CuriousWorks Toolkit

Teams present their pitches to each other and a panel of supportive allies, which could include other staff from your organisation, friends & family, and professional media producers. This day marks the culmination of a great deal of effort and preparation on the part of the teams and should be treated as a special occasion. Pitchers receive immediate feedback on their presentation and written responses are collected from the audience that can be used to evaluate each topic in the next session.

Goals

• Present pitches.
• Get and give feedback on pitches that can be used as the basis for making a decision on which project will go into production.

Duration

1 workshop

Activites

1. The pitch day is a special day and should be honored as such by doing some special things. You might chose to dress-up, bring in special food, or organize the space in a different way than usual. If you are inviting in guests from outside of the usual group, it can be nice to treat pitch day as a community event, a celebration of the work that the group is doing, and a way of cultivating an audience for the proposed media production when it is complete.
2. Ground-rules are essential on pitch day, especially if there are people present who are not familiar with the norms of the group. Most importantly, participants should discuss what it means to give and receive supportive, constructive, and critical feedback. Remind the group that the purpose of this exercise is not to pick a "winner", but to evaluate what is the most appropriate of a range of good ideas for this group to go into production on. Acknowledge the love that each team has probably grown for their pitch topic, but remind them that only one topic will ultimately be selected and the importance of accepting the final decision in the name of crew unity.
3. Distribute evaluation sheets to the group and explain how to use them. These blank forms should be made up ahead of time, and include space for the pitch topic's name, the criteria that the group is using to evaluate the topics, and space for the respondents to make comments next to each criteria. Audience members can make notes on their forms while the pitch is in progress, and will have time at the end of each pitch to make comments on the sheet as to how well they think each idea lends itself to each of the criteria.
4. Teams have 5-10 minutes each to present their pitch.
5. At the end of their pitch, teams respond to questions and comments from the audience for another 5-10 minutes. Facilitators must take care in upholding the ground rules on constructive feedback in the Q & A.
6. Each team should be thoroughly congratulated and applauded at the end of their pitch.
7. After all pitches are completed, facilitators collect all the evaluation sheets. The information on them will be summarised and presented back to the group in an anonymous form in the next session.