Getting people to share any information, including a story, is one of the biggest challenges any organization or business faces. Why aren’t people as interested in what we do, the stats we obsess over, or the client testimonial we proudly display on our site? The simple answer is that people don’t care. We say things like “If only they were as passionate about our cause as we are, and if only they knew how important this work is, if only…if only”

Statements like these leave us off the hook for making people care more about things that matter. If you want people to care as much as you do, one of the best ways to get people to stand up and notice what you do, is to select a powerful statistic.

A well placed and remarkable statistic does three important things:

• It is something people will remember
• It is something they are more likely to share
• It opens up a gap in people’s knowledge about the world

The last point is so important, because this pulls people further into your site to learn more. Not just any person though, the kind of person you want to learn more. The kind of person who cares about the same issue you work on. If you have developed a way to gather more information and give more value to these types of visitors, you will help these people along their journey to be more active in your cause.

Learning how to identify an effectively presented statistic is part of the battle. If you are communicating with stats right now in your materials check them against these 5 criteria to see if there might be some room for improvement.

ETO’s 5 criteria for gauging an effective statistic:

• Is the language easy to understand?

No social work speak or inside baseball language. Could it be understood by an 8th grader?

• Is the stat human scaled?

People are terrible at grasping abstractions, especially if we use numbers of humans. We would rather help one person than join a cause to help 1 million people despite the obvious need.

• Is it something people didn’t know?

In other words, is it the sort of thing most people would find interesting. If you do an informal poll and realize this stat is news to people, you might be on to something. If it’s not news, no one will care.

• Is your cause embedded in it?

Will it be easy for the person hearing this stat to know the big picture problem, and will that problem be obviously connected to your organization?

• Would the person who shares this statistic appear smart?

If you want a message to spread via word of mouth, you have to ask yourself: What’s in it for them? If you give them a stat that is truly remarkable, they will share it with others to gain the social benefits of appearing smart. This is what you give them for being your advertiser. It is also the key difference between a stat on your web site and a story people will share with others.

Don’t think you have an effective statistic yet?

Stay tuned to my next blog post where I will show how one national nonprofit mines data from public documents, reframes and presents truly remarkable stats that get shared by thousands of people who share their passion for a cause.