Did bad presentations kill AV?

voting cross

Here in Britain we’ve just had a referendum – practically unheard of – where everyone who can vote, is give the opportunity to do so not in a tradition way (an election) but in a simple questions – in this case the question ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to “Do you want to change the way Members of Parliament are elected?”.

The result was a resounding ‘no’. And the commentary about why this is, has begun already.

Let me state now that I voted ‘yes’, just so you know where I stand, but I don’t think that is biasing my professional opinions here.  (I’ve been wrong before, though!)

Something I often tell people in my training sessions is that detailed information isn’t going to be remembered by anyone at the end of the day.  What people remember in presentations is the big, the bold and the beautiful. And there was nothing of these in the ‘yes’ campaign.  By that, I mean that the ‘yes’ campaign tended to use logical arguments to make their point.

Of course, they also used humour but these videos tended to be quite long…  which is also part of my point.

Look to the ‘no’ campaign and you find simple, easy grasp concepts such as ‘one man one vote’. Now it’s a logical nonsense to suggest that AV does away with this concept but that’s my point: you have to think about it for a moment before you realise that.  And as every advertising guru will tell you, people who have responded emotionally tend not to look too hard for logical arguments which are contrary to their newly formed opinions.

Perhaps the ‘yes’ campaign would have faired better with something more simple than the emotion-free approach they took.  Perhaps a simple question and answer would have got people interested – couched in very simple terms…

Activist: have you ever felt your voice was wasted? Or have you ever voted tactically?

Joe public: yes, of course, everyone has at some point

Activist: AV deals with that.

Joe Public: oh? How?  Tell me more!

See what I mean? In an emotive situation like this, you need to grab your audience’s interest before you can engage their brains.