Conference Slides We Never Need See Again
A colleague had been on a webinar and had to vent:
“The webinar was about email marketing tactics and, at the end, they had a bullet point that said: Don’t forget about digital. On an email marketing webinar.” she said.
Turns out, that’s not uncommon. There are the bullet points, slides, or even full presentation setups that give you the pause you need to check your email… or check out another session. Here are some of my picks; would love to hear yours:
Nonprofit boilerplate slides. If you are a lesser-known nonprofit, these are somewhat necessary. And occasionally, you need to set up a point that will come along later. But most of the time, when I see “our nonprofit has X number of chapter offices,” I react like when I hear I’m getting 40% of my riboflavin for the day: “hmmmmm… is that a good or bad amount? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Is there a point to me knowing this?” That data point is presented, is subsequently ignored, and fades like tears in the rain.
“We asked donors why they give…” and they lied to us. They didn’t mean to lie to us, but donors – like all humans – lack metacognition. We can’t explain why we do the things we do. So we go toward the reasons we think might have been involved and to the ones that seem like they’d be socially desirable. When based on poorly worded surveys, these slides can be worse than nothing because they create the illusion of knowledge where none exists. This is ignorance and self-important stupidity at its most dangerous More on this here.
Certain quotes. I once saw the Margaret Mead “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world” quote three times in one day at a conference. It was a pity, because once more and I would have won a set of steak knives. If you want to use these to be original, use them to be original originally. For example, what gets your attention more when talking about the identifiable victim effect? The Mother Teresa “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will” quote we’ve seen before? Or the “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.” from Josef Stalin. (Your mileage may vary on this, as I know my session evaluations have sometimes commented that I was memorable, but not in a good way.)
Non-profit slides on a for-profit’s template. This is a frequent indicator of Sock Puppet Syndrome, where the nonprofit “speaker” exists so that the for-profit with whom they are presenting can do a sales pitch. Other indicators include, but are not limited to:
- Two for-profit speakers from the same company on the same panel. At least one of these people is unnecessary; possibly both.
- Reading from a script or turning around and reading from the slide on the screen.
- A speaker being surprised by a slide.
There’s nothing wrong with the for-profit helping design slides – nonprofit professionals are busy and are presenting out of a belief in educating the community rather than a profit motivation. That said, nonprofit speakers should have their own point of view and points to bring to the party. (I will say I have been the sock puppet once; the other nonprofit speaker on my panel had left the organization the day before the conference. Thus, I took their slides and did my darnest, while not knowing much about the organization or the tests they ran. If you were there that day, I apologize.)
The Frodo boats away slide. My wife took my mother-in-law, who is not a fantasy fan, to the first Lord of the Rings movie. At the end of the movie (when Frodo boats away, hence the name of this trope), she asked Meg “that’s how it ends?” After hearing it was part of a trilogy, she was not happy that she would have to spend another six hours finding out what happens (and to this day has not).
Because of the delay between conference submissions and the conferences themselves – I think the deadline for the 2022 Bridge Conference is coming up shortly – sometimes the test you thought would get done didn’t. So we are treated to 20 mins of presentation and then… Frodo boats away. The speaker said “we don’t know how it ended; invite us back next year.”
No. No, we will not. It is implied in the speaker/audience member social contract that your story will have a beginning, middle, and end. If I don’t know if what you did was successful, why would I want to replicate it? And thus, why should I have listened to you?
Conferences often have back-up presentations and presenters in their hip pocket. If you can’t present a full thought, pass the slot to someone who can.
Use digital as an “insight”. Obviously, from the intro. If someone doesn’t think digital is part of the marketing mix by now, I don’t know what can be done with them.
Multichannel donors are more valuable; therefore get people in as many channels as possible. I see this at least once per conference and it gets my goat. Correlation doesn’t equal causation. Which do you think is more likely: 1) these donors just leaped in value because you did an e-append or 2) people who give in multiple channels are more valuable because they tend to be more committed donors? Clearly #2. There are plenty of good reasons to try to reach people in whichever channels they wish to engage – that you will instantly skyrocket their value isn’t one.
Almost any pie chart. There’s a great 14-page manifesto on this, but it boils down to:
- Pie charts are hard to read as we don’t render in degrees as well as we do with lengths.
- Pie charts can be intentionally manipulated, both in design and by obscuring that the pie is getting larger or smaller by focusing on proportion
- There’s almost always a better way to show data
In fact, we may do a whole ‘nother post on how people use misleading charts and data if that would be of interest.
Other presentation tropes you’d like to do away with?
Nick
P.S. If you want to vote for better conference presentations, you have that opportunity now. The Nonprofit Alliance is asking for votes on what you want to see as a part of their annual conference in Boston in April. I’m on the Education Committee there and would love your guidance here for the course catalog (link within to vote).
7 responses to “Conference Slides We Never Need See Again”
Behavioral Science Q & A
Integrating an individual giving appeal with other communications from a charity can have both positive and negative effects, and the outcome largely depends on how it’s executed. Advantages of Integration Brand Consistency: Maintaining a consistent appearance and messaging across all communications can reinforce the org’s brand identity and strengthen brand recognition and trust among your […]
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I’m not aware of any in-market tests specifically comparing recurring vs. gift frequency language. I suspect the answer might not be the same with all gift frequencies, nor with all people. It sounds like a great opportunity for you to test and find out what works for your audience. Based on the literature, here’s a couple […]
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Based on what we know from existing data, those renewal notices can actually be pretty effective in getting people to donate. They tap into our psychology – creating a sense of urgency, reminding us of past support, and using personalization to make the message hit home. They’re playing on our natural tendencies to feel obligated […]
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Interesting question. I had a quick look at the testing done on this topic. On the positive side, in all cases, over half of donors decide to cover the fee. In some cases, it goes as high as 65%. Not a negligible percentage at all. Here’s another test from iRaiser showing consistent results (see point […]
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There’s just one thing to consider when designing a supporter journey: the supporter. More specifically, you need to take into account: Who the supporter is i.e. their identity, which is the reason they support this cause, and their personality, which describes the way they “see” and process the world. These will determine the kind of […]
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I’m not an expert in this but a quick search surfaced this article on the effect of tax reforms on 2019’s charitable giving. The researchers didn’t find a reduction. Actually, they observed an “increase in charitable contributions in 2019, even with the lower tax rates and the dramatically smaller number of taxpayers who itemize their […]
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Bravo Nick!
2020 will mark 38 years of attending nonprofit conferences for yours truly and so many of your examples ring incredibly true, especially the pie charts…
Yes, it would be great to see an article about misleading charts and data. 🙂
I’ll second that!
My biggest irritant when I sit through a webinar or especially at a conference is when the person presenting simply reads the slides. I can read–if you don’t have anything to add, just send me the slides. On a webinar, at least I can bail. In person, I hate to get up and leave. But it’s time I can never get back.
The multichannel-donors example just seems rampant across all fundraising analysis. We spend a lot of time and money pushing donors
in and out of segments (into a certain giving circle, out of a certain gift-recency range, etc.) because there are segments that do better and segments that do worse. Nick, if you could describe a better model for measuring our progress on key challenges like retention, that would be a great contribution.
Such a good question and one that probably deserves its own post, but I’ll start with the reply here to ponder and spark discussion.
There will always be a need to look at things like channel and transactional information because they are somewhat predictive. Knowing nothing else about a person, you know that someone who gave you multiple gifts, the last of them four months ago, is going to retain better and give more on average than the person who gave you a single gift four years ago. So there’s a value to having those as part of the model’s portfolio.
The challenge is that for so long that’s been the entirety of the model, when there are other, often better, ways of looking at donors. I enjoy sashimi – it’s part of my eating portfolio – but I’m glad that one day someone discovered cooking food with fire (and that person is even more glad for the next day when someone invented putting the thing in the fire on a stick so you don’t have to hold it). That’s more of my eating model right now, and generally rightly so.
The point of segmentation is to have groups as different as possible. The ideal in/out segmentation would be group A, where 100% of people will respond and group B, where 0% will respond. Nothing will do that, but that’s the goal. Along the way, you also get additional benefits when the segmentation allows you to create differentiated messaging for groups A and B that lift each’s response.
Channel is pretty bad at that. There are small differences, but a mail donor looks much like a digital donor, who looks like an event donor. So what’s better?
One is identity. We actually looked at this for a health organization at https://agitator.thedonorvoice.com/channel-versus-identity-two-go-in-one-comes-out/. Long story short, you see real differences when you look at connection to cause that you don’t see when you look by channel.
Commitment and satisfaction are both highly predictive of giving as well. See http://agitator.thedonorvoice.com/predicting-sustainer-retention/ for an example.
But let’s take identity as the organizing principle. What if instead of thinking that mail donors and online donors are different and should be handled by different people, we said that those with a direct connection and those that don’t (or cat people and dog people or advocates and don’t-get-anything-political-on-me’s or globalists and here-firsters or whatever your identities are) were handled by different people?
Our mindsets would shift. Instead of saying “our online donor retention rate is below the industry average; what online tactics should we take?” — forgetting that it’s still a victory if those “digital donors” are retaining in other channels — we would say “those with a direct connection are seeing a decline in retention; what do we do with our marketing plan to better address them?” The latter gets to actual people-based, dare I say donorcentric, solutions — the former… well, channel thinking yields channel solutions.
This then works its way back to acquisition. There’s nothing inherently wrong recruiting disaster-only donors or those who are in it for the premium, as long as the price is right. You’d be just as happy (plus or minus) getting 10 $10 LTV donors for $5 CTA as getting one $100 LTV donor for $50 CTA. When you have differences in lifetime value by identity, you can better focus your investment instead of artificial rules like I’ve seen where you have to break-even on online donors in the same year, but mail donors can take longer (or vice versa).
It’s a tough system to imagine, so steeped are we in channel and transactional thinking — I’m in the same boat. But you can see things like grateful patient programs in health care and alumni fundraisers in higher ed where identity is first and foremost, so it’s a possible worldview.
Nick, you’ve managed to hit a number of my pet peeves when it comes to presentation slides. Here are three more: 1) Contradictions — I love/hate when a slide contradicts what the speaker is saying. 2) Microscopic — I hate slides that are packed with so much information (usually pointless) that they are unreadable (usually because of a tiny point size). 3) Offensive Slides — I’ve actually seen slides (usually involving cartoons) that are blatantly offensive in general or to a specific group.
Regarding misleading charts, sometimes no slides are best. I learned a valuable lesson about this years ago. I was slated to present to a client’s board. I had my projector set up and was ready to talk about the great results of our campaign. As board members streamed into the room, one saw the projector and said, “Oh, someone has bad news.” I asked what he meant. He replied, “If someone has good news, they don’t need slides. You only need slides if you want to spin bad news.” I took the vice president aside and told him I wouldn’t be using slides after all. It was a successful presentation.