Sometimes your client or potential client needs to fail before you can help him. That was a difficult lesson for me to learn, but has proven to be an important one. And if you’re going to be successful in the service industry, you better learn this one, and fast. Earlier in my career as a consultant, I would try to argue and convince my clients of a course of action that I thought was best for them. Most of the time my advice became strategy or a tool that eventually brought results. But from time to time I encountered, and still do to this day, people who believe they know more than I do and decide that their solution is preferable to mine. As a consultant, this know-it-all attitude has always puzzled me. After all, if you know the “what” and “how,” why hire me in the first place? In…

I recently attended a fundraiser where the opening video was so poorly produced that instead of help the cause, I believe it actually hurt it. The excuse was a familiar one, “it’s about the stories and not the production,” was the reply to my text on how bad the video was. The truth is that because of the poor production, great stories were reduced to bad stories that made no sense.  A bad video will undermine an event and the professionalism and competence of any organization and its leaders. Whether you’re using a volunteer, a staff member or even a paid professional, here’s what to look for in a fund raising video: Is this image clear enough to look good on a projection screen? You’d be surprised how poorly produced videos that look OK on computer monitors translate terribly to a projection screen. If a video looks grainy and dark…

I was recently reminded of a failed social media campaign that started with a lot of promise but went nowhere. For all practical purposes the campaign is still going because there are “posts” being created everyday. As I reflect what went wrong, here’s my assessment: Blog content is never fresh. It is re purposed from old material. It’s edited, sanitized and packaged but it lacks soul and relevance. There are no personal posts in the blog, twitter or Facebook. And the reason why there are no personal posts is because the author delegated his entire campaign to someone else. The few people who began following early on quickly figured that the author was not the one posting and stopped following. Readers were ignored. Early on when people commented on posts, they were ignored. So they stop commenting, and eventually reading it. Posts are monologues. There are no questions, no interactivity,…