Although I’ve pitched many ideas before, I thought that for this post, I might search out a bit of advice from seasoned professionals on how to best approach the situation. That’s when roommate and Unreasonable Institute Co-Founder Daniel Epstein walked into my room and dropped Guy Kawasaki’s book, Art of the Start into my hands. Like Daniel advised, I read through it and I’m convinced that if you ever plan on starting anything, you should read this book too.  Although the book is a little outdated as it was published 5 years ago, it is still filled with invaluable advice for any entrepreneur.

Guy offers plenty of relevant advice for the startup process in general, but I really enjoyed the chapter titled The Art of Pitching.  In it, Guy offers a lot of great advice, much of which I will utilize when I’m pitching to a room full of investors next week.  I will highlight here what I believe are the most useful points that Guy makes in regards to The Art of Pitching.

Explain Yourself in the First Minute. The one question your audience is wondering while you’re sharing your life story in the first few minutes of your presentation is “What does your organization do?” As Guy suggests, “Do everyone a favor: Answer that question in the first minute.” Once your audience understands what your organization does, they’ll be able to give you their focused attention. I couldn’t agree more. If you can get this done in the first 30 seconds, you are doing something right.

Answer the Little Person on Your Shoulder. Imagine that there’s a little person sitting on your shoulder during presentations, asking you “So what?” every time you say something. The best way to answer that little man’s question is by giving examples that illustrate the significance of a claim.  Utilize the simple phrasing; “for instance…” to offer concrete examples.

Know Your Audience. Before the pitch, learn who you are pitching to and what is important to them. What are the most important things your audience wants to know? What issues and landmines (tough questions or concerns) should you be prepared to address? What does their organization do? If they are investors, what do they like to invest in?  Speak to these questions in your pitch and tell the audience why it is you are meeting their wants, desires, or needs.

Keep Your Pitch Short & Your Powerpoint Simple. “I’ve never heard a pitch that was too short,” reveals Guy. A good pitch should pique curiosity and invite follow-up questions from your audience. Keep your powerpoint simple to this effect: keep it to 10 slides, 20 minutes, and make it “sticky.” (We wrote a post on how to make an idea / presentation sticky in this previous post).  Below, I’ve outlined how Guy advises you to structure your powerpoint to investors.  This structure is great, but there is always room for creativity on your part:

1. Title – organization name, your name and title, and contact information
2. Problem – what’s the pain you’re trying to alleviate?
3. Solution – how do you alleviate this pain?
4. Business Model – how do you make money?
5. Underlying Magic – what’s your secret sauce?
6. Marketing & Sales – how will you reach your customers?
7. Competition – who else does what you do?
8. Management Team – who are the key players in your organization?
9. Financial Projections & Key Metrics – what’s your financial forecast and how will you measure your efforts?
10. Current Status, Accomplishments, Timeline & Use of Funds – How are things going and what do you expect in the near future?

Set the Stage. When you are presenting, whatever happens during the presentation (whether good or bad), including technical glitches, it’s your fault. So be prepared for the worst-case scenario. If you have them, bring multiple laptops, your own projector, a USB drive with your presentation, e-mail your presentation to yourself, and bring handouts in case you can’t get your powerpoint to work. Most importantly though, know your presentation well enough that you don’t need the powerpoint. Your powerpoint should be nothing more than an enhancement to your pitch.

Let One Person Do the Talking. If your team is on the stage, let the CEO / President / Executive Director do 80% of the talking. Other team members can present one or two slides on their specific expertise. Often times it is even more effective just to have one person on the stage.  For the pitch I’ll be giving next week, we decided that I should run the entire presentation because we only have 10 minutes on stage.

Get to 1,000 Feet and Stay There. Neither fly too high with your pitch nor get mired in details. Stay above the ground, but still think about tactics. “Provide enough detail to prove you can deliver and enough aerial view to prove you have a vision.”

Pitch Constantly. Most people need to practice their pitch 25 times to feel really comfortable with it. I hope to practice a few times in front of our dog, Kaya. Keeping her attention for 10 minutes will be a good test of how compelling my pitch is.

Be Comfortable, Be Yourself, Be Passionate. Guy never directly touches on this in this chapter of his book, but this is critical to your success.  Don’t be afraid to show people how passionate and obsessed you are with the venture that you are pitching.  In fact, this is something every investor is going to look for.  Furthermore, always remember that at the end of the day the investor is investing in you and not just your idea.  Make certain you know your pitch well enough and have practiced it enough times that you can be yourself on stage. An investor would rather invest in a great entrepreneur with a descent idea than an mediocre entrepreneur with a great idea.

Other Resources:

Canaan Partners and PopTech designed an excellent slideshow detailing the important parts of pitching. I recommend blowing it up to Full-Screen so you can read it. But it’s got everything you need to know! Check it out:

A Tale of Two Pitches – Entrepreneur turned VC Mark Suster tells two stories of entrepreneurs who pitched to him – one a 10 out of 10 and one a total flop.

Angel Funding Advice – Mark Suster overviews how to pitch to angels, with whom you should do it, and how to find angels who will listen.

David S. Rose on pitching to VCs – Pitch Coash David Rose gives a 15-minute TED talk on the 10 things you want to convey to a VC

When I was recently asked what I did to get bloggers of some major publications to write about the Unreasonable Institute I said what any good entrepreneur would say, “I don’t know…I just did it.”  After some reflection, I realized that there were about 8 things that helped me increase our chances of getting major media to care that I think can help you too.

1. Let Your Story Do the Work. In all honesty, when it comes to getting a major media source to write about your organization, its 10% about the effort you put in and 90% about the intrigue of the story itself – the key word here being story.  No matter how amazing you think your organization is, it in-and-of itself is not usually worth writing about. Major media are looking for an event or a major announcement that can tell an intriguing story. It is within that context that people will hear of your organization.

2. Pique instead of Press Release. In my novice opinion press releases are useless (ok, maybe that is a little harsh – sorry, I never took a journalism class). You can imagine that folks in media get constantly bombarded with page long press releases and don’t read the majority of them. You will be much more effective by piquing someone’s interest with a concise, intriguing email. If you can adequately do so, and of course include a call to action, then they are more likely to contact you at which time you can tell them so much more than a press release ever could. Steve Strauss of USA Today discusses this point in depth in a post called “The (Almost) Surefire Method for Getting Publicity for Your Business.”

3. Contact low hanging fruit. There are an endless supply of journalists and bloggers that you could contact, so work smart by finding and contacting “low hanging fruit.” That is, contact writers who have a published stories about your organization’s industry or about similar topics, thus showing they might have a genuine interest in your story. Unreasonable Institute Mentor Lindsay Clinton of Intellecap suggested I search for articles written about major organizations within our industry.  Another way is to have technology find these people for you by using some sort of an article/blog reader, like Google Reader or Google Alerts, that search for key words in newly published articles (my Google Alerts, for instance, send me emails with articles containing the words “social entrepreneur”).

4. Sleuth around for Contact Information. Considering the amount of organizations seeking media coverage, you can image that many folks in the media keep their contact information well-hidden.  Be creative in finding ways to contact writers.  I have done everything from finding their emails on their personal blogs and reaching them on Facebook to simply guessing an email address based on their organization’s name (note: this last one almost never worked!).

5. Be persistent. Some folks only cared what I had to say the second time I wrote them.

6. Play the numbers. Even if you contact 10 low hanging fruit, chances are maybe only one writer you contact will get back to you (and even that may not turn into an article). Now, if you contact 100 people….well, you can do the math.

7. Help them. Remember, their job is to get eyes on their articles. If they do write about you spread the word – its good for them and you!

8. And of course, always say thank you! Thanks to Steve of BusinessWeek, Donna of Inc. Magazine, and Ty and Durga of the Wall Street Journal’s Venture Capital Dispatch and India Chief Mentor.

So What? Follow these 8 tips and you’re likely to dramatically improve your chances of getting major media coverage for your organization!

Each week, the amount a donor can give to any single entrepreneur on the marketplace is capped. The first week, this cap is $10, the second week it’s $50, the third week it’s $100, and so on (until the last two weeks, when there is no maximum contribution limit). This means entrepreneurs will have to galvanize the support of hundreds of people from around the world to raise the full amount and earn a seat at the Unreasonable Institute.

So this post includes our 5 tips for reaching hundreds of people and enlisting their support, based on our experience attracting applicants (almost 700 young entrepreneurs from 50 countries began applications before we ran our first Institute).

1) Maximize Your Strengths. Galvanizing the support of hundreds require you take full advantage of all the assets at your disposal. Let’s consider, as an example, a compelling concern one of our finalists raised on the phone with me this morning. She’d just run a fundraising campaign over the holidays and asked hundreds of donors for financial contributions. She understandably feels it’s inappropriate to ask them for funding yet again to raise $6,500. I totally agree. However, this donor base is not only a source of money, but also an incredible marketing base! Instead of emailing these donors to ask for contributions, this finalist should do the exact opposite. She might email them saying “Please do NOT make a contribution. Instead, tell five people you know about the opportunity to sponsor our venture on the Unreasonable Finalist Marketplace.” This strategy makes sense considering that an entrepreneur on Kickstarter (the online fundraising marketplace that inspired our marketplcae) receives the majority of her funding from contacts of her contacts. You might be surprised how many ways you can leverage your assets!

2) Find the Hubs. As a young startup, the Unreasonable Institute lacks a number of important assets including a credible brand and a proven track record. But in the 6 weeks our applications were open, nearly 700 young social entrepreneurs from countries like Mauritania, Benin, and Serbia, began applications to attend our ten-week summer institute. As much as we’d like to, we can’t take credit for getting the word out to so many applicants. Instead, all the recognition goes to our partners, organizations and individuals around the world that are trusted hubs for young social entrepreneurs (i.e. places social entrepreneurs already go to). These organizations, including Ashoka Changemakers, SocialEdge, and Change.org, helped us to market to their networks by tweeting, blogging, and emailing on our behalf. In total, our 28 partners spread information about our applications to well over 100,000 people. Targeting individuals with vast networks, organizations like the ones we mentioned above, local websites, meet-up groups, communities and blogs where the people you want to attract already go will lay the foundation for your viral call to arms!

3) Give Them the Tools to Market For You. To make it easy for our partners to spread the word about our applications, we did all the hard work for them. We sent them short blurbs they could email their networks word-for-word, 120-character tweets they could post on their accounts, materials (e.g. our logo, video, and diagrams) they could use to blog, and banners they could embed in their websites. By simplifying outreach for our partners, we also opened the door for their networks to spread the word. In fact, 42% of our applicants heard about us from organizations and people we’d never directly contacted (further evidence for Kickstarter’s observation that friends of friends provide the most support). The easier your message is to spread, the more it will.

4) Create a Sense of Urgency. According to John Kotter, author of the aptly titled A Sense of Urgency, any effort to create change is doomed without getting people to see and feel a need for change. Why should people sponsor you to attend the Unreasonable Institute? Because if you are one of the first 25 Finalists to raise $6,500 you receive rigorous entrepreneurial skill training, seed capital, mentorship from 50 seasoned entrepreneurs and investors, legal advice, prototype consulting, web development, a global support network, and the chance to pitch your venture to over 200 investors and philanthropists. No big deal. Oh, and you only have 50 days to edge out the competition!  Including specific goals and deadlines for action also incentivizes your supporters to move quickly (e.g. “Help us reach our goal of raising $500 by Friday by being one of 10 donors to give us $50!”).

5) Make the Ask. According to Dan Zarrella’s blog post 5 Steps to Going Viral on Twitter, the tweets that are most often re-tweeted (shared by other twitter users with their networks) include a request to be retweeted. Similarly, your contacts are more likely to help if you make a request of them that is (1) easily actionable and (2) “sticky.” (1) An actionable request includes specifics. For example, instead of asking people to spread the word about Unreasonable Institute applications, we asked them to get one person they know to apply. (2) In order for people to act, they have to remember your request. According to the book Made to Stick by Dan and Chip Heath, making your request memorable, or “sticky,” is best done through a Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional Story (SUCCESs). Check out our blog post on the subject for more details on how to nail these six principles.

So What? Catalyzing collective action is a vital skill for any successful entrepreneur, Unreasonable Institute Finalist or not. These five key strategies enabled us at the Unreasonable Institute to find our amazing 42 Finalists! We hope you find them useful as well! We’d love to hear other suggestions for rallying support in the comments section below!

One Actionable Request - Go back to the top of this blog post and retweet it. Not only do we advise you on what to do to mobilize hundreds of people, we also offer an example of what not to do. Never ever write a blog post this long. Do, however, communicate its core message in 140 characters or less by retweeting it!

Oh, and always say “Thank You”…thank you!