What's your FIRST Elevator Pitch?

[Michael Sperber]

Instead of reviving an old thread started by John Boucher a little over two years ago, I thought it would be important to start clean and fresh... after all, FIRST has changed a lot in the past two years.

With all the discussion about the "Educate to Innovate" initiative launched by President Obama yesterday at the White House, I figured it would be important for all of us to practice, share and improve our promotion of FIRST within our communities.

Usually, this comes down to having to explain FIRST to someone who does not know anything about FIRST or the FIRST programs... and having to share that message in a clear, clean and concise format within an extremely short period of time. (If you take too long, you risk losing their interest.) Thus, the Elevator Pitch.

Here's an explanation of an Elevator Pitch from wikipedia:

An elevator pitch is an overview of an idea for a product, service, or project. The name reflects the fact that an elevator pitch should be possible to deliver in the time span of an elevator ride, meaning in a maximum of 30 seconds and in 130 words or fewer.

The term is typically used in the context of an entrepreneur pitching an idea to a venture capitalist or angel investor to receive funding. Venture capitalists often judge the quality of an idea and team on the basis of the quality of its elevator pitch, and will ask entrepreneurs for the elevator pitches to quickly weed out bad ideas and weak teams.

A variety of other people, including entrepreneurs, project managers, salespeople, evangelists, policy-makers, job seekers, and speed daters commonly use elevator pitches to get their point across quickly.

So... What's your FIRST Elevator Pitch?