Julia Campbell (4:21)

I can't even tell you how much that resonates with me, only because I am sitting on a school board right now. I have two kids, one in high school, one in fourth grade. I receive so many communications, whether it's from the little league or it's from the camps that I've signing them up for, or it's from the school committee or it's from parents. I mean, I honestly, it's so overwhelming. And sometimes when I see this, these communications, I'm just like, can someone just sum this up for me? And then I know we're going to talk about AI tools, because I do use ChatGPT sometimes to just summarize like a very long email into like, okay, what are the three most important things that I need to know? But I do, I think it's important. And I also, I think that it's a good way to have empathy for people. Like, yeah, we're all busy. Busy is a very overused word. But the thing is, you know, it's up to us to get our message across. Like, the reader has, you know, what's in it for them. The reader has no reason to consume our messaging if it's not for them and if it's not in a way that they can consume. So I think the whole principle is really interesting. And I want to talk about the six principles of writing for busy readers. So we don't necessarily talk about all six of them, although I do think they're Very interesting. Could you walk us through maybe two of. Maybe the most impactful ones?

Todd Rogers (5:46)

Sure. But can I respond to what you just said?

Julia Campbell (5:48)

Oh, yes.

Todd Rogers (5:49)

First, thank you for being on a school board that is such a thankless and but important job. And the other thing that I want.

Julia Campbell (5:56)

To say is, and we need to do better in our communications, so I'm taking notes for us because we don't communicate in a concise way as well.

Todd Rogers (6:03)

Yeah. And. And the other thing that I'm going to say is that it sounds like you already see it, but I think that a listener and readers of the book and people who we work with, it's something you can't unsee. After I point this out, after you realize that when things are written in a way that is not from the perspective of making it easier for readers, you can't help but think, wow, that's. It's kind of unkind. It's just unkind to write to people in a way that burdens them more than it requires. So the first, the easiest, the most, the one that is my favorite of them all is less is more. And I like to start with a quote that is attributed to every clever person who's ever lived, which is. It actually comes from Blaise Pascal, this French mathematician. He wrote in a letter, I'm sorry this letter is so long. I would have written a shorter one if I'd had more time.

Julia Campbell (7:00)

Oh, I've heard that.

Todd Rogers (7:00)

I'm sorry this letter is so long. I would have written a shorter one if I had more time. And what I love about it, it says two things. It says, one, it is worthy of apology that I have burdened you with all this. And two, it takes more time to write less. And so to illustrate it, we do lots of randomized experiments, A, B, tests. And so an example of one, since you're on a school board, I'll describe one of those. We scraped the email addresses of 7,000 school board members. You might have been one of them. And we randomly assigned them to two different emails to get them to fill out a survey. One was, you do such important work. Thank you for your service. It is so important and influential on kids. You're making such incredible sacrifices of your time. Thank you. Please fill out my survey. And the other was, thank you for your work. Please fill out my survey. We just deleted all the middle sentences, and we hired a couple hundred people to read both. And the vast majority thought the more respectful, deferential, wordy one would be more effective. But we run this giant randomized experiment, 50% randomly assigned to get the short one, 50% randomized to get the longer one, the deferential respectful one, and the short concise one was almost twice as effective at getting people to respond to the survey. And we've, we've now done lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of experiments like this. It's just consistently the case that we should add around where we just ask ourselves, how do I make it easier for the reader? And one perspective is how do I make it shorter?

Julia Campbell (8:25)

I love less is more. I follow an email marketing guru, Liz Wilcox, and sometimes her subject lines are amazing. She sent an email that said this email is just six words long and it was a promotion and she just needed six words inside the email. And she was true to form and it was just six words and it had a link to learn more. But her emails are always very concise, very short to the point. And I love that point where if I had more time I could edit this down. I think that nonprofits, especially because we're dealing with such heady and heavy issues, sometimes complicated, sometimes technical, there's so many words that we need, we feel like we need to stuff in to our emails to get the point across. So what's maybe another principle that.

Todd Rogers (9:20)

Well, so there are, there are three dimensions of this. Less is more, one is fewer. Fewer words in anyone.

Julia Campbell (9:27)

Yes.

Todd Rogers (9:27)

And, and that's, and, and what's hard about this, Julia, is that yes, it's.

Julia Campbell (9:31)

Very hard is that we have a lot to say.

Todd Rogers (9:33)

You want those who read the whole thing will read and understand more of the important things you're conveying when there's more. But you have to know that the more you add, the less likely it is someone's going to read it at all. And so there's just this tension, you see, there's this trade off that adding more deters people from engaging, but those who do engage are, get more content. And so there's no right answer. But less is more. And there's three kinds. One is fewer ideas. That's what we're talking about. Like you just have to use your judgment and there's no right answer. We've seen it with experiments with text messages. Adding one more sentence to a text message decreases people's likelihood of responding. And that's the shortest mode of communication we have. So one is fewer ideas, the other is fewer words, which is like in order. Two should just be two. The reason for this is, should just be because there's no information lost. It's just Shorter and then the third, less is more, which I think will instantly resonate, but you probably have not explicitly thought about it is fewer requests. We and others have run a bunch of these experiments where when you ask people to do multiple things, you decrease the chance they'll do any one of them. Just people are busy and they postpone doing any of them until they can get to it or they'll do the easiest one. And it's just. And when. And what you do is you crowd out them doing any one of them when you add more things. So if one thing is important and two things are not, cut the other two things or be heavy handedly signal that one is the only important one.

Julia Campbell (11:06)

100%. And I teach this in email marketing. I teach this in digital marketing. I see this in my own emails. If I send an email out with two webinars, it will get half the clicks as if I just send an email, an individual email about one webinar or one LinkedIn Live or one promotion. I do see this in terms of email efficacy for fundraising appeals. You know, if the fundraising appeal is couched in your newsletter with 25 links and then you're saying, well, no one's clicking on the donate button. Well, it's because there's too many other requests.

Todd Rogers (11:42)

Yeah, exactly. And for anyone listening, including you, Julia, we want to do more experiments on that specific topic because we want to, we want to write a scholarly paper on this where we want to replicate it lots of times in lots of different ways. So if you, if anybody, listener or you want to do an experiment with us, reach out. We'll put my email in the show notes or however we want to do it. And it's basically anybody with more than 5,000 people on your list and interested in doing an experiment, an a B test on multiple requests versus one.

Julia Campbell (12:11)

Oh, cool, that'd be amazing. All right. That's an amazing principle. What is another principle? Maybe one that you think people struggle with the most?

Todd Rogers (12:20)

I don't know. I don't know whether we want to call this the one they struggle the most with, but the second most powerful, I think really potent one here is what we call design for navigation. And what's cool about it is we're talking about writing, but this is above writing. It's how we structure what we write. And the idea is if people are skimming and we've got lots of we, not we, but other people have done this really cool eye tracking research where you just watch how people read and they jump around. And the idea Is you want to write in a way that accommodates the way people actually read. And what they do is they are busy. You are competing with the delete button and they're just like moving fast. So you want to make it easy for them to jump around. And so one is for design, for navigation. It's things like adding headings. We've run experiments where when you add headings to a multi paragraph message as opposed to no headings, you almost double the likelihood that people read or click past the first paragraph. Another is bottom line up front. I work with a bunch of people in the military and in the US army, there is a concept that is widely applied called bluff bottom line up front. And it's actually a rule in the US army that anything written has to have the first line at the bottom line. And it's cool. It works in the US Army. It's not going to work everywhere because sometimes you have to have a little bit more like introduction if you don't have a relationship or norms aren't that you just are that direct. But the easier you can make it, and subject lines are great for this, but the easier you can make it for the person knowing they're not going to read the whole thing to pull out what you think is the most important thing before they quit on you. And everything we're doing is fighting against the most likely outcome, which is they quit before they read everything.

Julia Campbell (14:06)

So nonprofits, the people listening to this podcast, they're writing grant proposals, they're writing donor emails, they're writing advocacy messages, they're writing event briefs. How can they apply these principles without losing important details or without feeling like they're losing important details?

Todd Rogers (14:26)

It's judgment. It's all judgment. You as a writer have to make a determination what is the most important content and what can I afford to cut. But it's also not even just cutting, it's just making it easy to write. So you can use, for example, an executive summary and then have a full report. And you can have the executive summary not be eight pages, but be one page. So knowing that people are probably not even going to read the whole thing, I am afraid to even propose this. But I suspect everyone who manages a board puts materials in front of the board in advance of meetings. I don't think all your board members are reading your materials. And it's terrible because I usually teach, when I teach this material, I always start with, have you ever been in a position where you're looking at someone after they asked you a question and you're looking at them and you're like, how could you ask me that? Didn't you read the thing? Like, I put all this effort into giving you the thing and you are asking me a question and the answer is the first paragraph of the thing I sent you. Everyone has been in that position. And so the idea is you want to make it easy for them to pull out the key info. But if you want and need to have all the details, then there's tricks. You use the appendix, you use an executive summary, you use footnotes, you use links, use attachments. But the idea is you always have to have all your writing go through this lens of how do I make it easier for the reader? And the checklist that we have and the book that we wrote is all the six steps, the six principles, and then all the sub principles of like, actually how you make it easier for the reader by applying these. But there is not one answer. It depends on your context and the norms. But the idea is everyone is busy, everyone's skimming. That's the universal. And then from there, only you know the context.

Julia Campbell (16:08)

Let's go into another principle, if you don't mind sharing. They're so interesting, everyone. You can find this book in the Show Notes if you just Google writing for busy readers wherever you get your books. I know it was very easy to find, but I'll put the link in the Show Notes for sure. But I'd love to hear more about the principles.

Todd Rogers (16:27)

Sure. Another one which is it's all in the spirit of the tldr, of all of this. I know that we're saying it midway through the session, but the tldr, if you made it this far and. And you've got a screaming kid in the background, is that we should add a round of editing to everything we write. Where we ask ourselves, how do I make it easier for the reader? Because when we make it easier for the reader, we are more effective at achieving our goals. It's also kinder to our readers. How do I make it easier for the reader? How do I make it easier for the reader? Another one is in addition to we've talked about less is more, and there's three kinds of less. Fewer words, fewer ideas, fewer requests. We also talked about design for navigation, which is like, make it skimmable. Like, structure it so it's skimmable. A third would be make reading easy, which is actually the writing itself. So in the United States, the 50th percentile, U.S. adult, the median, the 50th percentile you rank all adults by the reading level. The 50th percent U.S. adult reads at a 9th grade reading level. 20% of U.S. adults read at a 5th grade reading level. 1 in 5 U.S. adults read the way at the level we teach 11 year olds. And so what that means is, is if we are writing for people out in the public, the easier we make it to read, the more accessible it will be to more people. Now, that means instead of words like vernacular, we use words like words, or like simple, common words, shorter words, simpler sentences, which I'll get to in a second. But the idea is, one, writing in a way that is easy to read makes your writing more accessible to more people. But then even for people who can read it, it makes it more likely they will actually read it. Because it turns out that anything that requires cognitive effort, we're more likely to quit or postpone.

Julia Campbell (18:20)

Saving those calories for, like, hunting and gathering. That's what our brain's trying to do. And yeah, we avoid hard things.

Todd Rogers (18:28)

Sure. Yeah, exactly. So, like, the. All of this is about making it easier. And so we ran a giant experiment in a large urban school district where we had 130,000 families. And we randomly assigned a letter that the district already sends to kids who miss a bunch of school. And one was written in like, legalese by lawyers, and it was the normal one written by the state legislature. And, and this is in California. And we had the attorney general, who at the time was Kamala Harris, who's since.

Julia Campbell (18:58)

Was this worth Attendance Works by any?

Todd Rogers (19:00)

Yeah, it was.

Julia Campbell (19:00)

Yeah, yeah, they're one of my clients.

Todd Rogers (19:02)

Oh, good.

Julia Campbell (19:03)

Yeah, Shout out to Attendance Works.

Todd Rogers (19:04)

Oh, good. Hetty Chang. Hetty and I.

Julia Campbell (19:06)

Yes.

Todd Rogers (19:07)

And my co author on this book, Jessica, are all co authors on this page.

Julia Campbell (19:10)

Oh, I love Hetty.

Todd Rogers (19:11)

Yeah.

Julia Campbell (19:11)

Okay, that's so funny.

Todd Rogers (19:13)

They do amazing work. And even more important than ever because there's not. There's just a crisis in the topic.

Julia Campbell (19:18)

Let's talk about, like such a topic. That is when people hear about it, they immediately have such misconceptions and then their eyes glaze over. So, yeah, tell me the story. I love this.

Todd Rogers (19:30)

So there's a state mandated form. I was going to say inscrutable, but we don't need to use words like that. We'll just say difficult to read. And so we get permission from the attorney general to rewrite it in a fifth grade reading level, cut the words, make it simple, structure it, and then we do a giant randomized experiment with 130,000 families, looking at what effect does it have on. On attendance in the next 30 days? And we find is here's like not that shocking a headline that when you write in a way that makes it easy to read, it's dramatically more effective at getting kids to go to school than if you write in a way that is difficult to read. And so that's. Now we're working with some states to make it the state standard. But the idea there is just like make reading easy. And there's another dimension to making reading easy. It's not just simple words and common words and short words. It's also simple sentences. And the most interesting thing that I learned in doing research about this book was this incredible eye tracking research on watching people read sentences. So they'll basically like lock your face in and then they'll track your eyes as you read. Word, word, word, word, period. And then you just sit at the period. And it's called the period pause effect. The period tells us the idea is over. We have now talked about, you now have been introduced to an idea and it's done. And what happens is people sit there until they get the idea. And very often they have to go back and reread because they're like, I didn't get it. That's the idea. I didn't get it. That more likely the longer the sentences, the more complicated it is, the longer the period pause and the more likely they have to go back and reread. And that's when you lose people, that's when they quit. When you require them to put more effort in to read your writing, that's when you're going to lose them. So the idea is simple short sentences that they can just go through without ever having to go backwards. And we could write in grammatically complicated ways that our English teachers would have said is grammatically correct in a beautiful convoluted sentence, but it's actually not an effective sentence because people are going to quit on us.

Julia Campbell (21:32)

That is really cool. I love that experiment because I worked with them a couple of years ago on their social media and their social media marketing messages and I found they had so many amazing videos and amazing content. But like you said, less is more. And it was very heavy and very legalese and very just like, here are the reasons why this is important. But you know, especially for incredibly busy parents or parents that are clearly struggling, like if their child's missing a lot of school for some reason, they need to be communicated with in a different way. So I think that's. I love that. Now we obviously have to talk about AI and writing. And I know that you've developed an AI tool to help people improve their writing. Let's talk about that. How does it work? What is it?

Todd Rogers (22:24)

So the idea is this. There are six principles and we've talked about three of them. And they're all through the lens of starting with how the reader reads. And then how do we write in a way that accommodates the way people read so it's easier for them. And initially when the LLMs, the large language models started coming out, we're like, oh my God, does this mean that we don't have to worry about how we write anymore? And the actual, like the conclusion that will seem obvious, but it took us a second to get to the conclusion is if we want humans to read, regardless of whether humans are writing it or AIs are writing it, if we want humans to read something we write, then everything we're talking about is still relevant to the extent that we want humans to read. Humans are going to be limiting their attention and skimming and trying to move on. And so whether we are writing or the AIs are writing, we want to make it easy for readers. And so initially we trained a large language model on the principles, tuned it with some emails, pre post, and we have hundreds of thousands of users on our basically teaching tool at our website, writingforbusyreaders.com but people can use it. It's great. Hundreds of thousands of people do. The problem with ChatGPT is that when you ask it to rewrite something, it's not rewriting it. So it's easy for readers. It's rewriting it so that it, whatever it, so it looks like other things that it thinks it's supposed to look like. It's getting better. Like there is. Now for those interested, if you, if you ask it to go to Canvas, that's its editing page. And then on the right hand side, they have toggles that lower the reading level, that make it more concise. So it's moving in that way, but it's just a lot of work. You can use our website, our AI tool, but the idea is just, it's a teaching tool. It shows you what it would look like if you use these principles to rewrite it. But what's cool about it, in addition to its incredible effectiveness at actually applying the principles, is it really drives home that there is no right answer. You know, your context, what it produces does not reflect the norms and expectations of your reader. It just reflects a brutal application of these principles to Whatever you wrote, you then have to add color and style and voice and whatever the norms are. And so there is not one answer, different audience. Like we one of the principles is less is more. And we wrote a 207 page book about it, about these six principles, where one of the principles is write less. The reason is because people who read a book expect a book to look like a book. You can't have a open up a book and have it be a one pager. That's not what a book is. So you write for your audience, you write for the expectations, but you can still apply the material so that it's easier to skim and easier to navigate and easier to read. And it's structured in a way that people can figure out how to pull out whatever they're looking for. So like, the book is written in a way that's easy to read, but it still looks like a book. So you write for an audience.

Julia Campbell (25:17)

That makes so much sense. And how do you see AI shaping the future of written communication? Maybe especially as it relates to nonprofits and philanthropy or communications in general?

Todd Rogers (25:30)

Again, I am really interested in our effectiveness. There is the production side and there's the consumption side. And on the production side, AI is helping us become more prolific, for better and worse in our writing. But it can write under with many styles and under many voices and for many audiences. We have to make sure that we are steering our writing with the reader's experience as the center. Right now, you know, the LLMs are trained on the writing it's trained on. And not all writing is written to be easy, to be read. To be read. Like you put something in, it often adds complicated, flowery words. Yeah. And makes it longer. Fine. I mean, it depends what your goal is. But if your goal is to be ready, then we want to make it easier. I do want to underscore some people. For some writing, the goal is not to be read. Right. And I don't just mean terms and conditions where you write legalese to bury stuff. Sometimes we write to make it look like we put a lot of effort in. Fine. You can still make it easier to read by adding structure to it. Sometimes we don't really want them to read. It's a compliance and we just, you know. And so maybe the goal isn't. I mean, I would question the ethics of that. But like depending on what your goal is. But if the goal is to be read and understood, then we want to make it easier for the reader.

Julia Campbell (26:43)

I think that's so interesting. And now I mean, I use ChatGPT a lot. I have custom GPTs that I've designed and I probably will design one called Writing for Busy Readers. And I will say, here is my goal. I want to be read. I want to be understood by the majority of people. Less is more philosophy, taking out words that are unnecessary. And then what I would do is probably put my own writing into it and see how I can tighten it up and see how I can make it more effective. And I think this kind of tool will be really effective for subject lines, like cutting down subject lines, making them more effective, cutting down word counts of important documents. I know that a lot of nonprofits use it to fit into the character counts of grant proposals. Sometimes when you only have 150 words and you have like a 1500 word mission statement. So I'm interested to, I'm interested to ask you because a lot of my, a lot of my listeners struggle with social media digital marketing. How do you feel like these principles apply on social media when we're trying to get heard and cut through the clutter?

Todd Rogers (27:58)

Just to respond to that first part, there are two AI routes you could take. One is making a custom GPT, in which case you should just use the PDF of the checklist that we'll put in the show notes. It's a one page free checklist. And then in your GPT, in your custom GPT, just say these are, these are the principles and give a little.

Julia Campbell (28:17)

Bit, make sure it adheres to this checklist. I love that.

Todd Rogers (28:19)

I mean, the second is our actual AI tool, which you know is a little bit more friction. Do what you want, but it's better in that it is narrowly trained with examples and tuned for it. But they're all, it's all great. Your question was about using AI.

Julia Campbell (28:38)

You could talk about using AI, but more what are some formulas, some structure where we can just become. We could write for busy social media scrollers.

Todd Rogers (28:47)

Yeah. So there is research on this and you will not be surprised and not to be surprised to hear it from me, that there is research that the simpler the vocabulary and the sentence structure and social media posts, the more likely is to go viral, which again, like think about your experience as you're scrolling. If it is a block of text versus one sentence, you're just more likely to read the one sentence and just move on because cognitive effort, everyone is just busy conserving their cognitive capabilities. There's another part of like make reading easy where one of my friends and heroes is a woman named Nancy Gibbs who used to be the editor in chief of Time magazine. And she is a word person. She like, is like just has an extraordinary vocabulary and it is. I just, she's just an incredible word. She's a, she's good with the words. I was surprised to hear her at one point say that she would tell her reporters, does this have to be said with words, even in their writing, which is like, is there an image or a graphic that can say it more simply? And I mean, I'm sure that is true in social media too, although I don't have research on that and I haven't read it, but it seems intuitively right. Basically the goal is how do you make it easy to read? And the easiest way to read is to not require reading at all.

Julia Campbell (30:06)

That's true. And a picture is worth a thousand.

Todd Rogers (30:09)

Words as long as it's easy to understand. Like they're like, they're. Sometimes people put graphs together where there's, there's so much data in there it's hard to really understand. Something we've been thinking about is a follow up on how to make presentations and PowerPoints and graphs that are sort of informed by the science of attention and cognition that actually help people be more effective. And one thing you got to be careful about is attention is limited and you want to control where it goes. And so you want to make sure that it doesn't go to places that isn't your main point.

Julia Campbell (30:41)

Attention is limited and you want to control where it goes. Love that. If listeners can take away just one piece of advice to improve their communication, what should it be?

Todd Rogers (30:52)

We should add a round of editing to everything we write where we ask ourselves, how do I make it easier for the reader? That makes us more effective. It's also kinder to our readers. How do I make it easier for the reader?

Julia Campbell (31:03)

Where can people find more about you, Todd? Connect with you and get all of these great tools? I mean, I'm going to put everything in the show notes but tell us where we can connect with you and learn more.

Todd Rogers (31:15)

Writingforbusyreaders.com that's the website for the book. And you could also if you search, I mean I have a scholarly homepage with my research and academic work, But I think writingforbusyreaders.com is what we're talking about. On it you will find there is a PDF, one page checklist. There's also the AI tool. There's also a tool for calculating the grade level reading required based on what you write. There's a bunch of tools and resources. Also something we talked about, Julia, which I'm really serious about. Anybody who has an email list of 5 or 10,000 or more and wants to do an a B test on the number of requests, I'm interested. We want to do more research on this and I'm particularly interested if you have a list of non English language the principles hold and we have lots of research showing that it's like turns out everyone is skimming but there are different cultural norms and different languages. So we are particularly looking for collaborators.

Julia Campbell (32:08)

Awesome. Well, readers, listeners, everyone take note of that because I think that'd be such a fantastic opportunity and you'll learn a lot. And I always encourage AB testing around communications, especially emails. So you'll learn a lot and they will learn a lot and it'll just be a win win for everybody. So once again, all the information in the show notes Todd, thank you so much for being here today, sharing your wisdom and expertise.

Todd Rogers (32:36)

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Julia Campbell (32:44)

Well, hey there. I wanted to say thank you for tuning into my show and for listening all the way to the end. If you really enjoyed today's conversation, make sure to subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast app and you'll get new episodes downloaded as soon as they come out. I would love if you left me a rating or review because this tells other people that my podcast is worth listening to and then me and my guests can reach even more earbuds and create even more impact. So that's pretty much it. I'll be back soon with a brand new episode, but until then you can find me on Instagram @JuliaCampbell77. Keep changing the world, you nonprofit unicorn.