How do You Connect with a Numb Audience?

One of the most confidence-testing situations is speaking to a non-responsive audience.

You’ve got something important to say, and you’re putting your best foot forward, but the audience is giving you blank stares of indifference, if they’re making any eye contact at all.

How do you snap them out of it, wake them up, and get them to engage?

With a few very notable exceptions, that was the comparative reality many speakers faced last night at Night 2 of the RNC. Fortunately, there are a number of lessons we can all learn from it regarding how NOT to get stuck in that position again.

First let me clarify what I mean by a (comparatively) “non-responsive” audience, and identify three key conditions that create that environment.

The RNC is taking place a Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum, which holds nearly 18,000 people. 18,000 people should be able to make a crazy amount of noise when cheering for something, like the many concerts and ice hockey games it hosts every year.

Yet for so many speakers, the comments that were clearly intended as “pause for cheering and applause here” moments yielded what sounded more like “golf claps” and charity-cheers.

And more often than not, a consistently audible sound was the murmur of the attendees talking amongst themselves, oblivious of the speaker of the moment who was desperately trying to establish his/her three minutes of fame.

Why? They became numb to the content and the delivery.  Here’s three core reasons.

1. The speaker’s name doesn’t carry weight (yet). For the first two thirds of the night, most speakers were lesser-known (or all-but-unknown) newcomers from smaller congressional districts and the like. Attendees had no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt that they’d be worth listening to… so they didn’t. They were biding their time until the big-name politicians and other heavy-hitters came out later in the program.
2. They’re tired and bored! They’re sitting in the arena for 12+ hours per day listening to near-identical stump speeches and related rhetoric. (It’s in person, but not unlike sitting in Zoom or Teams meetings for 8+ hours per day.) You’re swimming upstream.
3. Nearly all the speakers marched to the beat of the same drum… almost literally. Beyond the content of the speeches, the cadence of the stump speeches was nearly identical: Make a 15-second statement that’s supposed to be a mic-drop moment, wait for cheers and applause, lather-rinse-repeat. In the course of a 12-hour day, people quickly burn out from cheering and clapping on cue in 15-second intervals, especially for the same dozen party-line rally-cries again and again.

For the audience to snap out of their haze, they need VARIETY.

Just like good music needs dynamics, going from loud to soft, slow to fast, driving to hesitant, so does your speech.

(For comparison, check out House majority whip Tom Emmer here who just yelled at the audience in exactly the same volume, tonality, pace, and energy for four and a half minutes. After the first 30 seconds or so, you just have to tune him out.)

A convention is a 4-day pep rally, which is supposed to be exciting. Imagine getting on a roller coaster only to find that the track looks like a toy train set that just loops around the base of the Christmas tree ad infinitum. Who wants to ride that train? Nobody.

What kind of twists and turns, inclines and drops will keep people enthusiastically engaged from start to finish? Here are three examples and speakers who did each well:

1. Translate your data and expertise with stories and analogies. Ted Cruz did this perfectly when stating that 11.5 million people have crossed the southern border. The number is big enough that most people can’t process it concretely, so to drive the point home, he pointed out that the arena they were in could seat about 18,000 people. Then he said, “Now imagine 639 arenas, just like this, filled to the brim. That is about 11.5 million people.” Now that’s an image.
2. Use a bit of humor when possible and appropriate. Ron DeSantis gave a great example, quipping that the country “could not afford four more years of a Weekend At Bernie’s presidency,” which got a full-auditorium laugh from the heavily Gen-X audience. It was like a chance to for everyone to inhale, after which he could launch back into his series of complaints without sounding like he was just ranting with hyperbole after hyperbole, and the reference endeared him to the audience.
3. Do a little “Mind reading.” Nikki Haley did a fantastic job of proactively addressing conflicting perspectives and controlling the narrative from the start. Knowing that she was one of the last holdouts of the “Anyone but Trump” camp, and people would be eager to hear how she would reconcile that with now speaking on his behalf, she addressed the elephant in the room (no pun intended) head-on, and explained that she was there to speak “in the name of (party) unity.” She then spoke directly to viewers who “were not in agreement with Trump 100% of the time,” identifying herself as one of them. Then she listed the priorities that allowed her to endorse him, and by implicit extension, should allow others to vote for him as well. Subsequent comments like “For those who have some doubts about President Trump…” continued her path of “I know what you’re thinking, I understand you, and I have a good answer for you.”

Unless you’re in the cookie business, using a cookie-cutter approach to get quick “moments” ends up leaving your words – much like cookies – full of empty calories.

A message needs to nourish and inspire with a variety of textures and flavors to truly engage and energize the listeners..

Let’s see if Night 3’s course tomorrow energizes you, or puts you into a full-scale “food coma.”