Dropping Your Stopping Points

Photo by Photo Yaroslav Shuraev on Pexels

Writer: Craig Meerkamper

Let’s play a quick game. There are no wrong answers, only more information and more complexity. I’ll present you with a list of choices followed by some sentences of added context. Before reading each section of context consider at what point you’d be comfortable not reading any further and making a definitive decision with the limited information. Let’s get started. 

The Game: Buying Your First Electric Car 

After each paragraph you can:  

A) Repair your current car to pristine condition.  

B) Buy a new electric car. 

C) Buy a used electric car. 

D) Continue reading. 

Your “ol’ reliable” has finally kicked the bucket with an impressive 300,000 km on the odometer. It was your first car out of university and took you everywhere, but it recently began making ‘the noise’ again and seeing that flashing yellow symbol on the dashboard probably shouldn’t have become the norm. You have many great memories with the car and suspect investing in some repairs could keep it going for another ten years. 

--- 

You’re in a stable spot financially but you can’t help but mull over how much gas was burned over all those kilometers. Everyone seems to be getting a new car anyways but as a future minded person you want to feel like you’re doing SOMETHING to offset those record-breaking temperatures. You’ve heard that buying a new electric car is a good option, but you’ve also heard that the carbon produced from the construction alone would take decades to truly drive off. 

--- 

While a new electric car sounds good a used one would mean that the carbon offset would be a bit easier to achieve since a brand-new car doesn’t have to be manufactured for you. Your current car’s resale value is basically just scrap anyways. There’s an electric car dealership that’s just opened near to you and you remember reading they’ve announced a ‘grand opening deal’ to the first 100 people that order a car from them. 

--- 

While looking into used electric cars online you come across the same model listed for $40,000. You message the seller, but it takes a few messages for them to respond to you. They ask if you are willing to pay for the car in cash because they live about an hour's drive away from you. They don’t have much social media presence but do have generally good reviews on the other things they’ve sold before. Your old car is really starting to struggle now and making noises you can only describe as “expensive”. Calling the dealership about the deal you also learn that it was only on the first 100 pre-sales of the newest model which have already sold out. 

--- 

The used seller has stopped responding to you online and appears to have deleted their account and all their listings. A recent media story has broken about the CEO of the electric car company making some comments about gay people’s right to marry and if it’s “necessary to legally enshrine those rights”. Your wife is highly displeased with their statements and is strongly against you buying any of their cars. You are also offput by the CEO’s statements because you are also a woman.  

So, did you make your decision? 

This game was inspired by something I heard Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad recently discuss. In a podcast segment discussing ‘Stopping Strategies’ he asks, “When is it that a person has acquired enough information to stop and make a choice?”  

Sadd explains that “Every decision that we make every day; we don’t sample all of the relevant and available information before we make a choice. We sample until we have sufficiently differentiated between the choices that you can say ‘There’s no point in sampling more information, I now have enough information to vote for Trump’”. 

Now regardless of whether you find his concluding example... compelling ... finding your decision threshold is important. When have we reached our own thresholds to make a conclusive decision and to take a stance that we will stand by? Be they in a professional context or our own personal beliefs, our thresholds are typically invoked faster than we’re even aware they’re there. Basic things like deciding what to have for lunch or when to go for a break, to decisions with more gravity like purchasing a house or committing to a business plan. In all cases we eventually have to take the leap and commit to a choice. 

For myself, different decisions have different ‘decision thresholds’ largely depending on their level of impact, things like weighing their repercussions or consequences. Considering their permanence can also weigh heavily on me, because there’s comfort in the ability to retry or undo things if they don’t work out in our favor. Our thresholds are a largely personal metric that fluctuates from person to person. 

The game you played took some inspiration from my childhood fascination with choose-your-own ending books (notably Goosebumps: Deep in the Jungle of Doom which can’t possibly hold up to my memories of it). This was a little game to test your own stopping points. There were no wrong answers with your decisions, only things to recognize about your process of decision rationalization. Did you have a gut instinct just by seeing the initial options? Was it a practical, social, or economic element that swung you one way or the other? Did your decision change with the more context you read through? 

While you’re in this mindset I’d also highly recommend you check out Welcome To Vanguard Estates a phenomenal choose-your-own adventure I came across at university where you navigate the ethical decisions of putting your aging father into a retirement home completely run and operated by AI assistants.  

Understanding our stopping strategies and decision thresholds can help us not only make decisions but prioritize our search for the information we value. Out of 100+ elements of a car like mileage, colour, price, social image, speed, brand, size, etc. our decision likely boils down to less than 10 key attributes that carry much of the decision's weight.  

For Ontarians provincially, and Canadians federally, one of the most important decisions we all must make is the upcoming Provincial/Federal elections. Again, it’s a choice with hundreds of factors and variables that may influence our ultimate decision but take a moment to ask yourself what the key variables are for you. Do you like the candidate but not their party? Do you like their policies but not the person? Are you not convinced by any of the options and think you may sit this election out? Political campaigns are floods of compelling information and attempts to undermine competing candidates, but all of the facts and figures aren’t equally influential in your decision.  

Don’t get overwhelmed and swept away by the flood of information. Find the anchor points that you value and hold on tight. Everything else has sway but will rush past you if you let it. There are calmer waters coming. 

If you want your friends to try this game for themselves, send them the link to this article or download the attachment here for a longer version of the game. 

What’s in A Name?

Photo by Andre Benz on Unsplash

Writer: Craig Meerkamper

Shakespeare was right when Juliette asked “What's in a name?” because, as it turns out, it’s quite a lot. 

Everything we interact with has a name. People, places, items, brands, they’re all referred to with words so entwined with their being that we often neglect the fact they could have just as easily been called anything else. Without getting too semiotic about how the word “Tree” and the signified Tree that we talk about are not inherently linked outside of linguistics, today my reader I want you to interrogate the meaning found in some of the names you interact with every day. 

In the professional world one of the most obvious examples of a ‘name’ is a brand name or a company name. Take your own for example, you might be intimately familiar with its background, its meaning, its reference, heck you may have been present when it was first scrawled out on a napkin. However it was manifested, have you ever considered what the name alone communicates to its potential customers? 

Granted, with some brands their names have grown to instill security, reliability, profitability solely by the nature of them already being a major player in their field for decades. Nothing about Apple necessarily communicates that it’s the world's most valuable technology brand other than the fact that we’re all aware it has been dominating the field and that roughly 2.2 billion people on the planet own one of its products. The cache of the name came from its accomplishments, but it could have just as easily been named ‘Tree’ and maintained a similar market cap. 

That said, for the brands that don’t quite make the Fortune 500, a good name serves both to communicate things to ourselves and our audience. A name should ideally give a gist of its purpose, values, goals, and identity. Sometimes this can be quite literal like Canadian Pacific Railway. For small-scale cottage industry projects a pun or play on words is a tried-and-true way to endear yourself to clients. A personal favorite of mine comes from a hair salon I spotted in the UK dubbed Curl Up And Dye which expertly deploys both methods at once. 

There should be a level of uniqueness to your name that distinguishes you from direct competition. Memorable, pronounceable, and able to pass the phone test (i.e. can you hear and accurately write the name down if told it over the phone) these are all great metrics to aim for, but understanding what your name communicates to someone that’s never heard of you is crucial to making a powerful first impression. 

Begin by considering the values and purposes of your organization. A bank might value security, stability, and trust, which can be seen in The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce which conveys an old-money colonial sentiment, while a name like Chase has always confused me. Even though the name comes from Salmon P. Chase, the US Treasury Secretary under Lincoln, and remains a wildly successful bank throughout The States, I’m personally not that comforted by the idea of needing to ‘chase’ my money from place to place if I ever wanted to withdraw it. 

When it comes to tech-startups the ‘drop a few vowels from a noun’ strategy, delightfully dubbed ‘disemvoweling’, demonstrates that brands begun spending less time considering the actual “meaning” of their names than they did their memorability and if they could be used as a vehicle to capture the traffic of a common word. This was largely in response to the cornering of single words during the .com goldrush which quickly led to the ownership of nearly every word in the English Dictionary followed by .com. This accumulation forced many tech founders to focus more on pronunciation than on grammar. David Karp the founder of Tumblr.com put this succinctly saying, “At the end of the day… it all comes down to one simple, absolute truth: Tumbler.com (with an ‘e’) looks f---- stupid.” 

A clear instance of the emotional bond an audience can form with your name can be seen in Twitter which started its life as Twttr when the domain name Twitter.com was owned by a bird enthusiast that the Twitter founders eventually agreed to buy the domain from at a massive markup. Though it’s recent transition to the much maligned ‘X’ might just be the ultimate example of the gutting of meaning from company names. X is everything and nothing all at once, it’s a mathematical symbol, a sexual symbol, a mark, a cross, a negative, an unnamable ‘factor’, and of course was chosen as “the ‘coolest’ letter of the alphabet” when polling both Elon Musk and 12-year-olds worldwide. With a name like X there was certainly buzz generated about the drastic rebranding of an internet staple, but despite the ongoing skirmishes between the Xvangelists and the Orthodox Twitterites, the adoption of the new name has broadly been integrated and moved past. The attention it once grabbed was drawn more by temporary novelty than anything else. 

There has been some recent reversal of the brand disemvowelment trend to full, grammatically correct words being used by companies to be both literal and explicit with their business, while continuing to corner entire concepts like the clothing store Wardrobe. Take Blast as an example. Mike explained his reasoning behind the name as an origin story. “When I began working as an independent company, I wanted to create a brand that encapsulated what was unique and different about the way I work. I would just say that it conveys speed, simplicity, clarity and high impact. When I thought about words that were short and conveyed this “Blast” surfaced right away.” 

When thinking of what name represents your brand, remember that the name will always be secondary to the content of the service. Your identity as a brand can feel concrete and unchangeable. Shaking up your identity can be costly, labor intensive, and unintuitive to users that have gotten used to the precedent. For Mike, the brand name arose by primarily grounding it in the values and goals of the company. 

Deciding on a good name is a highly personal decision that will fundamentally shape how your company or organization is seen. But, before you indulge in the temptation to emulate what you see other successful brands doing by following trends like disemvowelment, literal names, or joining the X-ify X-ly family of brands, heed this warning:  

“You don’t want your business name to be part of a trend. Trends have short life cycles.” -Mariana Glazman, Founder of Suitely 

If you don’t know who Mariana is or what Suitely was, take this as proof enough that she’s speaking from experience. 

The Funny Little Power of the Understatement

Photo from RDNE Stock project on Pexels

Writer: Craig Meerkamper.

Now I'm not one to brag but I’ve recently been offered the opportunity to pursue my Master of Journalism at Carleton University which is widely recognized as the most prestigious journalism school in Canada. It’s incredibly difficult to get into this elite school and it might just be the most significant achievement of my life (or anyone's life for that matter). 

To be real, I feel myself cringing when I talk about my accomplishments in a self-congratulatory way. Even just while writing that opening sentence, I often find that when I'm talking about this accomplishment, it feels really arrogant to put the opportunity into those terms. And despite what I see and hear from influential figures daily, I doubt that I’m the only person that feels a sense of embarrassment to talk about myself this way.  

In the social media era, every accomplishment is expected to be recorded, posted, and promoted to help build your own identity ‘brand’ online, and this leads to an uncomfortable pressure to constantly compare my resume of experiences, achievements, and accomplishments to those of my peers. But to counter this practice, I feel like we all need to develop the confidence to allow our audience to ascribe their own level of importance to our achievements without a bunch of hyperbolic posturing.  

There’s a narrative concept usually found in action or sci-fi stories called ’power-creep’, where the protagonists need to keep beating bigger and badder villains at a rate that leaves little time for the narrative stakes to be appropriately raised. The latest Star Wars trilogy had to make everything a bit bigger for it to have an impact with audiences. The Death Star is no longer the size of a moon that can destroy planets, now it's called ‘Starkiller’ and it’s the size of an entire planet and can destroy solar systems. Marvel superhero movies suffered the same issue since defeating the decade-long threat of Thanos who sought to kill “half of all life in the universe”. After his defeat the next major villain is presumably going to be a threat because they plan to destroy... all of life in the universe? What happens after that? Where does it end? 

Protagonists run out of ‘tangible’ threats, so oftentimes they end up fighting ‘concepts’ like ‘Reality’ or ‘Alternate Universes’ or ‘The collective negative consciousness of all living things’ or ‘the darkness’ etc. Etc. I sense a similar power-creep problem has entered the professional world as well. 

The reason I bring this up is to highlight how excessive hyperbole causes companies (much like narrative writers) to quickly run up against a limiting wall of their own creation. Ever-greater problems, stakes, and metrics have to be manufactured to justify why the latest achievement is any more substantially remarkable than the previous. In short, people get tired and bored of the extremes because if every announcement is equally ‘world-changing’ and ‘unprecedented’ then they eventually become just as predictable as if nothing significant happened at all. 

To work around this, I often find myself strategically employing my favorite conversational tag-team of understatement and humor.  

When describing the admission offer to my dream program to friends and colleagues, I'll often say that it’s “pretty good” or how I was “glad my writing samples did the trick”. I’m intentionally leaving the (wrong) implication hanging in the open that I could have possibly been admitted to a better program, or that the carefully curated portfolio of my best work samples somehow ‘tricked’ the experienced admin team into offering me admission. Both of these implications are of course false, so why even make them? An effective understatement isn’t usually false itself, as much as the implication it leaves open is so obviously wrong that it becomes humorous. 

Understatements aren’t strictly inaccurate; rather they highlight the obvious by brazenly avoiding its direct acknowledgement. Getting a promotion becomes “moving offices and getting a better chair”. Having a child is “having a new roommate”. Officially launching a product after years of development is “looking for public feedback on a new prototype”. Simplifying situations intentionally draws attention to the thing being understated while avoiding getting caught up in extreme hyperbole. 

It might sound a bit self-deprecating to undersell massive achievements, but when using understatement, the point isn’t to deny yourself the ability to feel pride in what you’ve achieved, or to downplay a truly significant accomplishment, but to remain realistic in the scope of your accomplishments. In a professional context, when you have nowhere in your field or career to go but up it's a good idea to leave yourself a bit of space for perceivable growth. 

When it comes to professional communications with your coworkers or staff, I don’t advocate that you use understatements that come off as being dissatisfied or underappreciative of your/their successes, so this usually works best when talking with people that you’ve built background with and are already familiar your personality.  

Say we have a stern professor who delivers all of his lectures at an excruciatingly slow pace. Talking with someone after I might say “I wonder what the good news is, did you notice he had some energy today?” While this isn’t factually ‘wrong’ it’s subjective enough that it becomes funny to acknowledge that there even was a remark-worthy difference between two comparably dull lectures. I am intentionally drawing attention to how dull the lectures are without directly saying “well that was another slow one.” From my perspective a good understatement appears to “miss the most obvious” but in doing so actually draws attention to the obvious, which is often so unavoidable or integral that its acknowledgement is usually deemed unnecessary.  

I feel that there’s also a need to use understatements to counterbalance the prolific hyperbole we often hear in the professional world. When every achievement is announced as the biggest, the greatest, the most profitable, the first in history, they often become indistinguishable and exhausting. A company’s goals fail to stand out from each other when the bar can’t go any higher than where it’s been set. 

Say Company X has recently been purchased by Apple and they put out one of the two following statements. Think about which statement (over vs understated) engages you more and makes you interested in following the company's future developments.  

1. “Our company has just made start-up history by becoming the highest value asset Apple has ever paid to acquire.”  

   vs.  

2. “The team slept well last night. Apple offered to acquire us for only double our market value.” 

A good understatement has the miraculous power to engage people’s critical thinking faculties by forcing them to ‘read between the lines’ of a statement. There’s something satisfying about the feeling that you’ve been let in on a secret or picked up on a hidden message even if there’s nothing truly being withheld. I find that acknowledging an open-secret indirectly often causes a little ‘game’ to begin between me and my friends where we all know ‘what’ it is we’re talking around but continue feigning ignorance with a wink and a nudge. Forming in-jokes and understanding subtext is highly useful in the professional sphere where teams of coworkers can learn how to better understand each other's communication styles and subtleties. 

Mastering the use of understatement in your communications isn’t for everyone nor for every scenario since we do have to take formal professional communications seriously. But knowing when to relax on the hyperbole and leave your work the room to rise to new heights will make anyone that is interested hungry for the next big update. 

At least in my case understatements have opened a door or two, one just happens to be the doors into a major University. 

How Analogy Cuts Both Ways

Photo from Artem Kulinych on Pexels

Writer: Craig Meerkamper

Analogy is easily one of my favorite tools in the writer's toolkit because it’s relatively easy to deploy -- but difficult to effectively use. It provides your audience with a recognizeable and easy way to understand everything from the organizational structure of a business to the utility of a new product. The central power of analogy is the way it turns comparisons into ‘frameworks’ that can significantly ease your audience’s comprehension when strategically applied.

The barrier to entry when using analogies is so low that most people end up unintentionally using them every day without even realizing it. This article is riddled with a bunch that I didn’t even mean to put into it, they’re just that integral to the English language.  

Here’s a very familiar example: 

We talk about housing markets as “a bubble ready to burst”. Housing markets are really complex. They have so many variables, it’s almost impossible to describe them to the public without an analogy. A framework that can be visualized makes this much easier. The bubble is clear and simple. The notion of it bursting is quite powerful too. We see the bubble getting bigger. We know it can’t continue forever, but we don’t know exactly when it will pop. We can only sense it’s about to happen. 

Analogy is not the same as Metaphor and Simile, but they are often used together. Metaphor is calling one thing something else entirely. Think “my math teacher is the devil”, sorry to all the math teachers reading this but today you are my scapegoat (oh look a metaphor!). Simile is the next step up; think “my math teacher is like the devil”. Simile recognizes a single comparison, letting readers draw their own assumptions of exactly how the teacher is comparable to the devil. Maybe they’re a tyrant who rules their domain and enjoys inflicting torment through brutally difficult tests. I for one would assume a math teacher is like the devil because they both enjoy ‘sin’ (that joke's an apology to all the math teachers because only you guys will get it).  

Analogy takes a like-comparison and runs with it, exploring its limits by demonstrating a number of similarities. Take a mental note when you feel this following analogy stops working for you and you’ll get what I mean.  

Although analogy is the most powerful of the three tools, using it is a lot like running with scissors. It's flashy, attention grabbing, and can quickly turn into a bad idea if you don’t know when to slow down and question your choices. You need to make sure it’s the right pair of scissors to run with for your intended purpose. Running with a bad pair of scissors means that the longer you try to force them to meet your needs the more likely you are to misapply them. You might want to continue running with the scissors because you’ve already committed this far. So, you double down and now you’re running with two pairs of scissors at the same time, which is twice as dangerous, and (at around this point) the analogous comparison has gone far past credulity and entered the world of the absurd. 

As a thought experiment, there is a lot of potential value in getting to that absurdist point because depending on the two elements of the analogy, it may take a shockingly long time to get through all the appropriately correlative comparisons. A comparison with a high level of parallel elements can mean the analogy is actually quite strong. Pushing past that point to increasingly tenuous comparisons (i.e. airplanes are like monarch butterflies because they have wings, migrate to Florida every winter by the thousands, and are interested in... flowers?) enters the territory of ‘forcing’ an analogy when you begin assuming that every element of framework must cleanly correlate with something you’re trying to describe. However, doing this exercise can help you to consider your problems in a nonconventional way and even help reframe them.  

On the other hand, forcing an analogy can make you overconfident in your understanding of your problem and can cause you to make ill-informed decisions. A good analogy should help you think outside of the box, instead of just providing you another box to graft your problem/idea onto. You might feel that your business compares well to how a pirate ship is run with its ruthless Captain, First Mate, and keeping all of its treasure hidden in the Caymen Islands, but if you force the analogy and try to literally run it like a ship by barking captain’s orders to your crew and throwing the dissenters overboard you’re going to end up with a mutiny on your hands. 

Entire industries use analogy to make themselves sound less intimidating and more comprehensible to newcomers. If you try to explain to me how blockchain technology is a distributed ledger system within a decentralized network of users, my eyes will glaze over. However, we can understand why it became popular to discuss cryptocurrency as “digital gold” that you “mine” and keep in a “wallet”. A similar thing is happening in the AI space where we describe the “training” process of large language models like that of a pet where they are given digital “treats/rewards” and “punishments” based on their outputs to get them closer to desired behaviors. Simple, visual concepts that we’re all familiar with make the new and obtuse more approachable. 

When it comes to your own use of analogy in the workspace consider a complex problem you’re currently facing and the ways analogy can help you provide an approachable framework to explain the situation. Say a member of staff is making a workspace intolerable because they are disruptive and insert themselves into projects or discussions where they aren’t needed. Or an investor would be interested in supporting your project but isn’t convinced of its feasibility without a test or prototype. Draw out a diagram of the parties involved and their relationships before asking yourself if there’s power dynamics at play, emotional factors, functional relationships, procedural stages, and anything else that defines how these elements relate to each other.  

Is your problem like a boardgame, a sporting team, a Greek myth, a movie, an illness? Inspiration for the appropriate analogy can come from anywhere, but when you’ve found one that seems to have a high level of parallels, begin mapping your problem onto that framework while highlighting the points it’s different. These differences are crucial to personalizing your deployment of the framework and explaining the problem to others. If there’s a “rock in your shoe”, then would it be better if the “rock” was “smoothed out” or just “removed” entirely? If the “team is resentful of a star player” getting the most “field time”, then could you “increase the frequency you rotate the bench?”  

Analogies don’t usually produce hard answers or decisive recommendations, but they assist you in focusing on the questions you should ask to effectively tackle your problems and communicate your proposed solutions. Real problems are never as simple or easily addressed as we would like them to be, but a solution can often become more obvious with a bit of strategic reframing. Like a hot knife through butter, you’ll be cutting through your problems and clarifying confusion before you know it. 

Building a Skeleton: How Writing Comes Together From the Inside-Out.

Image by DangrafArt

Writer: Craig Meerkamper

Whenever I write I like to imagine I’m building a person. Everyone has their own unique voice, personality, perspective, shape, attitude, flaws, and a multitude of other elements too long to comprehensively list (nor would you want to read). Writing is much the same, with a little bit of ourselves, our quirks, our voice put into everything we produce. We are all Doctor Frankenstein trying to bring our work to life.  

When I say ‘building a person’ what I mean is starting from the inside. The place I always start is constructing a skeleton -- literally the bare bones of what points I want to make or broader arguments I want to convey -- in the order I’m planning it to appear in the final draft. Laying out the ‘bones’ of your sections including title, topic, and themes gives you a clear framework you can quickly reference to get a sense for the flow of the completed piece. Instead of writing a bunch of disparate points and spending hours reorganizing at the end, think of the paragraphs as buckets of like-information that you can use as a roadmap to quickly visualize your completed piece early on. One page of structured information with keynotes is a far more manageable way to review and restructure a piece from head-to-toe than a 10-page semi-finalized draft. Now, a skeleton of a piece can’t stand on its own because even with the foundation in place it’s far from complete. It’s dull, disconnected, and not very ‘fleshed-out’ (you see where I’m going with this?)  

The next layer is the guts and arteries, the major points of connection that ‘flow’ throughout the piece. I’m talking about the points that bridge the gaps between the separate bones so the transition from one to the other is much smoother. This is the layer that starts to hold everything together and brings some cohesion by clarifying the connections between your key points. It’s also where you can start planning out any overarching themes that you want to reinforce across the piece. If you were writing about sales and wanted to have a section summarizing an industry success story followed by a section discussing a brief history of mercantilism, they aren’t unrelated, but it’s at these leaps that you’re most likely to lose some readers. Smoothing out the transition with an overarching theme like ‘evergreen sales tactics across history’ gives your readers an informational bridge to cross. 

Next comes the muscle; the references, the evidence, the expert quotes and sources that strengthen and back up what you’ve said. You might have been collecting these already to guide your direction, but building muscle is often the most exhausting and labor-intensive part of writing. No one ever said building muscle was easy and if you want your piece to be its strongest it’s where much of the ‘work’ really lies. Have a coffee, or a protein shake if that helps you get into the mindset better, and strap in for five more reps (or refs?). At this point your piece should be looking pretty functional but still a little raw. Time to wrap it up with the last layer.  

Skin! Skin is the layer where you can start really adding personality, character, and voice to your work. It’s the asides and the notes that make your work feel more human and less robotic (note: remind me to renew my subscription for ChatGPT). While I personally try to avoid using AI as much as possible in my writing it does help me find specific words that sound more professional, or a it suggested: it helps me "endeavor, to the utmost extent feasible, to employ terminology and verbiage that exudes an elevated level of sophistication, intellectual refinement, and professional gravitas.” Your mileage may vary. Skin is the refining and accessorizing of your piece. To me it’s the most enjoyable part of the writing process because it’s the stage when detail and nuance can be added. The danger with the Skin stage being that it’s also the point when you must determine your work is finished. A quote from Céline Sciamma’s phenomenal film Portrait of a Lady on Fire always comes to mind.  

HÉLOÏSE: When do you know when it's finished? 

MARIANNE: At some point you stop. 

Skin wraps everything up and gives one final pass to what was once a jumbled bag of ideas, points, and references, turning them into a cohesive unit of information that’s ready to send out.  

So, congratulations doctor, you’ve completed your piece and with the help of a handy framework to structure your approach you didn’t go mad in the process (hopefully). The last, very crucial, step before hitting ‘publish’ is to take a deep breath and declare: 

“IT’S ALIVE!” 

Raising Trust Raises Dollars

Photo by Jessica Alves on Unsplash

Writer: Craig Meerkamper

Fundraisers believe in the power of community. They believe in the charity of the individual and the power that can come from harnessing many individual donations to cause large-scale social impact. But it’s in proving and communicating the impact of contributions that many fundraisers struggle.

When you make a donation you aren’t buying a service or a product, you’re buying a promise. The promise is that your contribution will have a bigger impact when pooled than it could have individually. Fundraisers attract donations from large and diverse audiences of donors, each with differing levels of investment in the cause and familiarity with the structure of pooled funds. Getting too analytical risks alienating donors who are focused on the big picture impact from those who want to know how their personal contribution specifically had impact.

It’s extremely difficult to quantify how much impact each individual brings to the project, and the danger arising from this is donors becoming apathetic to the necessity of their individual donations. When discussing your successes, bring clear and honest examples that can be understood by anyone. Leave your audience feeling that their donations are well cared for and have made the difference they hoped.

When hosting presentations for donors, a fundraiser’s job is to demonstrate success. Nothing convinces people that their money is being used effectively more than tangible results. This is of course easier said than done when a fundraiser is tasked with conveying complex data in an accessible and engaging way. If your presentation is long-winded or caught up in the nuanced details of research, the data itself may indeed be crucial to explaining how you arrived at the breakthrough, but to avoid risking donor disengagement you must focus first and foremost on the breakthrough itself. 

The magic of keeping donors engaged and willing to continue contributing lies in an effective balance between factual reporting and understandable success stories. Exploring how an individual was affected by your research, or how their life specifically changed due to the funding, is a great way to give a face and name to donors. It provides a case-study of how your organization seeks to help other similarly struggling individuals, and can remind donors of where they would be if the organization was not able to help them due to a lack of funding.

Fundraising must carefully balance its messaging between emotional calls to action, and the factual results of their research. So be strategic with your presentations, charts, and graphs. Make the most crucial takeaways the most memorable, and don’t spend all of your time getting caught in the specifics. Broad change happens thanks to a broad base of support, and that requires building a longstanding trust in your organizations purported goals, and in proving your efficacy at achieving them.

With these struggles and tips in mind, Blast is excited to offer a new course, “How to Build Powerful Presentations”. The program is designed for professionals facing diverse audiences, looking to improve the clarity and impact of their presentations. By taking the course, participants learn how to structure a clear, powerful story. They also learn proven methods to build impactful slides that reassure and inspire audiences very time.

Upcoming Fundraiser Sessions: January 20 & January 22 2025 4pm-7pm EST.

Taking Centre Stage

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels

Writer: Craig Meerkamper

How bad is your stage fright? When making public appearances in front of a crowd, there’s a fine line between those who crave the spotlight and those who feel safer behind the scenes or in the audience. This is doubly so for those working in promotions who have the added pressure of not just representing themselves, but representing an entire brand identity. 

From video games, to industry conventions and fast food, promotional presentations are unique in the dynamic they create between presenter and audience. At most promotional presentations, the audience is self-selected. They’re there looking to get a sneak peek at what their favorite IP has planned for the future. They’re there for more than just data and sales metrics. The audience wants to be the first to hear the inside scoop. More than anything, they want to be entertained.

Thinking of promotional presentations in this way, as a show and performance, rather than a strictly corporate affair, is a crucial way to build audience engagement. Wowing an audience doesn’t mean flashy spectacle and pyrotechnics (though if there’s the budget for some flamethrowers I don’t see how it could hurt), it requires an engaging confidence in your information delivery. 

This is to say, you need to impress them. The least impressive thing is reading every word verbatim off of presentation slides, adding nothing more. When hosting a promotional presentation, you’re performing, you’re a one person show. So you really have to learn your lines. An overly constructed presentation that’s long, complex, and writing heavy is like putting your entire annotated script up on the screen. Sure, all the content is technically there, but does the audience really gain much from seeing that?

Instead, think of your presentation as your cheat sheet. You’re the star and your presentation is the backdrop. It’s there to support and bolster your performance — to give the audience something big to think about. Making a point more impactful, making a crucial statistic memorable — these are the moments you change the slide, or bring up a visual that creates a special, lasting impact.

With these struggles and tips in mind, Blast is launching an exciting new course, “How to Build Powerful Presentations.” It’s designed for professionals who want to take their presentations to the next level. By taking the course you’ll learn proven methods to tell a powerful story and design impactful slides that help your presentation leaving the audience saying “wow!”.

Upcoming Promoter Sessions: January 15 & January 16 2025 4pm-7pm EST.

How to Face the Dragon

Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

Writer: Craig Meerkamper

I’m a big fan of the mythology behind Dragon’s Den. The lone entrepreneur charges into battle against a panel of five hungry beasts, trying their best to gain the dragons’ favor (and capital) without sacrificing too much of their company in the process. Despite the more ‘fantastical’ elements of the show it’s still the image that comes to mind for many aspiring entrepreneurs who wish to see their own venture succeed. While the reality of ‘reality’ television is always questionable, there are some major lessons that entrepreneurs can take when building their own pitch presentations. 

1. Time is Money: Wasting an investors time is an incredible way to lose their interest and their funding. You have roughly five minutes to pitch, explain, and establish trust in your venture before an investor even begins considering your offer. Instead of burning valuable minutes building up your backstory, struggles, and future goals, focus on what you have to offer here and now. Lead with value and follow with context. 

2. Be engaging and clear: No one knows the nuanced details of your project like you do so it can be easy to forget that no one is where you are when it comes to your venture. It’s so to lose investors and customers explaining the niche and specific elements of your product. What may very well be an impressive stat, or innovative change to a classic design, will fall flat if not communicated clearly and concisely. Your presentation should be engaging, easily understandable, and focused on the things that really count. You can always elaborate more if an investor is interested in specifics, but if they can’t understand the broad strokes of your presentation then they can’t understand the value you want to bring.

3. Leave a lasting impact: Bad presentations are notorious for being long slogs of dull information, so learn how to defy that expectation. Add personality to your presentations by delivering it with a conversational confidence. Don’t rely on your presentation to do the pitch for you, use them strategically to deliver the most important information in an impactful and memorable way. Keep focused on success stories and ongoing plans that show you’ve planned the future of your venture and can execute it with investor support. You want your venture to be seen as a sure investment, so even if you leave without a deal, you’re sure they’ll remember your project. If your presentation feels like every other presentation the investor has seen before, then you’ve given them nothing new to consider.

With these struggles and tips in mind, Blast is launching an exciting new course “How to Build Powerful Presentations”, designed for professionals who want to improve the way they build presentations that shine in front of investors and customers. By taking the course you’ll learn proven methods to structure a clear, compelling story, build clean, impactful slides and bring it all together in a way that gives you the platform to communicate your pitch with confidence every time.

Upcoming Entrepreneur Sessions: January 6 & January 8 2025 4pm-7pm EST.

The Art of Impact

Photo by George Desipris on Pexels

Writer: Craig Meerkamper

Presentations aren’t just about sharing information; they’re about creating a connection, building trust, and inspiring action. For many professionals, particularly those offering a vision or sharing results, presentations can be the bridge between innovation and investment, concept and commitment. Yet, even the most compelling insights can lose their power if not delivered with care. The challenge lies in balancing clarity with depth, and impact with simplicity.

When we present, we’re not just informing—we’re inviting. We’re asking our audience to see what we see and believe in our vision. This requires a careful, thoughtful approach that avoids overwhelming the audience with too many details or complex data. While every insight may feel essential, too much information can obscure the core message, making it hard for audiences to walk away with a clear understanding of what truly matters.

To create impactful presentations, start by focusing on the heart of your message. What do you most want your audience to remember? Then, consider how best to convey that core idea in a way that resonates. This might mean sacrificing some data points in favor of clarity or crafting a narrative that helps your audience see themselves in the story you’re telling.

Another essential element is visual simplicity. Slides brimming with text or dense with graphics hinder comprehension. Instead, aim for slides that deliver the message cleanly, conscisely - rather than give every possible point. Each element—whether a graphic, chart, or piece of text—should reinforce the main point, not distract from it.

And never underestimate the power of sharing real life examples. At the end of the day, it’s often the stories we tell that stick. An anecdote about a customer, a case study, or an example can humanize data, giving the audience a natural way to care about your message in a way that facts and figures alone cannot.

Presentations, like any act of communication, are about building a relationship. You’re not just presenting a series of facts; you’re building trust, nurturing interest, and inspiring action.

With these struggles and tips in mind, Blast is excited to offer a new course, “How to Build Powerful Presentations”, designed for professionals looking to improve their communications skills. By taking the course, participants learn how to tell a powerful story. They also learn proven methods to build high-impact slides that deliver the most value for audiences.

Upcoming Sessions for Everyone: January 27 & January 29 2025 4pm-7pm EST.