Read between the lines

When you’re in marketing or fundraising, it’s tempting to treat feedback on your creative as a checklist.

A series of fixes to reconcile everyone’s conflicting edits so you can hit your deadline.

This is almost always the wrong approach.

Apply every comment and you risk creating a Frankenstein’s monster. Split the difference and you get something dry and forgettable — nobody objects, nobody’s moved.

Here’s why: the notes you get aren’t really about the words on the page.

They’re diagnostic signals. When someone says “this isn’t working,” they’re telling you they felt something — confusion, skepticism, a disconnect — before they knew why. Your job is to find the why.

Consider a common scenario: you share a draft proposal with two executives. One wants you to list key programs. The other wants more emphasis on mission and history.

Both are telling you what they care about. Neither is asking what might actually move the customer to act.

Your job isn’t to negotiate between them. It’s to diagnose what’s underneath: they both sense the piece isn’t compelling — they’re just reaching for familiar answers. The real question is what a prospective customer needs to feel before they’ll say yes.

That’s the difference between taking a note and reading a note.

Sometimes the right move is to accept an edit verbatim. More often it means applying the spirit of it. Occasionally it means rejecting it entirely — and being able to say why, in terms of what the reviewer actually felt and what the piece needs to do.

That’s what it means to own the work. Not protecting your original draft, but using others’ reactions as data to get closer to something that will actually land.

Stop trying to satisfy the room. Start asking what the customer needs.