Fundraising and the Backward Brain
The second flip was right to left: Talking about success feels much better than talking about need. Transferring that onto how it is going to feel to donors is a big mistake.
Contributing factor No. 8
We also found another contributor to the failure of Project X: The creators were over-reliant on PowerPoint as a communications tool. PowerPoint has a deadening effect on thinking. The modular style of communication it fosters breaks ideas down into often incoherent chunks. Sustained thinking falls apart. It alternately overcomplicates and oversimplifies the situation. The outcome is a kind of fog — it becomes hard to judge whether something should be right- or left-hemisphere driven. The very idea of correct processing is often lost in the confusion of PowerPoint. PowerPoint is a tool for creating slide shows and should not be used to write memos or position papers.
