It’s all eyes on Kildare Street this week.  And not just the budget . . .

The excellent Kildare Street.com — ‘a non-partisan website which lets people keep tabs on their elected representatives” — has just won €5,000, taking the first-ever Outvesting grant, and beating 60 other projects in the process.

The funding will surely be useful for the site, which is run on a near-voluntary basis, yet manages to achieve a considerable amount.  So take a well earned bow, Sabrina Dent and John Handelaar.

What surprised me, however, was that so many of the other 60 project pitches were so poorly presented and communicated.

In this Dragon’s Den era of ‘elevator pitches’ I had expected short and punchy summaries of projects and their benefits, both for users and would-be investors.  Perhaps even some YouTube video pitches. Instead, many applicants omitted even a basic statement of what their project does.

The applications were published here, so you can read them yourself, and the voting was live, online via twitter.  (Kildare Street was almost guaranteed to appeal to the, shall we say ‘venture socialists’ — myself included — who had donated to the fund.)

Clearly, some of the projects have the potential to be heavy hitters — TribalX, for instance, has attracted interest from the National Digital Research Centre (NDRC) . . .  but I still have no idea what TribalX is offering, nor what ‘distributed organisational tacit knowledge’ means.

So, for what it’s worth, here are a few tips on communicating, useful whether it’s pitching for funding, writing a press release, trying to convince would-be customers, or even talking to school students.

Rule #1:  Know your audience(s). Who they are, and what they might be looking for.  What problem are you solving for them?  When pitching for funding, you essentially have two audiences: the investors, and the end users  of your product/service.

You’d be surprised how many people forget to think about this first important step, and analyse who their audience is. Yet, it is worth spending time on this — the equivalent of the market research section for your business plan.

Rule #2:  What are you offering your audience? What will your product/service enable them to do (e.g. a new process for making widgets)

Rule #3:  And what does that mean? Frequently, this comes down to how you are better than/different from the competition (e.g. your new process means their widgets will be cheaper to make). 

Rule #4:  Start your pitch with the answer to Rule #3. It’s the most important thing you’re trying to communicate, so this is where you start.

For the record, here’s how the winning project opened their successful pitch, with a lovely succinct summary:

KildareStreet.com is a non-partisan website which makes it not only easy for people to keep tabs on their elected representatives in the Houses of the Oireachtas, but actually possible for them to do this – quickly, clearly, and electronically – for the first time ever in the history of the Republic.

And if you ever need assistance to develop a pitch or presentation,  I can help