikely to weave humor into our messages. And it can be hard to get the OK to use humor, especially when it deviates significantly from your organization's usual tone or it's the first time.
It's tough but worth the effort. The folks in your network are humans, too, and enjoy a good laugh just like you do. And, just as when you share a laugh with a colleague or friend, that grin or guffaw can draw the two of you closer together, enriching your relationship.
Humor brings people together! It also relaxes your audience, releases tension and puts people in a more receptive mood. After you've made them laugh, they are far more likely to listen to you.
6 steps to sharing a laugh that connects
Follow this path to shape humor that connects for your organization:
1) Know what your organization and your base have in common, and play on that in your humor. That's the point of connection for all messages, but especially for humor. The only way to find it is to know your audiences well.
Humor based on common experience unites the group. So dig deep to learn as much as you can about your base. Personas are a great place to start.
A joke told without deep understanding of your audience is dangerous. How do you know that people won't be offended or just not get it? If you can't get those insights, skip the laughs — for now.
2) Find a genuine, believable way to integrate humor into your content. If you incorporate humor because you think it's the funniest thing in the world and bound to get laughs, but it has nothing to do with your core topic, then skip it. It might be hilarious, but it's not relevant. In fact, it will only distract your audience from what's really important in your outreach.
3) Delivery is everything. When you integrate humor into a video, e-newsletter, Facebook post or conversation, it's crucial that you fine-tune delivery — from where it falls in the flow of messages, your tone, the pause before or after, etc.
No one delivers it better than The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy (NCPTUP) in its humor-based outreach to teens.
Knowing that teens and young adults are likely to have less experience (and less comfort) in discussing issues like birth control, the organization leans heavily on humor in its print and video campaigns.
Take a look at NCPTUP's "Itchy Situation" video, an old-style cartoon it created for its Bedsider Birth Control Support Network to bust myths on how to know if your partner has an STD. The video uses humor to open the conversation on this squirm-inducing topic and warns in the video description, "Even if you have special X-ray glasses or the observation skills of [a] ninja, you still can't tell if someone has an STD just by looking."
The message gets across, clearly and memorably.
4) Test it first. Take a look at comedy writers. I've learned a lot from "30 Rock," and those writers do it right.
Tina Fey's team doesn't just toss a new joke on the live show. Instead, the writers try it out on colleagues and see how it rolls. If it flies, it's used. If it doesn't, it's trashed.
Although you don't have a team of humor writers to work with, you do have colleagues, families and friends. So draft your humorous blog post or that joke you want to tell at the fall gala, and test it out tonight at dinner or tomorrow at your meeting.
Those numbers are going to be small, so if you want a broader yay (or nay), drip the joke or the humorous part of the post out via your organization's Facebook page. That feedback gives you an immediate sense of how your humor is going to generate laughs or fury.
Keep Facebook's demographics in mind if you use this test. More seniors are there than ever before, but many aren't.
No matter your testing technique, listen closely to the feedback. It may be that the subject is wrong for the situation, your delivery needs work or your language choice needs altering. Any of those issues could cause your humor to fall flat.
5) Keep it brief and use only sparingly. Humor is a "less is more" tactic. That ups the ante — it has to be right.
The exception is when you reach out to a well-known and narrowly defined audience segment (or group) that you are certain will respond positively to your humor. Then you can share laughs much more frequently, as NCPTUP does.
6) Wrap it up while they're still laughing. Don't push it. Instead, pause, return to your more typical tone (although serious shouldn't mean deadly) and cycle in humor from time to time when the opportunity arises.
Nancy Schwartz is president of Nancy Schwartz & Co.
and author of the Getting Attention! blog. She also is a member of the FundRaising Success Editorial Advisory Board. Reach her at nancy@nancyschwartz.com
