Category: communications

“Presentations” are Stories Too

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

A lot of people have trouble with PowerPoint presentations.

The first problem isn’t with the slides.  The first problem is that people think that “making a presentation” is something other than storytelling, and that their goal is something other than connecting with the audience.  Do yourself a favor: the next time you have to “present” something, DON’T start with a blank page in PowerPoint.  And don’t start with a few slides that you have pulled together for some other purpose.

Instead, take out a sheet of paper (or open a Word document), figure out what you want to say, and write it down.  Keep it simple and stick to the main points.  Make sure someone who hasn’t been elbow deep your work would understand and care about what you’re saying. Avoid acronyms and abbreviations.  Give specific examples.  Use anecdotes.  Tell stories.  Share of yourself.

Once you’ve figured out what you want to say, start writing slides.  Use pictures.  Don’t write out full sentences.  Take most of what you want to say and put it in the notes section as a script.  Then learn the script.

If your slides would make sense without you presenting them, then they’re not slides, they are handouts.  These are two very different things.

If the presentation matters, practice giving it a few times before the big day.  The point is for people to listen to you.  The slides are supporting you and the story, they are not the main attraction.

There’s a lot out there about making good PowerPoint slides, and a lot of it is instructive.  But no amount of slide-making wizardry will help you if you don’t know what point you’re trying to get across, what story you’re hoping to tell.

What have you noticed lately?

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

A friend just shared this fascinating conversation on the AIGA website about noticing.  It touches on a few interrelated themes, but starts with the basic premise that it is important to be an “active noticer” (my made-up term) in the world if you’re going to be an effective designer (and, I would argue, communicator and storyteller).

I’m seeing the importance of noticing coming up more and more.  You need to be an active listener if you’re going to be successful at connecting with people.  You need to pick up on peoples’ cues, the flow of their conversation, even their language (I’ve noticed this last point especially when speaking in a foreign language, and how one’s accent naturally adjusts depending on the person with whom you’re talking.  I’m pretty sure it happens in English all the time as well, it’s just harder to notice).  But more broadly, the more you notice in the world, the more informed, connected, and aware you are of your surroundings, both local and global.

Noticing is also at the core of the design thinking mentality of great design firms, and IDEO has worked closely with Acumen Fund (where I work) to help us think about and incorporate user-centered design in creating products and services for the poor.

What a radical notion: start with poor people, their habits and their preference, when figuring out how to design a product.  Take their opinions seriously.  It’s about listening and valuing what you’re hearing and seeing, and knowing that you as an outsider don’t have all the answers.  It’s also the opposite of how lots of poverty alleviation has been practiced by international organizations, like the World Bank (“Bring in the experts!”), for decades.

From the conversation at AIGA, Dan Soltzberg comments:

It reminds me a lot of the approach we take to being with people when we do fieldwork. In the field, you have to simultaneously drink all kinds of information in, and at the same time be active in guiding the interaction. There’s this tightrope walk between action and non-action, ego and non-ego. To move back and forth gracefully between these different ways of being requires noticing not just what’s going on around you but what’s going on inside you as well. It’s one of these things that sounds so simple, but really takes practice to be good at.

If you’re going to be an effective communicator and storyteller, you have to be good at noticing – it’s the source of your raw material and the fabric of your conversations.

I’m discovering that it’s also part of the value of blogging: it forces you to notice and really pay attention to the world around you.

What have you noticed lately?

A week for review

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

I will be out for a week and not blogging. The last time I took a few days off, traffic to my blog increased. I’m not sure that’s a good sign, but who knows?

The good news is that this blog is borrowing a much-maligned campaign by NBC networks to justify summer reruns: “If you haven’t read it, it’s new to you.”

This is your chance to review some posts you may have missed. Read one every day if you like, and it will be almost as good as new posts:

Philanthropy:

– Donations that Make a Difference

– Reflections on Maimonides’ 8 levels of Charity (tzedakah)

– What would Maimonides think of Kiva?

Storytelling

– Explaining Complexity with a good Analogy

– Even Fiji water can be green?

– 4 in the morning

Pro-poor businesses

– 1298 ambulances in Mumbai

– The need for maternal care in the developing world

– Acumen Fund breakfast discussion on energy

…and, for some reason, the single most popular post on the blog: About Sasha.

Thanks to all of you for reading and for the positive feedback. It really means a lot and it’s exciting to know you’re out there and tuning in.

Would you like some petroleum with that Evian?

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been running around with a factoid in my head, wondering if it’s true before I start repeating it. The factoid is that it takes a third of a bottle of petroleum to make and deliver a bottle of water.

I was told this about six months ago and hadn’t been able to check the facts until now. As far as I can tell, it is at most a small exaggeration. If you take manufacturing and delivery together, the number seems to be a quarter of a bottle according to Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute.

This is shocking, especially for a product that barely existed 10 years ago. Consumption of bottled water in the U.S. has increased fivefold in the last 10 years – from under 4 billion to more than 30 billion. Put another way, the average American has gone from having about a bottle of water once a month in 1997 to twice a week in 2007. That’s a seven-fold increase in a decade.

What’s crazy, of course, is that there’s a good substitute (tap water) out there, one with a huge infrastructure in place to distribute it right into our homes and places of work. This has all the makings of a habit we could all unlearn as quickly as we have learned, if the right message gets out.

Most of the vitriol that I’ve seen explaining why we shouldn’t drink bottled water centers on cost. It explains that bottled water can be 10,000 times more expensive than tap water to drink, and that bottled water costs more that gas (even at today’s high prices). I think these facts are interesting, but also “ho hum.” The mistake is that the anti-bottled water advocates are fighting a story with facts alone.

What’s missing from this approach is that a bottle of Evian (or Poland Spring, or Desani) is not the same thing as water from your tap. True, the quality of the water from a health perspective is essentially the same. But when you buy Evian, you’re buying the story of purity, the alps, clean mountain air, a story whose ultimate punchline is that at the most luxurious resorts, the poolboys come by and cool off the guests by spritzing them with spray bottles of…Evian. Add to that refrigeration, convenience, and habit and you understand why water and its offshoots are a big piece of Coca-Cola’s growth story these days (never mind that Dasani’s source is tap water).

So instead of dry facts that appeal to the head, why not fight a story with a story that hits people in the gut? How about taking something that’s on everyone’s mind these days – oil – and putting that at the center of the debate?

Making plastic bottles is oil-intensive: it took 17 million barrels of oil to make the 29 billion liters of bottled water Americans drank in 2006. That’s almost a full day’s worth of our nation’s annual oil consumption.

But I’m pretty sure even that idea won’t stick. So here’s my idea (and if anyone knows how I could get some donated billboard space near I-95 or Route 101 let me know):

Make a billboard with two bottles of water on a white background. The first bottle is filled with water, the second is one-quarter full of oil. Put an equals sign in between the bottles. Done.

(OK, it probably needs some snappy slogan like “Bring back the tap.” and a sentence saying, “This is how much oil it takes to bring you bottled water,” but I think all of that is incidental. The point is the powerful, simple, memorable image, one that’s worth talking about.)

If we want our advocacy to be as effective as the marketing that gets us to adopt bad habits, we have to be better at using marketers’ tools more effectively. Start with storytelling. I’m picking on bottled water but I’m sure you could come up with 10 other good examples. If you have some ideas, let me know.

Better yet, if you’re good with Photoshop, or know someone who is, ask them to make the image and send it to me, and I’ll use that to pitch the idea to Clear Channel Outdoor (who own all the billboards).

Notes for the skeptics:

1. According to the Earth Policy Institute, it takes 17 million barrels of oil to produce bottles for U.S. consumption. (Oddly, a recent NY Times article cited the Earth Policy Institute but quoted the number 1.5 million.)

2. If you are interested in this topic, check out the American Museum of Natural History water exhibit.

3. I was curious if I could get even close to Peter Gleick’s (of the Policy Institute) numbers using the information that’s being kicked around in the mainstream press. The bottom line is I could get to 10% as an oil:water ratio just for production of the bottles. I couldn’t get good information on transportation. Here’s the math for those who are interested:

a. 1 barrel of oil = 42 gallons = 158.987295 liters/barrel of oil

b. 17 million barrels of oil to produce water bottles = 2.7 billion liters of oil to produce 29 billion liters of water.

c. So just the production of the bottles means you could fill the bottle 10% with oil

Explaining complexity with a good analogy

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

I would bet that most people not in finance (or with formal financial training) have glossed over countless news articles that explain the current credit crisis without understanding much of anything. If so, this one’s for you.

I got a heads up from an Acumen Fund Partner about a great article in Harper’s titled The Next Bubble: Priming the markets for tomorrow’s big crash. The article is about financial bubbles, and it eloquently explains why the next financial bubble might be in alternative energy. (It also shows with deft simplicity why those of us who bought our homes after 1996 were buying after the bubble started — and that it may take until 2012 for this to play out.)

While all of that made the article worth reading, what I liked most was a wonderful analogy that explains CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) and the financial contagion they caused. It is powerful because it takes a very complex concept and paints a concrete picture that gets the core principle across:

Consider the chemical industry of forty years ago, back when such pollutants as PCBs were dumped into the air and water with little or no regulation. For years, the mantra of the industry was “the solution to pollution is dilution.” Mixing toxins with vast quantities of air and water was supposed to neutralize them. Many decades later, with our plagues of hermaphrodite frogs, poisoned ground water, and mysterious cancers, the mistake in that logic is plain. Modern bankers, however, have carried this mistake into the world of finance. As more and more loans with a high risk of default were made from the late 1990s to the summer of 2007, the shared level of credit risk increased throughout the global financial system.

Comparing CDOs to effluents, and the inability of “cleaning” this toxin (read: loans that weren’t credit worthy) captures the essence of the financial contagion — and yes, that makes modern bankers the bad guy corporate fat cats of old. As a bonus, the “hermaphrodite frog” leaves the reader with a memorable image as a mental point of reference.

For those of you who have a complex message to communicate, find a powerful analogy as your starting point. The analogy is packed with meaning, and it does most of your heavy lifting for you.

4 in the morning

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

My summer cold, which I was sure would pass in 24 hours, is entering its second week. So, Nyquil notwithstanding, most mornings this week I’ve been awake at 4 in the morning. This feels like the worst of all times of day to be awake, doesn’t it?

Why is that? Where did I even get this idea about 4 in the morning? How did 4 in the morning get such a bad rap?

The slam poet Rives might have the answer. Check out his “4 in the morning” lyrical origami at the 2007 TED Conference. I don’t want to summarize any of it, for fear of ruining the effect. See it for yourself and you’ll see how Rives has the uncanny ability to take any topic and make it captivating, humerous and profound. His “mockingbirds” riff still gives me the chills. (check it out; it’s 4 minutes long)

Rives is just one of the speakers at the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) Conference who defies easy classification. TED is a conference about the spread of ideas. It brings together some of the smartest people on the planet, and asks them to give 18 minute TED talks on their area of expertise. So the next time you’re thinking about watching a Seinfeld rerun on your DVR (“it’s just 22 minutes long,” you think), check out a TED talk instead.

I’m continually amazed by how transcendent the speakers are. Who could imagine being captivated by a biologist talking about the fastest movement in the animal world; a doctor and researcher explaining graphically why some countries are rich and others are poor; a brain scientist talking about her personal experience having a stroke; or computer scientist who modified a Wii remote control to make a $50 whiteboard (the market price is $2,500).

To me, TED is about the raw power of ideas, and of community, to change the world. It is also about how influence comes from the ability to communicate with people outside your field of expertise (see: the Obama campaign).

And listening to these speakers, one cannot help but think, “Wow, maybe I can do something totally fabulous that makes the world a different and better place.”

Tell a Friend (really)

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

It’s this blog’s one week anniversary. Already I’ve learned some things:

  1. Blogging takes about 3x more time than I expected
  2. I also like doing it more than I expected
  3. I think that finding out the series of random facts I need to make a post come together (e.g. what is U.S. aid to Pakistan? What’s going on with fuel economy legislation? What should I know about Maimonides?) will, over time, make me a smarter person
  4. I’m very interested in figuring out how to build an audience of interested readers

This last point is where you all come in. While I’m a big fan of shameless self(blog)-promotion (and have been doing a good deal of it), I’m looking forward to the day when I don’t have to update my Facebook profile letting people know that I have a new blog post.

Since there are many more of you than there are of me, you can play a part in this social experiment. Please pick one of the following (really, I need your help):

  1. If you’re a blogger/Facebook/MySpace/social media user, post a link to my blog somewhere in Web 2.0-land
  2. Think of one person you know and send them this email:

Dear So and So,

I’ve just started reading a blog about philanthropy and social change. Sasha’s a credible guy who works at Acumen Fund and I’m enjoying hearing what he has to say and thought you might too. The site is http://sashadichter.wordpress.com. No obligations, but thought you might want to check it out

Enjoy,

YOU

(P.S. If you’re my mother, you’ll probably have to edit that note slightly)

Think about how much email you send out every day — don’t you think you could add this to the list without bending a friend out of shape? (If you post to a site, let me know where; he/she who generates the most traffic (per “site referrals” on WordPress) wins a prize.)

This could be fun. I promise to post about progress. Thank you!!

“Things younger than McCain” t-shirt

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

This definitely feels like a low blow, and not the kind of discourse we want when choosing our next President. But it’s also so darn funny that I thought it worth sharing:

http://blog.200nipples.com/2008/07/new-t-shirt-notice-younger-than-mccain/

The way this site works is that they sell 100 limited-edition t-shirts at increasing prices. Very clever way to turn pricing on its head and use the Internet as more than another storefront.