You can have a great story, decades of experience, and incredible stage presence and still struggle to get booked if your pitch doesn't answer one simple question:
""Why should we choose you?""
Every year, conference designers, event planners, speaker bureaus, podcast hosts, editors, and media producers review thousands of pitches. Most are quickly forgotten. A few stand out.
Why?
In this highly interactive NSA NYC workshop, conference designer and Gateway Gathering & Pitch Fest founder Jacquelyn Fletcher Johnson pulls back the curtain on what happens behind the scenes when designers choose their speaker line-up.
Jacquelyn has spent her career helping powerful ideas find their way into the world. She began as a publicist for bestselling authors Maurice Sendak and Clive Cussler, crafting pitches and securing media opportunities that amplified their work. Since then, she's served as a magazine editor-in-chief and designed large-scale conferences. She's currently the producer of the Gateway Gathering & Pitch Fest, an event that gathers powerful decision-makers—including literary and speaking agents, producers, meeting planners, editors, and the head of TED Conferences—who can open doors to bigger stages and opportunities.
She's reviewed thousands of speaker proposals, media pitches, story ideas, and keynote descriptions and has seen firsthand why some speakers get selected and others get overlooked.
In this session, we'll explore:
• What conference designers, gatekeepers, and decision-makers are really looking for
• Why some speaker pitches get immediate attention while others are lost in the crowd
• The role of ""sticky"" ideas in generating referrals, bookings, media opportunities, and word-of-mouth buzz
• Common mistakes that weaken speaker brands
