4 Tips to Successfully Pitch Your Solution for Systemic Change
How do you arouse the enthusiasm of your audience? As a change maker, you need to onboard your stakeholders. Let’s have a look at how Erik Turner, participant of the Catalyst lab cohort 2020/2021, pitched his idea of creating a sustainability certificate at the Zurich sustainability week.
For the second consecutive year, collaboratio helvetica facilitated a co-creation workshop for the Nachhaltigkeitswoche Zürich, an event series presented by the five Zurich universities and more than a hundred students. The aim of the workshop was the co-creation of practical solutions to foster sustainability in the Zurich universities with regard to four topics: equality and diversity, sustainable procurement, cooperation and synergies between the institutions as well as sustainability competencies. Four solutions, one for each topic, have then been pitched by students to the directors of all five Zurich universities in an online panel discussion broadcast on youtube. In the end, viewers have been asked the following question: if you’d have 1 million Swiss francs, how much would you give to the four different projects. As a result, the sustainability certificate pitched by Erik Turner scored the highest amount. Let’s see what has made this pitch so impactful!
1. Share your vision
Close your eyes for a moment, and imagine...Instead of following the classical structure: what are the problems, what is the goal and what are the necessary steps to get there, Erik invited his audience to visualize how his desired outcome would look like. He asked the directors to close their eyes and imagine they were hard-working bachelor students whose extracurricular engagement in favour of the environment and sustainable development was being recognised and rewarded by the education system and society at large.
2. Activate empathy
If Erik had underlined the lack of recognition faced by sustainability competencies and demanded that the directors of the Zurich universities take action, they might have felt the need to justify themselves. Instead, Erik asked them this simple question. How does it feel?... How does it feel to be me? How does it feel to remember the time when you were a student full of dreams and ideals? By activating his audience’s empathy, Erik very smartly closed the gap between him and the people he was trying to convince and onboarded them towards the realisation of his idea.
3. Use appropriate body language
Your body as well as your words convey meaning! Therefore it is wise to be aware of the way you use it and use it in a way that serves your intention. You can do a body scan before holding a speech in order to come back down to earth. Standing up is also a good starting point since you can move more freely. Then be generous, imagine that you are talking not only with your mouth but with your body as a whole as if it was an instrument.
4. Commit to a first step
Being aware of the challenges to be met in order to realize his idea, Erik did not only pitch it as a demand to the universities directors. He also shared his intention to create a working group with representatives of each institution that will meet on a monthly basis. By committing to a first step towards the creation of a sustainability certificate, Erik took responsibility for his project and gave his audience a guarantee of his motivation.
Further literature to the topic
Vom Wissen zum Handeln – Sind die Zürcher Hochschulen Vorbilder für Nachhaltige Entwicklung? - Youtube Video
Erik Turner is a participant of the Catalyst lab cohort 2020/2021
Author
As a dialogue facilitator, an image coach and a translator, working for more than 10 years for the Federal Office for the Environment, Elsa offers expertise in communication and language services with a specialisation in the fields of environment and sustainability. She has a talent for conveying meaning and bringing out the essence be it by asking powerful questions, finding the right words or with visual means. She joined the Practitioners’ circle, collaboratio’s design & facilitation team in 2020.