What I Did On My Holidays

 

“I’ve just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. Never again.”

That joke courtesy of Tim Vine. The photo, however, is all mine – taken during my recent holiday in Mexico, where, taking my role as The Brit Abroad seriously, I managed to badly burn myself on the first day.

To the point where some of the American tourists would see me and exclaim “Ooh, red!” out loud. (This actually happened several times.) And now, back at home, I’m now peeling so much it’s like waking up in a bed of desiccated coconut.

Great place, mind – beaches (as you can see), history, weather, hotel and people all fabulous.

In fact I can only find two things to gripe about. Both of which I can (just about) contrive to link with fundraising.

Firstly: copy that over-promises. I remember liking Tesco’s ‘Every little helps’ line when I first saw it because it was nicely humble, not falsely grandiose.

Unlike the menu of my in-flight meal. Which described the roast potatoes as ‘homemade’. Come on. Aeroplane food that’s been made in somebody’s home? Reeeeeeeally? Next you’ll be claiming that the ‘Champagne’ is… Champagne.

I get stuff like that from charities all the time: I donate a fiver and they tell me what a superhero I am, saving thousands of lives. No. I’m really not. A fiver? I’m a miser.

Second: Nonstop pleas for ‘feedback’. I swear, the world has gone feedback mad. Some days it’s hard to do anything without being asked to comprehensively survey your experience afterwards.

At the resort, whichever of the 10 restaurants you went to, your after-dinner coffee was accompanied by a portable touchscreen computer housed in a wooden box.

And you were asked to use it to rate your meal. About 50 multiple choice questions. No exaggeration: 50. Covering things like the crockery, the lighting, the choice of wines, the waiter’s knowledge of the wines, the cut of his trousers, the width of his smile.

The first night it was a bit surreal. By the third night it was a bloody chore. By the fourth we were just leaving the tip on the table and running for it when no-one was looking, before the feedback computer arrived.

Being a proper curmudgeon, I can subdivide this feedback gripe:

1. Why should I? I’ve paid for the service, with money. I shouldn’t have to pay you with my time too, filling out a questionnaire of bizarrely-chosen, strangely-phrased questions. Not unless you’re giving me a 20% discount.

2. What are you really going to do with my feedback? Sod all, I’m guessing. If I rate the lighting as ‘poor’, are you really going to buy bigger table candles?

In fundraising there’s the same challenge: it’s all very well running a survey and asking lots of questions, but I can’t remember the last time a charity told me the results afterwards, or what they were going to do as a consequence of the feedback they’d gathered.

Yet if they did, I’d feel a lot closer to the cause. A lot more like I really was part of the charity, rather than just a cash machine.

3. Strange as it may sound, you can’t always discover what customers want by asking them. They often don’t know. For example, do you think that’s how Apple came up with the iPhone? They asked – and thousands of people said, “What I want is a phone without any buttons, so it’s harder to type. One that looks good, even if it’s at the expense of phone signal. Preferably one I can play ‘Angry Birds’ on”?

No, of course not. People didn’t know that was what they wanted until Apple came up with it. But now, every phone manufacturer in the world has a touchscreen phone.

Similarly in fundraising – you won’t come up with anything properly game-changing by simply asking your audience to feedback on what’s gone before. As the saying goes, “You can’t leap a chasm in two jumps”.

Anyway: Mexico ­– if you’ve never been, I recommend it. In fact, I’d give it an ‘excellent’ on the feedback form.