The 15-Second Pitch
I just spent a great weekend in Mendocino with a bunch of friends, some of whom I haven’t seen in almost a year. As we chatted and caught up on each other’s lives, I got a lot of questions about what I’ve been working on lately - and I found I didn’t really know how to tell them. The Drama Farm is such a unique, out-there idea - how do you explain it in terms better than “this crazy theatre internship idea I have”, without taking over the conversation for 10 minutes?
There are a lot of great resources out there to help you write an elevator pitch (also known as a 15-second pitch) - basically, the idea is to have a brief overview of your venture that hits all the key points, but is short enough to tell someone about in the space of an elevator ride - ideally, 15-30 seconds. I’ve read through a lot of them, and I’ve been tossing ideas around in my head for a while, but I hadn’t really come up with the right words yet - which left me sort of sputtering and sounding clueless anytime anyone asked about what I was doing.
So, I spent some time this weekend trying to figure out how to explain the basic idea of this project to someone who knows nothing about it, without telling them everything about it. My problem is that all the concepts I want to use to explain the Drama Farm end up needing explanations of their own: it’s a theatre internship based on informal learning, but no one knows what informal learning is; it’s a professional-level theatre production with the safety net of an educational environment, but how is that different from a college theatre production?
After giving it some serious thought, here’s what I’ve come up with so far:
“It’s a semester-long theatre internship program. We’d take two dozen students, give them a professional director, a script, a budget, and all the resources they need, and let them at it. They’d make all the decisions and do all the planning, but with a staff of advisors there to guide them when they needed it.”
It’s definitely a work in progress, but what do you think so far? Does it make sense? If you knew nothing about the project - or even really about theatre education - would you get the idea? Better yet, would you be excited by it? Tell me what you think!
