April Fool's!

Seven years ago, on April 1, 2002, I produced an April Fool’s edition of our organization’s weekly newsletter. I was only about eight months into working for them at that point. and was always looking for something different to do. So I came up with a bunch of bogus and, if I may be so immodest, pretty funny articles, called it the OUTSIDER (instead of the INSIDER, its usual name), and sent it out.

The response was huge — people loved it. I don’t think I’ve received that many emails about any newsletter since (and we had a LOT fewer email subscribers then). Everyone thought it was funny and were happy to see our organization (at that point still struggling to break free of a very stodgy and fossilized image) poking fun at ourselves.

About a year or so later, someone contacted our office looking for backup on a piece of information they said they had originally seen in our newsletter. I did research and the only thing I could find supporting the bizarre position they were claiming was, yep, you guessed it — in the April Fool’s issue of our newsletter.

So I had the unenviable position of responding to this person, “Um — I think the article you saw was in the April Fool’s issue of our newsletter, and it wasn’t true.”

I haven’t sent an April Fool’s issue ever since, even though staff and a few members always ask about it.

Now, my desire to avoid spreading any accidental misinformation doesn’t mean I’ve lost my sense of humor, or that I think it was a bad idea to do. Since then we’ve made a point to lighten up our communications in general, include a lot of humorous asides, and I go out of my way in certain emails and publications to poke a little fun not just at our industry but also myself personally.

Why? Because people like it … and because on the whole people don’t trust other people who take themselves too seriously.

I was reminded of this with a recent ASAE listserve conversation when an exec said that his conference was being held over April 1 and he was seeking suggestions for a fun joke to play on the audience. I didn’t respond, but I did think, boy, would I have fun if our conference was held on April 1. We try to have fun anyway (we’ve done everything from producing humorous videos, to springing surprises on our CEO while he’s on stage). But if we met on April 1, that would offer a lot of possibilities.

I was surprised when first one response to the listserve was received, then another then another then another, saying basically, “This is a bad idea. You might offend some people.” One person actually wrote, “Practical jokes do not belong in a business environment.”

Sigh.

Look, it’s true — every audience is different. And certainly one has to be careful not to be too offensive. But fear of offending a few people can keep associations from delighting many, many more, and I’m not just talking about humor here.

I used to think many associations were staid and stodgy because of their structures. Then I realized that those structures were put into place by people — and many of those people still work in them.