[AI-assisted for speed.]
No one in the history of time has ever given money to a deck. Do not write one. Do not ask for one. Resist the urge. I can’t count the number of times I’ve watched people make this mistake.
When you ask a fundraiser for a deck, you’re not helping the fundraiser, you’re not helping the work—you’re just helping yourself feel safe. You’re asking for something to hold instead of something to feel. The deck soothes your anxiety about being wrong, about wasting time, about risking reputation. It lets you believe the process is rational when, in truth, it’s relational. It’s a security blanket. A stuffed animal. And the moment you ask for it, the relationship stops moving.
The Myth of the Rational Funder
The deck exists to protect a myth: that people give because they’ve been convinced by evidence, analysis, or argument. They don’t.
Every “yes” comes from something more human. They like the person they’re talking to. They like what it says about them to be part of the work. They like the community and the energy that surrounds it. And they’re drawn to the larger purpose—the sense of striving toward something that matters.
Those moments of connection and shared ambition are what make people move. A deck can summarize logic but not the feeling of a quest undertaken together.
You’re Wrong About the Deck
The only time a deck works is when you already agree with its author. You’ve been carrying the same idea, half-formed, and find your own reflection staring back at you. That isn’t persuasion. It’s recognition.
Every other time, the deck fails—because decks don’t create belief; they only mirror it. And the odds of that alignment—the exact overlap of tone, language, and worldview—are about as good as roulette.
The obsession with decks is an infection from the venture-capital world, where this logic actually works. Investors already know what they want. The deck is a filter, a way to see who fits their thesis and who doesn’t.
That logic fails in philanthropy. We’re working on harder problems—human, structural, moral. The answers don’t exist yet. They have to be discovered together. Importing venture culture here doesn’t make philanthropy more disciplined; it makes it smaller.
How It Kills the Work
A deck doesn’t just slow momentum—it breaks the system in a dozen ways at once.
Premature Certainty
A deck demands that everything be fixed and final before the right people have even touched it. It freezes variables that should still be in motion. It locks the funder out of co-authorship and turns a live, relational process into a static proposal. You may agree with nine out of ten ideas, but the tenth one—a word, a frame, a policy detail—breaks the spell. You don’t feel invited to edit; you just quietly opt out. That’s the first way decks fail: they close the door before the relationship begins.
Judgment Over Discovery
A deck replaces exploration with evaluation. It moves the posture from let’s figure it out together to prove it to me. Collaboration becomes a test. Curiosity becomes compliance. Instead of sharing an evolving vision, the fundraiser performs legibility—showing they can fit into a predetermined mold rather than building something new with you.
Fixed Voice, Lost Translation
In conversation, good fundraisers translate across worlds. They can speak activist to an activist, technocrat to a technocrat, humanitarian to a humanitarian. They adjust language, rhythm, and metaphor to create alignment. A deck can’t do that. It’s frozen in a single register, bound to one voice. A technical deck alienates an organizer. A moral deck bores an investor. The tone mismatch becomes the reason to disengage instead of the beginning of a deeper exchange.
False Signals and Internal Theater
Inside organizations, decks generate false confidence. They feel like progress: meetings, revisions, CEO reviews, design polish. In reality, it’s rehearsal. The team mistakes internal consensus for external validation. Weeks become months of readiness theater. By the time the deck is beautiful, the idea is brittle—and no one has been fundraising. Urgency turns into polish. Momentum turns into meetings. What should have been fieldwork becomes formatting.
Too Much Surface Area for Critique
A deck exposes everything at once—every plan, every number, every idea—before there’s any trust or pacing. It doesn’t let exploration unfold over time or adapt to what’s resonating in the moment. The fundraiser can’t remix, reorder, or adjust at each step; they’re suddenly responsible for being right about everything, all at once.
That overexposure creates too many chances to be wrong and too little space to discover alignment. The conversation stops moving because the work has already been flattened and fixed on the screen.
Broken Rhythm
Fundraising depends on rhythm—short calls, quick follow-ups, real-time calibration. A deck destroys that cadence. Everything slows down while people “get around to reading.” It interrupts the natural tempo of relationship-building and replaces it with a silent waiting game. Momentum dies while the inbox fills.
What It Does to You
When you step back, the pattern is always the same. The deck shifts the center of gravity away from people and toward paperwork. It removes the space where alignment is built—the room for fundraisers to wield their craft, to translate energy into shared purpose, to find the point where two convictions meet. It denies the funder the chance to be persuaded to let themselves do what they already want to do.
And when you take that deck to your colleagues, you find yourself in the same trap as the fundraiser—defending slides instead of championing an idea. The deck will fail you, too.
The Referral Trap
Here’s how it usually goes. You meet someone extraordinary—a founder, an organizer, a human being who reminds you why this work matters. You think of a friend who might care, someone with means or influence. You want to connect them, but you also want to stay safe. You don’t want to look foolish if it goes nowhere. So you ask for a deck.
A few days later, you send an email: “Hey Bob, met someone interesting last night. It’s up your alley. Deck attached. Let me know if you want an intro.” And that’s it. You’ve replaced the possibility of seeding a meaningful connection with an email attachment.
Bob opens it because it’s from you. He sees an attachment and recognizes what it is immediately: a sales email. Worse, a sales email that’s assigned him unsolicited homework. He scans a few slides and realizes the email isn’t written to him as a person—it’s written to his bank account. It’s polite, professional, and completely dead. It positions him as the evaluator, the decision-maker, the buyer. It hands him all the power and turns you into a supplicant.
He doesn’t want to say no, doesn’t want to disappoint, but also doesn’t want to engage in a transactional exchange with a friend. Maybe he’s just really busy and doesn’t have time. So he lets it sit.
When the fundraiser checks in a week later–“How’s it going with Bob?“–you tell them you shared it with Bob and haven’t heard back, so he must not be interested.
But that’s not what happened. What happened is that you replaced your relationship with a transaction. You asked Bob to do homework. You turned a spark into a task. And now you’re embarrassed. You feel exposed. You took a risk on someone you admired and it didn’t go anywhere. You quietly decide not to do that again.
The truth is, the fundraiser would have been better off approaching Bob directly. They know how to build excitement, how to listen, how to frame the work. That’s their craft.
If you really believe in the work, spend your social capital. Write the kind of note that carries weight: “Bob, I met someone extraordinary. Their analysis is the sharpest I’ve seen in years. It would mean a lot to me, personally, if you took time to connect with them over coffee.”
That’s how successful work begins—through conviction, not caution. But none of that can happen if you ask for a deck.
What to Do Instead
Start with a conversation. Give it space. Let it happen in a place—emotionally, creatively, intellectually, physically—that you both enjoy. Go for a walk. Have a coffee. Try the restaurant you’ve always wanted to try.
Let yourself be fully present as you. Bond, share, explore. It’s more fun and—counter to what you might be thinking as you’re reading this—it’s way more efficient. You get to the center of things much faster.
You uncover the questions that matter, the insights that sharpen the work, the openings you couldn’t see alone. The work gets stronger because it’s being built in real time, with the person who’s going to help make it real. You start shaping it together—testing, challenging, imagining. And it starts to move faster.
That’s where the work begins—not in the deck, but in the conversation that makes you both want to keep having more of them.
Geoffrey MacDougall 