Ah, how to say things and not burn bridges. Especially with someone who’s a great guy, shared a lot and bought lunch to boot. This ’tis a challenge.
Especially when there’s a great lesson to share.
Once we had these things called Chambers of Commerce and these things called Economic Development Corporations. That world always looked to me like an insular little club. But, interesting things have been happening in that world. There’s a trend to merge the two and shift the focus.
Here, instead of a focus on membership building (that insular little club), they’re going to focus on community development. They want to develop the area –schools, downtown area, etc– so it’s an attractive place for people to come. If business owners and entrepreneurs want to live here, you don’t have to do big campaigns to attract each big name business to town. They’ll come on their own. And it jives with what a lot of smart people (think The Creative Class) have been saying.
Messages
A few hours after lunch, he forwarded an email to me (and everyone else on his email list), pushing a particular candidate for President. He’s not just anybody. He runs a third of their organization and he sent the email from his official, I run a third of the organization, email address. He’s one of their public faces; a public face that just watered down the organization’s message of developing (our) community with him-bad-and-wrong/vote-my-way.
In the world of politics, they talk about message discipline. Remember what your message is and keep saying it. There’s a lot of room there for personality, for fun, for keeping it real. But, there are limits.
The limit he ran into is simple: remember all of your audience. I’ll bet that his audience includes strong believers in both candidates. One camp cheered his email. For the other camp, imagine how that email landed.
Not exactly in line with developing (our) community was it.
That’s why I don’t blog everything here, why I have other email addresses and why, when I tweet, I don’t speak as Mr. eDao. I love to ramble and spout on lots of topics. But a lot of it just plain doesn’t matter to eDao’s audience.
And, in a way, I hope he-who-bought-me-lunch reads this and that I’ve written it well enough that he gets it. Because I love their message; it’s perfect. I don’t want that message lost because it’s diluted and people stop listening.
At a very high level, what we’re up to is helping people create new possibilities and communicate them. So, spending time talking about how not to communicate makes sense.
How I (or anybody else here) will vote in November? You won’t hear it here because our message, what we’re up to, isn’t getting some guy to Washington. It’s making a difference for you and what you’re trying to do.
Even if you think some lady named Zendra, Ice Queen of the North, should be ruler of the universe.
Update
Independently, I sent him a (much more concise) email making the same point. He very graciously thanked me for the reminder. Gads… I done do’d make a difference!