How to make your ‘awareness day’ pitch stand out

So last week, I shared various notable dates, awareness days and holidays in 2023 to make a note of in your calendar. The reason? They often provide a really good excuse to pitch to the media.

There’s a caveat to this, though.

Obviously, depending on how popular the awareness day is, you could be competing with thousands of others to get your themed pitch accepted.

A perfect example of this is International Women’s Day.

As it’s now such a huge event in the social and corporate calendar, journalists and media titles that focus on women are typically inundated with pitches in the run up, as there are loads of female business owners, creatives and brand owners who want to get their business, expertise or story featured. This is understandable, given the clout that an awareness day like that can bring to a business and the recognition you’ll get by being associated with such a worthy cause (I mean, being the main business owner featured by a gender equity journalist on International Women’s Day… can you even imagine?!).

But how do you make your pitch one of the ones that’ll stand out? How do you make it different to all the others out there?

Here’s my advice

Plan well ahead

If you’re looking to get featured in line with a big awareness day, make sure you’re planning well ahead of it. As I’ve said before, print issues will be preparing these stories between 6 and 3 months in advance because of their printing deadlines, so if your dream was to be featured in a glossy magazine ahead of March 8th (IWD) you probably should’ve pitched your idea back in October.

Even for online, it’s better to get ahead of the curve and pitch your ideas in mid February. The worst that can happen is the journalist comes back to you saying they’re not quite planning features for that event yet, in which case they’ll likely give you an indication of when to try again and you’ll also already be on their radar.

Plan specifically

On the note of journalists’ radars, it’s far better to do as I always advice and tailor your pitches to send to specific journalists. Ahead of this, you should be working to get on their radar before you pitch to them (by interacting with their work on social media), so that when they see your email in their inbox, it stands out ahead of the rest.

Don’t be generic

When I receive a pitch ahead of International Women’s Day for my Forbes Women column with a subject line like, ‘IWD: Inspirational female founder’, I’ll barely even scan it. I can tell straight away that the pitch is going to be more focused on the person than on providing value to the audience and that the pitch hasn’t been thought out to the extend that it should have been. When you use generic or overused language, it makes it even harder for you to stand out. Get specific and be original.

Focus on the message of the day/ month

With your pitch, the focus should be on the message the awareness day or month is trying to get out there, rather than completely on you. Now, before you panic, that’s not to say that your story isn’t going to be interesting or valuable, but try to tie in the idea you’d like to pitch with upholding (or sometimes challenging - I’m thinking of Thanksgiving here) the message of the holiday and supporting the people the day/ month is most looking to support. Because when you do this, you automatically provide more value.