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Humans have an uncanny ability to domesticate everything they touch. Eventually, even the strangest things become absorbed into the routine of the daily mind with its steady geographies of endurance, anxiety, and contentment. Only seldom does the haze lift, and we glimpse for a second the amazing plenitude of being here. –John O’Donohue
A few years ago, I found that my life had become curiously flat. I had everything I needed to survive–food, shelter, creature comforts–and moved through my days in a haze. Each day looked more or less the same. Get up. Breakfast. Work. Sit at a desk. Eat snacks. Go home. Sleep. Sometimes I spent time with friends. Not a bad life. A domesticated life. A luxurious life, in fact. But the familiarity of the day to day routine, repeated endlessly, dulled my senses. Food became bland and I took to eating absurdly spicy dishes just to break through the haze. I’d find myself blinking at the end of each week wondering where so many hours had gone, unable to remember much of what had happened over the preceding days. I became a ghost drifting through the faint contours of my own life.
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 A few months ago I attended a lovely event that honored a few local nonprofit organizations. The audience was fairly diverse. There were more than a few well-heeled folks in attendance.
In other words: the event presented a fantastic opportunity for these organizations to get in front of potential contributors and expand their community of support or at the very least raise their visibility. All three organizations, two of which have decent sized budgets, whiffed. And all three representatives followed the same outline. It went a bit like this:
I could feel the room going cold as each person spoke. There was no sense of connection or humanity. Just a bunch of words, ideas, and generalities. And no one included a call to action. As each presenter spoke, I found myself getting unreasonably frustrated. These were great organizations doing important work and they were coming across as boring and inconsequential. There is NO REASON that every single person speaking on behalf of a nonprofit shouldn’t be able to deliver a 3 to 5 minute talk that connects with an audience, communicates not just what the organization does, but also why it’s important, and calls the audience to action, even if it’s just to visit their website. Here’s a proven structure anyone can use that’s been used for hundreds of years to rally people to action: |
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