THE BOW
The summer before my senior year of high school I worked at Barry’s Montville Pharmacy. It was my first job outside of camp counseling. Barry’s sold prescriptions and cold meds. It also sold the best gifts in town, with a full gift-wrap station behind the counter: bows, filler, custom boxes, every kind of paper. We wrapped every single purchase that asked for it.
The question is why. Why would a small-town pharmacy spend the capital on a full wrap station when most retailers were selling rolls of paper and letting customers do it themselves? Because the wrap changed the way the gift was received. The product was the same. The experience around it was different. People remembered where the gift came from.
The application to fundraising data is closer than it looks. The numbers your board sees on Thursday are the gift. The way those numbers are presented is the wrap. The information can be accurate, complete, and on time and still fail to land if the presentation does not respect how the reader processes complex information.
The discipline is older than the dashboard. Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic’s Storytelling with Data both make the same structural point: comprehension is not what the speaker delivers, comprehension is what the listener receives. A board member reading a different chart format every quarter is spending the first twenty minutes of the meeting orienting to the format instead of weighing the substance. The presentation decision is a decision quality decision.
The same applies to the way fundraising progress gets reported to a CEO, to a campaign committee, to a major donor. Same numbers, different audience, different wrap. The pipeline view a development director needs to read on Tuesday morning is not the same view a board chair needs to read on Thursday afternoon. Each one needs the bow that fits.
The bow is not decoration. The bow is the design choice that makes the work readable. Put another way: the report you spent the week building is only as useful as the format the reader can act on.
I would love to talk with you about how a few bows on your reporting layer might change the conversations you are currently having.
Originally published November 13, 2018. Lightly updated for Vivia Studios. By Erin Peshoff, Chief Curator, Vivia Studios
Erin Peshoff is the Chief Curator of Vivia Studios. She has spent thirty years inside nonprofit operations, helped raise over $100 million for institutional missions, and built Vivia around the operating discipline most strategic engagements skip.
