The outreach email in every Stage Finder drawer is the same email. Here is how to make it fit.

Look at what else is in the drawer. Two fields are written for that event alone:

1. Pitch this angle: a talk idea shaped for that audience and your level.
2. How to get on it: the realistic route in, such as a call for speakers page, a speaker form or the programming team.

Those are the parts to build the email from. The draft supplies the structure and the angle supplies the reason to say yes. If you want the principles behind a pitch that works, how to pitch yourself as a speaker covers them.

A short way to adapt it

Do this once per event, in this order.

1. Copy the email. The button copies the subject and the body together as plain text, subject first.
2. Replace every bracket. Search the text for "[" so none slips through.
3. Swap the generic opening sentence for the pitch angle, in your own words, aimed at the people who attend.
4. Add one fact only you know. A talk you gave, a result a client got, a reason this event and not another.
5. Delete anything that would be true of any conference.

Then read it aloud. If it still sounds like it could go to a hundred events, it is not done.

Check the route before you write

The how-to-get-on-it line is the tool's best account of the path, and the prompt asks it to word that line so you verify it yourself when it is not certain an event still takes pitches. Do that. Open the source link on the drawer, confirm the event runs and find out whether it takes pitches at all.

Check for a named contact too. The draft will not supply an email address, so you have to find the person yourself. A message to a named programming lead beats one sent to a general inbox.

Do not borrow names you cannot back up

The drawer also lists speakers, split into those confirmed on that stage and similar ones from the same world. Only the first list is a claim about the line-up. Two lists sit in every Stage Finder pitch drawer explains the difference. Name-dropping from the second list in your email is an easy way to get caught out.

Treat the draft as a first pass

The email arrives with the search and is saved with the rest of the run, so it will be there when you come back. That is a convenience and nothing more. A draft you edit for ten minutes will do better than one you send in ten seconds.

Run a search, pick the three events with the strongest angle, and write three emails. Do not mass-send one. For stages that never show up in a tool, where to find a call for speakers before it closes covers building your own dated list.

• getting booked
• pitching
• outreach

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