How to Retain Your Audience

How often do you forget where you put your keys or walk into a room and immediately forget why you entered it?  Happens quite a bit doesn’t it?  So why do we forget things?  It’s actually not a loss in your long term memory but really a failure in memory retrieval.  No information is actually lost, it’s still available in your long term memory, but for some reason you are just unable to retrieve it at that point in time.

In 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus did an experiment on memory where he had subjects memorize a list of meaningless three letter words and tracked how quickly his subjects forgot the words. As you can see from the graph below, known as the Ebbinghaus curve, our learners will rapidly forget information. This is also information that was memorized.  After 31 days the retention was less then 25%.  In the case of meaningless information, only 20 minutes after they only remember 58% of the information.  Now image what the retention rate is if there was no initial memorization.  It might not even hit 2%!

We spend so much time creating a master presentation or article to have our audience forget within an hour.  What can we do?  Video Scribing is a perfect mnemonic device.  A mnemonic device, is any learning technique that aids memory. Commonly met mnemonics are often verbal, something such as a very short poem or a special word used to help a person remember something, particularly lists, but may be visual, kinesthetic or auditory. Mnemonics rely on associations between easy-to-remember constructs which can be related back to the data that is to be remembered. The best mnemonic technique is imagery.  By using videos, pictures, and other images you can recall things years later it is much better to use pictures in our everyday business activities.

Contact us with any questions about how a video scribe can help add retention to your brand.

Check out this new whiteboard video we created