The Four Components of an Effective Social Venture Pitch
Written by Swaroon Sridhar, Co-founder of 33 Buckets
Pitching at the 2016 Pakis Social Entrepreneurship Challenge - we won $17,500!
In 33 Buckets’ early days, we relied entirely on pitch funding to support our projects. While our revenue streams are a bit more diversified today, we’re still frequently expected to distill our business into its core components when we meet a potential donor.
In aggregate, we’ve raised $100K+ through pitching – this has enabled us to bring a lifetime of clean water to over 7,100 people.
I often get questions from budding social entrepreneurs about how to deliver an effective social venture pitch, so I thought it’d be helpful to capture my experience in a blog post. For the most part, our pitches follow the same general structure:
Problem
Solution
Economics
Impact
Let’s dive in.
Problem
“Ana Maria is a ten-year-old girl at Huillcapata Community School in rural Peru. Every day, she drinks water that has 10,000x the acceptable level of bacteria by WHO standards. Without action, the best-case scenario is a frequently interrupted education. The worst-case is death.”
“1 in 4 people lack access to clean water globally. By the end of this pitch, 6 people will die due to waterborne illness.”
Every social venture pitch has to start off with a compelling problem statement. It immediately establishes the urgency of your ask – the longer your audience waits to act, the more will suffer; failing to act means ignoring the severity of the problem.
I presented two examples above that are both effective ways to pitch a problem. We find that they’re best used together – telling a story that focuses on a relatable entity (individual, family, etc.) evokes pathos and conveying relevant statistics signifies scale.
Listeners should come away from this section wanting to solve this problem immediately. Even if your audience doesn’t fund you, if they aren’t even interested in helping you improve your solution to solve the problem, you probably haven’t communicated the problem well in the first place.
2. Solution
“There are three components to comprehensively solving a rural community’s water problem. We need to filter their water using materials available to them. We need to distribute that water across the community so that everyone can use it. We need to educate community members to exercise hygienic water consumption after filtration. 33 Buckets ensures lifetime access to clean water by providing all three.”
Ideally, at this point, your audience is just as passionate as you are to solve this problem. Conveying an effective solution is how you get them to fund you and not find another way to solve it. Thus, your solution section should clearly articulate:
what your organization does
how your solution is better than all other options they can take to solve the problem
You can measure the strength of your solution section by the content of your listeners’ questions during the Q&A. If they’re confused about what you do or how you’re any different than the big non-profit that solves the same problem, you need to re-work this section.
3. Economics
“We need just $10K to launch our first clean water project. $8K will go towards program expenses – buying raw materials, contracting physical labor, producing educational materials, etc. $2K will go towards overhead – flights, lodging, salaries, etc.”
“In each community we support, we take a percentage of the profits from water sales to fund other clean water initiatives. With your $10K donation, we estimate that we’d generate enough revenue from our first clean water project to fund an additional clean water project every year thereafter.”
Once your audience thinks you’ve got the right approach to solve this incredibly dire problem, they’ll want to know how you’ll spend and sustain their money - the first example above speaks to the former and the second speaks to the latter.
Generally, donors want most of their money to go towards program expenses (expenses that have a direct impact on the problem you’ve described). Anything else isn’t as palatable. For smaller donors, we allocate 100% of their donations to program expenses. We fund our overhead through our larger donors – even then, we propose an 80/20 split between program expenses and overhead. Large or small, your donors should come away from this section of your pitch feeling like their money will be well-spent on solving the problem.
Additionally, many donors will want to know how you’ll sustain the money they’re giving you. If you have no plan here, you’ll ask for the same thing every year, and donors will face diminishing returns each time they fund you. For social ventures, this requires that you describe your sustainable revenue generation mechanism. While this isn’t as straightforward for non-profits that mostly rely on donations, you can still describe how you’re making your business more efficient by cutting costs and the like. That way, each successive donation will go further, counterbalancing their diminishing returns.
4. Impact
“With your $10K donation, Ana Maria will be afforded the basic human needs to attend school every day. She aspires to be a community teacher – let’s help her reach that dream.”
“Your $10K donation will bring a lifetime of clean water to 1,500 people in rural Peru. Based on impact analyses of our past projects, we expect that effort to bring a 15% reduction in waterborne illness among children in the community.”
This is where your pitch comes full circle. You started the pitch by selling the audience on a problem – now you get to tell them the specific impact their donation will have.
Similar to what I proposed in the problem section, a two-part structure that both focuses on a relatable entity and the scale of the impact is effective. If you started the pitch by describing how this problem affects a single person or family, tie that up – how will the donation make that person’s life better? Similarly, if you started the pitch by communicating the scale of the problem, how much will your listener’s donation blunt that problem’s impact? Good data is convincing for this use-case.
If you’ve done your job correctly, you should be well on your way to a donation.
Thanks for reading and happy to answer any questions or review your pitch – feel free to contact me at swaroon@33buckets.org!