Fight back against the bad fundraising conferences

There's one main difference between the nightmarish climactic scene of a zombie movie and some of the conferences we fundraisers attend: The conferences use Powerpoint.

I think the Powerpoint makes the nonprofit conference the worse experience of the two.

"A Fundraiser" (of Don't Tell The Donor) has noticed this too: An Honest Critique Of The Fundraising Conference Circuit ...

To put it bluntly, conferences suffer when organizers allow uninspired speakers to present stale content to disengaged attendees.

A Fundraiser would like to see a more rigorous system speaker selection. I agree. And I'd like to see it go even further, with reforms like these:

De-politicize speaker selection. Make authority and quality the reasons they're chosen. Not connections, and not filling out predetermined quotas of different types of speakers.

Zero tolerance for sales pitches. Every conference I've been involved in tells its speaker they may not make their presentations sales pitches. But it happens anyway. I'd station a conference organizer in each presentation, and if the material veers away from being useful and into pitch territory, it is immediately called to a halt. Yeah, that would be real embarrassing. But I bet it wouldn't happen more than once.

Ban Powerpoint. Yeah, that would be tough. But remove the Powerpoint crutch, and speakers might have to pay attention to communicating. At least, Powerpoint use should be policed and kept from becoming the mind-killing parade of bullet points it usually is. How about Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint? (No more than ten slides, lasting no more than twenty minutes, and containing no font smaller than thirty point.)

I know those things seem unlikely to happen. But we can take solid steps to make the conferences we attend worth our while. These like these:

• Don't let them get away with bad conferences. If you go to a conference and it's lousy, don't go again. Tell everyone you know not to go. And let the conference organizers know.
  
• Fill out those evaluation forms. I know it's a pain, but you really can help raise the standards by calling for high standards. If you sit through an uninspired, bullet-pointed snoozefest, don't be polite. Call it what it is; pour your outrage for the time they stole from you onto the form. (And if someone does a good job, let them and the conference organizers know you appreciate it.)
  

Technorati Tags: conferences, powerpoint

Comments

[Sam Davis]

Add to the list annual conferences which are literally re-runs of previous years, with only bits and pieces of new information thrown in.

Without being more specific: for many years I attended development conferences for the subset of nonprofits at which I worked. After the fourth nearly-identical conference, I stopped attending.

I did tell the organizers, along with many colleagues who attended, but the former seemed unable to grasp the concept of "new information."

[Katherine Wertheim]

This comment is hilarious: "There's one main difference between the nightmarish climactic scene of a zombie movie and some of the conferences we fundraisers attend: The conferences use Powerpoint." I laughed so hard I choked! Wow, is that true. I am sad to say that I felt relieved when I didn't have to go to the AFP International conference this year.

The fundraising conferences aren't even the worst. Have you been to planned giving conferences? Could they make them any more dull? I just glaze over.

You know who gives interesting conferences? The National Speakers Association. (www.nsaspeaker.org and www.nsaglac.org) They're amazing. They're light years ahead of nonprofits when it comes to using technology. And of course all the speakers are interesting because they are professional speakers! Kids! Don't try this at home!

I like your other posts about bumperstickers, too. I'll come back and keep reading.

Thanks so much for an informative site.