Pro Creation: recreating creating

There’s a good chance you’ve been on the receiving end of a creative presentation. Where someone shows you the ideas they’ve come up with.

Oh, it’s exciting. Someone with a large collection of felt-tips has spent the past few weeks beavering away in secret, tongue stuck out the side of their mouth as they furiously scribble down the genius in their head.

Then they’re in the spray booth, mounting all the concepts onto board to make them look dead posh and proper.

They turn up at your office with the concepts in a giant black portfolio bag that’s annoyed everyone on the Tube, but they refuse to show you what’s inside until they’ve spent at least half an hour building it up to a fevered crescendo.

Then, when you can bear it no longer – ta da! – they lift out the first board (with its back to you) and turn it round with a dramatic flourish.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how creative types present their ideas.

I should know, I’ve been one of those people for many years. I was even thinking of buying my own dry ice machine, to make the ‘reveal’ even more theatrical.

But there’s a problem.

It might make for an entertaining 90 minutes, but it’s not necessarily the best way to develop concepts.

So at Tangible, we’ve developed an alternative method which our clients can choose if they wish. We call it Pro Creation.

More choice, more input, more polish

It’s a really simple idea. Instead of working up three ideas fully and presenting them as a big surprise to our client, we show four ideas at an earlier stage, with a description of how each could develop.

That way, the client gets to see more ideas, and can give us their input. They choose the two concepts they want to see developed, and we go away and work those up fully and in accordance with their input, before re-presenting them.

For example

Say we’re creating a mini campaign ­– email, mailing and microsite.

We’d show four ‘adcepts’ with a lead headline and image, plus a written rationale for each and a description of how the idea would track through each element.

We’d discuss them with the client, who’d give us their input to help shape the one or two concepts they chose to see fully developed.

It’s a simple little innovation. And it costs no more than the traditional way of creating concepts.

But it means we spend less time working on ideas that aren’t right, and more on really polishing the strongest concepts to create the most effective, exciting work.

Several of our charity clients are using Pro Creation with us and they already prefer it to the old-fashioned method.

Still might get that dry ice machine, mind.

The whole is less than the sum of its parts

I bought a nice bottle of red a couple of months ago.

First time that had ever happened. First time I’d ever bought a bottle of wine from a shop and been delighted with my purchase.

In fact after many years of failure, I was starting to lose faith in my patented Wine Selector System (A x B - C = How Good The Wine Is, where A is the price, B is how funky the label is and C is minus 20% if it’s a screwtop).

But then, as I say, success.

I remember the wine well: a Grenache Shiraz by Rosemount (I had given it bonus points, D, because of the way the bottle became square at the base).

And then, by jingo, it happened again.

A week later (I’m not an alcoholic) I went and bought a different bottle of wine. And that was delicious too! A few days later (hey, it was for friends, not me) I bought a third bottle. Different again, delectable again!

I’d cracked it. Somehow, I’d discovered the skills of an expert sommelier, able to divine a top tipple better than Simon Cowell can sniff out bland boy bands.

It was fantastic, this sudden ability to discern fine wine from cheap plonk.

But at the weekend, after yet another success, the truth dawned on me.

I haven’t gained the ability to glance at a supermarket shelf and tell good bottle from bad at all. My abilities haven’t changed – my palate has.

All of a sudden, I simply like wine. All of it. Whether it’s Chateauneuf Du Pape or Blue Nun. Communion wine, Le Piat D’or, Lambrusco – I’ll gargle it all and declare I can taste a subtle hint of British strawberries, a whiff of fresh peat and just a soupcon of shoe leather.

I’d assumed I was making better choices, but in truth, my gob’s just got less fussy.

Now, with the barest hint of a contrived link, I’ve been thinking about something else people sometimes make a poor assumption about. Integrated campaigns.

The poor assumption being that it’s always better to integrate different communications.

But... what’s the point of an integrated campaign?

I would suggest that the reason to integrate different media communications is so the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. So that, for instance, someone sees your TV ad and your press ad and your email and then gets your mailpack – and as a result of getting your message four times, responds.

Which sounds both logical and wonderful. And if that’s your audience’s experience, then you’ve definitely got a campaign. And it should certainly be integrated.

But… what if that’s not their experience?

What if 80% of the people getting your mailing haven’t seen the email? And 95% have never – and will never – see your TV ad? Is it still a campaign? Should those three different communications still be ‘integrated’?

Personally, I don’t think so. At least, not automatically, which seems to be the assumption nowadays.

I think charities sometimes fall into the trap of thinking what they’re doing is a campaign, when actually it’s just a bunch of media that happen to be running at the same time. If you haven’t got the spend of NSPCC launching ‘Full Stop’ then the chances are most of your audience won’t see a campaign. Most will just see one medium.

And if they’re just seeing your communication in one medium, then I think that medium should play to its strengths. Some of which you might have had to forego if you were making everything integrated – which I’ve seen happen lots of times. You have a great idea that works for direct mail, but because it only works in that medium, you can’t use it, because “It wouldn’t be integrated with the poster campaign”. The poster campaign that approximately 0.001% of your mailing audience will see. 

So I’d never automatically assume integration is good.

If the figures suggest most of your audience won’t see more than one or two ‘impressions’ then it may not be worth bothering with. Because you’ll do something which looks integrated to you, when you’ve got the work spread out on the board room table, but which won’t be seen like that by the audience. 

Yet because your ‘integrated campaign’ has forced all the different media to look and sound alike, ignoring their individual strengths, each will perform individually worse than they would have done if they’d been able to go their own way (within the confines of the overall proposition and your brand).

Which leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. Unlike, say, my wine choices.

Right, I’ve got a large glass of Babycham with my name on it.

Sunday's child

I’m surprised to learn that Myleene Klass doesn’t follow my blog.

Or – more likely – she’s an avid fan, but just disagreed with my notion that ‘Hero’ would be a good name to give a boy, but not a girl.

Because that’s what she’s gone and done.

Our beautiful little girl (the much more sensibly named Daisy Boo) was born at 5 to midnight, Sunday 27th. Just in time for the census, as people keep telling me.

Both sets of grandparents are of course delighted.

My mum: ‘I told your auntie Floss in Australia that you’ve called her Daisy Boo, because making up names is all the rage over there. But even she hadn’t heard that one before.’

Caroline’s mum, visiting and giving us a lovely bouquet of flowers: ‘You can keep the vase too.’

Caroline’s dad: ‘It’s an old Branston Pickle jar.’

Anyway, on the Friday night before, Caroline was three days overdue. So I went to get a curry. Ok, it may be an old wives’ tale that a curry can help bring on labour, but hey, any excuse not to cook.

The man behind the counter asked me if I’d ever been there before.

‘You ask me that every single time’, I replied, a bit peeved. ‘Most recently, two weeks ago’.

Clearly I don’t make much of an impression.

Anyway, he asked me what I did for a living. I said I do a lot of work for charity but I don’t like to talk about it.

And he told me about his own charity work. After the Pakistan floods, he and his staff worked extra shifts for nothing, and donated the profits to the appeal. He also asked every customer if he could add £1 to their bill and donate that to the appeal too.

He was thinking about doing the same for people affected by the Japanese tsunami (look at me, I’ve worked in fundraising so long I know better than to use the word ‘victim’).

Anyway, I was very impressed. I work for some amazing charities who do fantastic work. But the stuff I do is really time-consuming. Involves dozens of people. Gazillions of ‘sign-offs’. And takes months to complete.

But my local curry shop owner hadn’t bothered with any of that.

He didn’t need a PowerPoint presentation. Or a social media strategy. Or 17 rounds of amends.

He just got on with it. A spoonful of compassion. A bucketful of action.

He reminded me how simple it can be.

And how easy it can be too – to get good people to support a good cause, if you don’t let your own briefings and bureaucracy and bullshit get in the way.

Or maybe not. Maybe I’m just tired and emotional at the birth of my first child.

I mean, look at little Daisy Boo. She’s gorgeous!

What's in a name?

I’ve been blogging neglectful recently.

Partly because I’m frantically trying get two books finished and ready for publishing before I become a dad in about eight weeks. (Getting permission from some clients to reproduce copy I BLOODY WROTE FOR THEM is proving particularly troublesome.)

But mainly because all my brainpower (what there is of it) has been going into the gargantuan task of Finding The Perfect Baby Name.

My first choice, if we have a boy, was Thor.

But that suggestion was less welcome than Richard Hammond at a Mexican restaurant.

In fact, according to my girlfriend, all my preferred choices sound like ‘something you’d call a dog’.

It’s tricky, Finding The Perfect Baby Name. You don’t want anything too esoteric (apparently). Because you don’t want your child being stared at by disbelieving faces all their life. “Your name’s… Crankshaft?”

Nor do you want a name that they have to spell out all the time. R Fiennes must have had a fine old time growing up. “Err, yeah, it’s it’s pronounced ‘Rafe’. But it’s spelled… Ralph.”

If it’s a girl, we did like ‘Sydney’. But if you hear ‘Sydney Atkinson’ is on their way, are you expecting a boy or a girl to show up?

And you don’t want to go the other way and pick something too humdrum. In fact, my girlfriend made it very clear we didn’t want a name as unremittingly-dull as ‘Ian’, for instance. When she was talking to my parents.

Plus there are all the perfectly-decent names you might like, before someone says “Oh no, you can’t call it Charlotte. I knew a Charlotte. She was a bitch.”

We’ve even had conversations along the lines of “Yes, but what if our child isn’t cool enough to be an ‘Ethan’?”

I wonder if charities have the same trouble finding the right name.

The Red Cross is a good name; has been since 1870. But it can’t be ideal that they have to be known as The Red Crescent in some countries. Especially as, despite them not being political or religious in any way, I once saw a BBC newsreader refer to “The Red Crescent, the Muslim arm of The Red Cross”. Which would have horrified them.

And what if you’re a new charity? Have all the good names gone?

After all, when John Grooms and The Shaftesbury Society merged a few years ago, they decided to call themselves Livability. It’s not even a word. Sounds more like a bad tag-line for a vitamin ad campaign. ‘Now with added Livability’.

But then again, Help for Heroes is a fairly new kid on the charity block – and they’ve got a fabulous name. Simple, clear and with a bit of emotion to it. And ‘Heroes’ is a great word to own.

Hey, Hero, there’s a possible name for a child. Not for a girl obviously.

That would be silly.

The Future's Bright. The Future's Black And White.

My girlfriend got me a Kindle for Christmas. Although I’m not sure she knows what it’s for, since she also bought me a stack of paperbacks.

But the Kindle is great – as everyone everywhere has already pointed out, it’s not like reading on a traditional, backlit screen. But it’s not like reading a book either. In some ways, it’s nicer.

You don’t have to hold it open against a protesting, perfect-bound spine. You don’t need to remember your page number or fold over a corner (in fact I believe they recommend not folding the corner of your Kindle over). And you can increase the typesize at the touch of a button.

But the reasons I wanted a Kindle were benefits they don’t even advertise.

After all, the TV ad for the Kindle is of a girl reading hers on some exotic, sun-kissed beach. I’m about to become a dad for the first time – it’ll be years before I see another exotic beach.

No, I wanted a Kindle because of an utterly self-centred benefit that occurred to me:

I’ll never have to lend anyone a book ever again!

Actually I don’t mind lending people books. I’d just like them back. Which often doesn’t happen.

I must have lost dozens of books that way. And you can either go through the social embarrassment of every so often wimpily saying, “So… how are you getting on with that book I lent you… eight years ago?” Or you can just not mention it at all, and just think of that person as A GODDAMN THIEF WHO STOLE YOUR PROPERTY.

Anyway. There was a second, related benefit I wanted a Kindle for. Not to read novels on (again, as they do in the ads). But instead, to store all of my reference books on. All my non-fiction books on fundraising, advertising, marketing, creativity, writing, design etc etc. It struck me that having all that reference material brought together on something weighing less than a paperback would be A Good Thing.

While I’m doing Amazon’s job for them, there are three more handy benefits they don’t shout about.

1. You can lend books with it. You can send your electronic copy from your Kindle to someone else’s, for 14 days. Then it comes back to you, without you ever having to drop unsubtle hints about getting it back.

2. You can email documents to your Kindle to read them. Really handy when you don’t want to be fighting with six different confidential printouts on a train.

3. You can surf the internet on it. Ok, it’s not in colour, but it’s still handy – yet it doesn’t feature in Amazon’s ads, and it’s accessed from a folder called ‘Experimental’. But I lay in bed on Boxing Day following the Guardian Online’s coverage of the fourth Ashes test from my Kindle and it was great. (It helped that we marmalised them, obviously.)

So. As I’ve clearly proved: modern advertising is rubbish. If charities conveyed the need and solution of their cause as weakly as those ads promote the Kindle, they’d never raise a penny.

And no wonder that when I log onto Amazon the homepage says, “Thank you for making Kindle number one.” They should be thanking me. I had to discover half the benefits for myself.

Less is more

Cheltenham is posh. Certainly posher than Posh (who’s from Essex).

In fact, Cheltenham’s so posh, it’s surprising it’s taken upmarket kitchen nik nak seller Lakeland so long to set up shop here. But they just have – and the other day I had a browse in the forlorn hope of finding Christmas present inspiration.

I didn’t get any presents. But I did get myself a folding chopping board.

It’s made of some kind of tough plastic that has sides which can fold up. So when you’ve chopped your organic, specially-selected, ethically-sourced, sun-dried, on-the-vine apricots (it is Cheltenham), you can just pour them straight into your Le Creuset tagine.

No more holding the chopping board with one hand, sweeping across it with your £150 Tojiro chef’s knife in the other and watching half the apricots go in the tagine and half all over the Aga.

Genius. In fact, it’s one of those things that make you say, “Why has no-one thought of it before?”

I heard another of those “genius / why hasn’t it been done before” moments last week.

Liz, our Data Intelligence Manager (DIM seems a cruel acronym), was demonstrating a rather brilliant new Tangible innovation. In as unpromising an area as charity doordrop targeting.

Basically, it’s a clever way of getting more income and a higher response rate from your doordrop campaigns.

By... wait for it... asking people for less.

Ok, not always less, sometimes more. It depends. Let me explain.

As we all know, doordrop targeting is usually done on the basis of finding areas that have a high proportion of ‘lookalikes’. People whose profile – according to ACORN or Mosaic – is like that of your existing supporters.

So you find those areas, and give them a doordrop with a cash ask. Prompt values of £15, £20 and £25 for example.

What we’ve done is take it a stage further, with an innovation called RAISER.

I know, catchy. Stands for ‘Right Ask In, See Enhanced Returns’.

In essence, RAISER overlays the giving history of the charity’s existing supporters in that doordrop area. Which might tell you, for instance, that existing supporters in a certain area give an average of £11.

So with hindsight, it seems a bit silly to send them a doordrop where the minimum prompt value is higher than the average gift of existing supporters in that area.

Thanks to a heads up from RAISER, we can correct that.

For example, a recent campaign Tangible ran did have areas where the average donation was £11.

To recruit new supporters in that area, we tested the standard doordrop (with the £15, £20 and £25 prompts) against the RAISER-inspired version (with lower prompts of £10, £15 and £20).

The RAISER version got 50% better response. Giving us many more donors who we can now contact again and begin a tailored stewardship programme that maximises their engagement, loyalty and value.

And even though those donors were giving a lower average amount, the RAISER version got 20% more income too. What’s more, as well as doordrops, you can use the same technique on cold mailings and even on regionalised inserts.

So: 20% more income and 50% more supporters. Like I said: genius. And why hasn’t anyone done it before?

And there you have it. A folding chopping board and RAISER. No wonder Madonna sent her child to Cheltenham to learn.

Right, I’m off to check on the tagine. Spills are a bugger to scrape off the cast iron of an Aga Rangemaster.

Bloody students

“I don’t like any of your ideas,” I told a roomful of advertising students on Monday.

“And I certainly wouldn’t show any of them to a client.”

Oh yes, I’m a tough macho no-nonsense badass from the planet Tellitlikeitis.

Didn’t manage to make any of them cry though. Just sulk. Which, since they were teenagers, was hardly much of an achievement.

Let me explain: agency founder Nick Thomas and I, in our role as creative gurus, help out with the local university’s advertising degree (him more than me).

And we’d given the new batch of students a charity brief to crack – a live brief we’re working on for an integrated campaign across TV, press and online.

It was a tough brief, in truth. And the students had made a good attempt at it, with some interesting, imaginative stuff that was nicely integrated, neatly scamped and very confidently presented (though often really badly spelled).

But I didn’t think any of their ideas were right because they’d all gone down the route of ‘borrowed interest’.

Which means that instead of work featuring human beings in need of support from the charity, I got storyboards featuring squirrels. Rugby players. Magic bottles of cure-all medicine. Coin-operated satnavs. Flocks of birds in synchronised flight. And Monopoly.

Not one of them had portrayed the world, the cause or the people as they really were.

Borrowed interest can work well, of course – when your audience has no idea what your product or service is, or its benefits, an analogy can be a useful way to show them "Our X which you don’t know is like this Y which you do know".

But clumsily done (as it so often is), borrowed interest suggests that, “We couldn’t find anything interesting to say about our own product / service, so we thought we’d show you this instead.”

For an example of borrowed interest in action, there’s the new Kronenbourg TV ad.

They’ve got ol’ Lemmy Motorhead at the bar singing The Ace of Spades in a slow, ballady re-imagining. With the endline ‘Slow the pace’.

Seems more like a concept for Guinness (who’ve made a virtue of the slowness it takes to pour their pint). Maybe Guinness turned the idea down, so they sold it to Kronenbourg instead.

Also seems like a strange shift in positioning for French fizzy lager. Are the French known for ‘slowing the pace’? Apart from when they’re on strike, obviously?

But, regardless of whether it’s good brand positioning, this kind of borrowed interest seems to work ok for a lager. There’s only so much you can go on about its ingredients after all. And very little else you can say, what with the alcohol advertising rules being what they are.

But generally, if someone shows you a concept that’s based on borrowed interest, ask yourself if that’s really the best way to bring the proposition to life. Or if actually, we should just dig a bit deeper and find what’s compelling in your actual product / service.

Anyway, students: not all of them are sulky of course. In fact, we’ve just taken on a graduate team from the university as trainee copywriter and art director. I’ll be giving them the ‘borrowed interest’ sermon on day one.

In my macho badass way, obviously.

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.

The Balinese Guide To Marketing

This time next week I’ll be in Mehico. Can’t wait.

Last time I went long haul was to Bali – which as well as great surf and sun had a diving shop called ‘Scuba Dooby Doo’. (That’s the kind of copy genius I aspire to.)

Bali has great salesmen too. Hundreds of them. You can’t go more than twenty seconds – thirty if you dawdle – without someone trying to sell you something.

And they’re bloody good at it. Hardly surprising, I suppose – after all, they’re all selling the same tat to the same people, so they need to be brilliant to survive. Plus, since they try their sales technique on about 200 people a day, they’ve plenty of opportunity to hone their skills.

So, you want to be a results-driven marketeer? Follow the Bali shopkeepers’ lead:

1. Smile. That’s how, in ‘AIDA’ terms, they get your attention. With a 100 megawatt megasmile using teeth unstained by Costa extra shot cappuccinos.

In fact, everyone’s so smiley, it’s a culture shock when you arrive back in a grey and drizzling Heathrow several weeks later. In Bali you get so used to smiling at strangers, you forget that’s the kind of behaviour that gets you arrested / assaulted in England.

Anyway: smiling. Very effective. Does your marketing begin by making your prospect smile? Now that I think of it, some of my favourite ads of recent months (like the Old Spice ‘The man your man could smell like’) do exactly that.

2. Relationship building. You walk past the same place more than once and they’ll recognise you. Say hello. Ask you where you’re from, how long you’re here for, where you’re planning on going. There’s no hard sell either, it’s always just, ‘Oh please, just have a look around, take your time, no problem’.

They put more effort into establishing a little rapport with their customers in five minutes than many brands do in five years.

3. Exclusivity. Like I said, everyone’s selling the same stuff. Yet the number of times I showed interest in something, only for it to turn out I’d made a very astute choice, picking something particularly fine and rare (therefore costing a little bit more) was extraordinary.

So I’m flattered to have made a good decision. And I don’t want to miss out on something exclusive.

4. Action. Nothing has a price on it. Because no price is fixed. Bartering is part of the whole experience. Again, there’s headology at work. Once you’ve started haggling, you don’t want to miss out (like people who are determined to win an eBay bidding war, and end up paying over the odds).

Plus, when you do agree a price, you feel like you got a bargain. Even though the price was simply inflated in the first place so they could then discount it (a bit like a DFS sofa sale).

5. Recommendation. Shopkeepers recommend restaurants, restaurants recommend shops or trip organisers. And it’s amazing how a testimonial of any kind – even one from a stranger who you suspect is getting a back-hander from the place they send you to – still convinces.

Then you get a free aperitif with your meal when you mention the shopkeeper’s name and you really do feel special and like you’ve found a really good place. So you spend twice as much.

6. Perseverance. Oh. My. God. Sit on the wrong part of the beach and you’ll be mobbed by people selling sunglasses or slices of melon or massages. They don’t give up easily. And if you’re seen showing interest in a pair of ‘Ray Bun’ sunglasses, every seller within 200 yards will descend to show you their Prarda, Guchi or Ohkley sunglasses.

Always polite, always smiley: but when it comes to the crunch they do push for that sale.

So there you go: six simple selling tips from the streets of Bali.

Of course, the final lesson I learned was that while bead bracelets might look ok on a man when you’ve got a tan and you’re on a beach in Bali, those same bracelets make you look like a right dick if you keep them on when you’re back in England.

Although I’m sure that won’t be the case with the ‘I love Cancun’ sombrero I’m bound to pick up in Mexico.

Fundraising's big drips

 
Couple of lunchtimes ago, I got soaked. My thin summer shirt clinging to me like an orphaned monkey.

In the morning I’d had a look at Metcheck, the online weather forecast. No rain for the whole week it said. Stupid thing.

When I got back to my computer, water dripping off the end of my nose and onto the keyboard, I had another look at Metcheck.

Cheltenham 2pm: 0.0mm rain. Stupid thing.

Not only couldn’t it get the future weather right, it couldn’t even get the current weather right. My shirt was a more accurate barometer than all the sophisticated trickery of Metcheck.

So you can’t always rely on computer expertise. How about human expertise?

Well, to choose a subject even more miserable than the weather, look at the global recession. Before, during and after, we turned to the brightest and best economists to tell us what was going on.

And they told us. Wrongly. In fact they made woefully inaccurate predictions over and over again. A child playing with alphabetti spaghetti would have made more sense.

Not that their blunders stopped the economists. They didn’t throw their hands up in the air and say, ‘To be honest, we haven’t a scooby’.

No, they just carried on getting it wrong. Job losses, economy shrinkage, size of debt, speed of recovery, interest rates, changes in stock markets ­– everything they could put a number to, they did. The wrong number.

In fact, there’s plenty of hard scientific evidence showing that experts in any field can make bad decisions precisely because they’re experts. Or rather, because being expert makes them over-confident in their own judgement.

You’ve probably seen it yourself: people who get to a level of experience and expertise, they really believe they know it all.

They stop learning. They stop questioning. Because they’ve seen it all, done it all.

But in rapidly-changing areas like marketing, communications and fundraising, that’s a big mistake.

Of course, the benefit of calling upon an expert ­– someone who’s spent many years specialising in their field ­– should be that they know more than you about that subject.

I, for example, probably know more about charity copywriting than you do. Because I’ve spent the last 15 years working at it, learning as much as I can about it, striving to get better and better at it.

Whereas you, presumably, have done something far more interesting with your time.

But the best experts are those who know they don’t know everything.

People who are willing to take a leap of faith and try something new. To challenge conventional wisdom once in a while. Because they’re the people who make the big breakthroughs and, once in a while, create new wisdom.

Don’t rely on the ones who always think they know best, whose views are utterly entrenched and who aren’t willing to try something new.

Or you’re likely to get drenched.