Context

During the summer of 2021, I participated in an internship program with the Human Services Council (HSC), a national non-profit organization. I worked with supervisors from the Norwalk, CT location, alongside a team of college interns. This location runs the Norwalk Mentor Program (NMP) to provide children with academic and developmental mentorship from working adults. The underlying goal of my internship was to recruit more mentors before the fall school year began. So, I composed an email pitch to target college athletes and coaches, community organizations, town board members, and other groups that would ideally serve as mentors to Norwalk’s youth. 

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Rhetorical Strategies

I had no prior experience writing pitches, so I relied heavily on writing feedback and personal mentorship from one of my supervisors. His experience with mobile advertising and comic writing made him a very credible source during my drafting phases. I quickly learned the two critical components of any pitch: keep it short and direct. Draft one contained multiple paragraphs, and I also remembered (from personal experience) that long-winded emails often end up in the trash folder, or the reader may get bogged down with excess information. So, the first rhetorical strategy I implemented throughout my final pitch was this idea of “shortness and directness.” I was writing to community-oriented individuals, who receive many emails and requests for aid. Why should my request be of higher priority? I kept this theoretical question in mind as I organized the pitch in terms of its separate paragraphs. First, I began with a simple greeting to the sender (in this case, a collegiate basketball coach). Then, I launched into who I was and my purpose for writing. The middle paragraph needed to achieve several things: NMP’s purpose, mentor benefits/time commitment, and who specifically I want to enroll from the coach’s organization. Most importantly, my closing line left no room for misinterpretation. I provided a timeframe and method for him to contact me, implementing a “call to action” strategy before I closed out the email. 

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These two strategies work in tandem to provide a clear request for mentors, mentee and player benefits, and the level of commitment. By including this information, I anticipated I would get responses directly willing to assist or who were interested to learn more. Persuasion is also interwoven throughout the pitch’s language, specifically when I used the words “caring,” “fun,” and “easy” to address the rewarding mentor and mentee relationship. My supervisor explained to all the interns how NMP was essentially a product, and we needed to act as effective sales recruiters within each writing and communicative opportunity. 

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Reflection

My final email pitch served as a model for my other internship deliverables, in terms of brevity within the text and implementing a balance of subtle/non subtle persuasion through language. Writing with a passionate tone was also important in order to convey my own excitement about the program onto potential mentors. Fortunately, I did receive several responses from my email recipients, which actually prompted me to embrace these tactics within my own professional emails. Success of this email pitch was measured by my ability to practice shortness and directness within my writing, forming connections between civic engagement and correspondence, and composing from a personal feeling of passion. As with each item in my portfolio, the email pitch reflects acquired knowledge that I was able to apply toward course assignments and other professional opportunities.