I’m not on Twitter, and I don’t frequent the message boards,
so when I came across this acronym, I had to research its meaning: TLDR.
Too Long; Didn’t Read. The
snarkiness all but oozes off the page.
Oh, you can apply it to War and
Peace, or any impassioned response to someone’s offhand social comment—but
where it becomes relevant to research is in respect to your audience: that
fundraising administrator, your fellow researcher, that gift officer for whom
you’re synthesizing data on a prospective donor and composing it into a
profile, often with a recommended strategy.
You rise to the challenge du jour,
finding obscure nuggets and including even a photo of their kitchen sink off
Instagram—only to encounter a yawn and a blazing “TLDR.” If a researcher fails in the forest, does
anyone hear the sound—of frustration?
It’s easy to blame the recipient. But when a researcher does, how different is it
from the chef who armors up into defensive mode when Gordon Ramsey tells him
his foie gras is salty, or the poor
tone-deaf souls (bless their hearts) who can’t understand why they can’t hope
to compete as the next Peoria Idol? You’ve
got to consider your audience—and each one is different. You have to research them first, in a sense—use your instincts, ask their colleagues and
subordinates, or simply ask them: What do you want?
Some gift officers wear it like a badge of honor: “I don’t need research. I suss out the deets myself and then tell YOU
what I’ve found. I ain’t afraid o’ no
ghosts, or cold calling billionaires.
Have I told you about the seven-figure gift I got from Montgomery
Burns? I’m a tightrope walker, and for
my part, researchers are little more than archivists, or stenographers.” For these characters, the most they might
ever need is basic contact information and whether or not there’s a dragon in
the moat.
At the other end of the spectrum: Needy Nellie.
“I simply MUST know everything! Dogs
or cats? Bagels or biscuits? Where do they vacation? Are they on Twitter? Heelllp meee!” It’s easy to scoff at this kind of
approach—except when there’s a method to what appears random madness. One of my former development colleagues kept
a calendar listing all his prospects’ birthdays, and sent a hand-written card
to every one, every year. That was a strategy,
as well as just being a Decent Human Being.
If you have a Needy Nelson who asks for shoe sizes and blood types, it’s
incumbent upon you to find out if that type of trivia is being put to good use
or merely being used as a crutch.
Information control is an art, and a researcher should not be treated as
a vending machine or a jukebox.
So it’s a no-brainer that you may have to customize your
profiles for each of your constituencies—but does that mean you should
similarly adjust your research logic for each:
cursory glances for the tightrope walkers, encyclopedic thoroughness for
the completists? Not necessarily. The old cliché is right: Knowledge IS
power. You were hired to be the research
professional, so don’t let an end-user get all up in your grill and mess with
your routine. Find out what they want,
and give just that to them. They don’t really want to know how sausage is
made; they just want it on their plates.
It’s up to you to know if your regular customer wants links, patties, or
boudin.
And there are times when you have to include information, at
the risk of a TLDR, more or less in self-defense. I once had a time-sensitive request for
simple information about our commencement speaker, a columnist for a newspaper
in New York (they didn’t want to ask
him; how gauche!): What synagogue in NYC
did he attend? I found out that not only
did he not attend a Big Apple congregation, he didn’t live there either
(they have trains and planes between there and DC; imagine that!). I could have merely announced the name of his
DC synagogue and left it at that; that was, in truth, all I’d been asked
for. But I made a point to include links
to two recent articles citing his membership in that congregation. Turned out that the college chaplain was the
one who had suggested the New York residency; I had no idea I was in a cage
match with a man of the cloth! So—sorry,
padre—but here’s the facts, and I was glad to have supported them by going just
a bit beyond where common sense might have suggested stopping. Know your audience and compose accordingly,
but if you err, do so on the side of excess, and TLDRs be damned.
Tim Dempsey,
Director-at-Large, APRA MidSouth
At-large@apramidsouth.org
