Regardless of whether your event takes place online, on site or in hybrid form, you need highlights and moments that inspire and excite your participants. There's nothing worse than a series of monotonous welcome speeches, never-ending presentations or soft-spoken panel discussions. If you really want to hold your audience's attention, you need interaction and exciting dialogue. Pitches in particular - whether as a stand-alone event or as part of your event - are ideal for this.
Why pitches are an exciting event format
Pitches are such an exciting event format primarily because they really involve your participants. Everyone can take part, everyone has a vote and can have a say in the outcome. Similar to the popular voting and surveys. However, pitches are even more intense and exciting because they are really about something. Your participants can decide live who should win your competition and who should not. If you develop an exciting dramaturgy around the pitch in addition to the pure voting, you can create real excitement and emotion. This is exactly what people remember. Emotions. You can quickly check this for yourself: What do you remember about your last event, holiday or concert? Probably the beginning, the end and the emotional highlights - the rest fades from our memory.
Utilise this effect for your events and focus specifically on emotions and therefore also incorporate pitches if this fits in with your concept.
How you can realise pitches with TEDME
As with regular votes and surveys, you can use the TEDME module for pitches Votings for this. Assign a "TEDME room" for your audience, i.e. a voting code, and a "TEDME room" for your jury. Why? So you can weight the votes of the jury and the audience according to your own wishes and preferences. For example, you can specify that the jury's votes are weighted fourfold and the audience's votes are weighted once. Of course, all other variants are also conceivable and can be implemented. Now every participant and every jury member votes on the entries or start-up ideas presented. This means that you can see the average value of the jury and the average value of the audience in the backend and can calculate (or have calculated) an overall result from this.
Have the pitches evaluated even more granularly
So far, so good. Many voting tools can do that. But with TEDME you can have the pitches presented evaluated in a much more granular way - thanks to the slider in the voting tool.
The advantage? While the participants or the jury can only decide on a single favourite in traditional voting, they can submit a differentiated evaluation with TEDME.
Example: In a classic pitch, you decide in favour of Team A as the winner of the five teams presented. You can only decide in favour of one. Team A receives the full score from you, so to speak. All the others go away empty-handed. In a granular pitch with TEDME, you could award Team A 9 points, B 8 points, C 5, D 3 and E 3 points. This allows you to evaluate the teams in a much more differentiated way and you no longer have to put all your eggs in one basket - or rather team.
You can implement this voting weighting for both the participants and the jury at your event.
Pitch panelling
Another method of vote splitting is the Panache. With this voting option, voters can allocate several votes or points to several candidates, companies, start-ups, ideas, projects etc.. An example: You give each voter a total of 10 points that he or she can distribute and this person then decides to award, for example, 7 points to candidate A, 2 to candidate B and one to candidate C.
In addition to using a slider, TEDME also allows you to use the panelling method to rate participants. This method was often used at face-to-face events. There, cards, balls or points were usually allocated to different candidates.
What adds to the tension of pitches
Increase the tension in your pitches even more by:
- choose a presenter whose voice, facial expressions, gestures and choice of words make the competition even more intense,
- Play emotionally charged music at the beginning of the pitch and before each individual vote,
- show the votes in real time - so everyone can join in the excitement,
- Make sure you have the right stage lighting and get advice from a stage designer,
- Visualise your prize in a large or high-quality form, e.g. with an elegantly designed trophy or an oversized cheque.
You can find more good ideas in TV shows with competitions of all kinds.
Conclusion
Pitches are an excellent event format - either as a stand-alone event or as part of your congress, conference or general meeting. Use digital solutions such as TEDME, with which you can easily conduct the votes in real time and bring them to the screen or the screens of your participants. Thanks to the slider in the TEDME voting module, you can even conduct very granular votes. Would you also like to use this at your event? Then contact us right away.
