Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes - The Goodman ...

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Overview
Such Good Causes, Such Bad Presentations
How far back must you search in your memory to recall the last presentation that wasted
your time? A week? A day? An hour? Rest assured: Your misery has plenty of company.
Buttonhole any colleague who has been to an off-site or conference recently and you are
bound to get an earful about endless data dumps, bullet-riddled PowerPoint, lifeless
speakers, and rooms colder than meat lockers. Who among us has escaped the sinking
feeling that follows those dreaded words, “I just have a few more slides”?
For the last five years, I have been traveling around the country, delivering speeches and
conducting workshops exclusively for nonprofits, foundations, educational institutions
and government agencies. In doing so, I have learned what it takes to engage, inform, and
motivate an audience of public interest professionals. And by watching dozens of other
presentations (while awaiting my turn or just session-hopping at conferences), I have also
learned that Albert Einstein was right: Time can slow down. In fact, I have witnessed
presentations where it has stopped entirely.
Which led me to wonder: Why are so many of our colleagues – decent, well-educated,
well-intentioned folks – so good at being so boring? Has their devotion to data and sound
science made them forget that audiences need not only to be educated, but emotionally
engaged as well? Are they so imbued with the righteousness of their causes that they do
not feel obligated to be interesting? Are they just too damn smart for their own good?
To be fair, good causes are not the only entities bedeviled by bad presentations. But from
where I have been sitting (and sitting, and sitting) it appears our sector is boldly pioneering
new frontiers of badness. In the fall of 2004, driven by curiosity and the fear that
“bored to death” was more than just an expression, I decided to find out why.
Had the Stories. Needed the Numbers.
When I talk to audiences about storytelling, I always remind them that telling stories
is not enough to make your case. Stories are a terrific way to bring large issues down to
ground level where people can get their minds (and hearts) around them. But after you
have told your story, you must back it up with the numbers that prove you have more than
one story to tell.
To answer the question posed by this book’s title, I knew we did not need to dwell on
the stories. Everybody I met had at least one. So I immediately started searching for any
existing research that could objectively quantify the factors that make presentations in
our sector succeed or fail. When I set out to write Why Bad Ads Happen to Good Causes,
I had Roper Starch’s database and 10 years’ worth of public interest advertisements to
draw from. For this book, though, there was nothing even remotely comparable. I had
to start fresh.