ProSpeak: A Not-So-Common Understanding of Fundraising and Common Sense

July 20, 2010 By Joel Zimmerman

multipage

Did you ever have an experience you really didn't understand until years later? Let me tell you about mine.

I landed my first job as a research analyst in a business research company shortly after graduating from a rigorously scientific doctoral program. My first client was a brand manager for a national food manufacturer, and my first professional assignment was a research project to explore how people reacted to alternative forms of a new Chinese fast-food product our client wanted to introduce to the marketplace.

A typically enthusiastic newbie, I jumped into this assignment with youthful exuberance and the desire to demonstrate my skills, which I was cocksure were superior to anything this client had ever experienced before. Harnessing the deep analytical skills my major professor had drilled into me for the last three years, I gathered data to explore our test consumers' attitudes, perceptions and reactions to the newly proposed fast-food prototypes. Quantitative data. Qualitative data. Data from individuals. Data from focus groups. Then, with an enormously powerful computer for that time (40 years ago), I put the numbers through multivariate analyses and skillfully cross-indexed my findings with an innovative qualitative analysis.

Results in hand, I delivered my very first presentation to a client. My boss looked on and provided a masterly perspective on consumer behavior that handsomely complemented my superb, but narrow, mastery of the data. Because this predated personal computers, I had no PowerPoint program to depend on. (How in the world did we do things without PowerPoint?!) Instead, working with handouts, computer-generated tables and flip charts, I spent two hours laying out my findings about the most promising food concept and recommendations about how to take it to market.

Our client was receptive, the meeting ended in a most cordial manner and we were all invited to dinner at a fine local restaurant.

A novice to all this and insecure in my new position, I was overwhelmed by the need for more feedback. At dinner, I leaned toward our client product manager sitting to my left and asked, "What did you think about our findings and recommendations?" "It was excellent," he responded, "although it was all just common sense."

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