Tips for Submitting a Pitch
Anyone in the U-M community can pitch an idea for a Hacks with Friends project. IT professionals can partner with U‑M faculty or staff to formulate a pitch for a project to attempt to find an IT solution to a problem they are facing in their unit or department. You do not have to pitch an idea to participate and attend Hacks with Friends. Participants will have the opportunity to review the pitches for hacks and join a hack team when registration opens on May 2, 2022.
IMPORTANT: If you submit a pitch proposal, you are committing yourself to lead the hack team (virtually or in person) that will work on your proposed idea at the HWF event on June 2 and 3.
What to include in your pitch proposal
- Name your pitch
- Describe your pitch. Briefly describe your idea in 150-200 words or less. What inspired it? Describe the goal or objective. This description will be published on the Hacks with Friends website with all other approved pitch submissions.
- Category: Select the category your pitch fit into.
- Mental Health and Well-Being: Explore ways technology can help provide support for the mental health and well-being of U-M students, staff or faculty.
- Academic and Business Administration: Explore ways to leverage technology in academic and business offices, including remote or hybrid work environments, to provide solutions to eliminate routine, mundane tasks, provide improved interfaces, enable integrations between key systems, or remove redundancies.
- Empowering Distributed Teams: Explore technological approaches for distributed teams to evolve and succeed in all aspects of the new worklife paradigm, including hiring and onboarding, productivity, collaboration, or professional development.
- Cybersecurity: Explore new tool sets that will ensure university assets are secured in this rapidly changing digital world.
- Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI): Explore technological solutions to ensure that each member of the U-M community is given full opportunity to thrive.
- Pitch topics suggested by the Office of DEI to consider: Poverty Equity; Food Equity; Gender Equity; Accessibility within Reporting Data in dashboards; and how to use data that exists to make resources more accessible.
- Resources are available from the Office of DEI for teams within the DEI category.
- Other: Your own original idea of how technology can be used to improve a specific discipline, the university, or its mission.
- Sell it with a video Create a short video about your pitch that is under 3 minutes in length. The more creative the better. Use it to sell your idea and recruit people to join your team. Be sure to state the problem your project will try to solve. Use your phone or a private Zoom meeting to record and provide a link to your video. Videos can be shared on Youtube, Dropbox or Google Drive. There is a place for you to provide a link to your video on the pitch submission form.
- Attract talent. You will be asked to identify the skills and talent you think you'll need to complete the project. Remember your team will benefit from non-technical team members, too! Project managers, documentation specialists and business analysts bring a lot to the success of a project. Will your project benefit from a designer, business analyst, or project manager? What about someone who is great at documentation or someone who excels in thinking about process? With the right people on your team, you'll have an easier time getting to a working prototype! Review the list of possible positions you may want to consider for your team.
- Technical Resources: Reach out to the HWF planning committee for help rounding up the technical resources you may need to have available for your team to start the hack process. Available resources: GitHub, Container Upgrade, Augmented Reality, MiDatabase, MiServer, MiDesktop, MiStorage, Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and GitLab
- Have fun!
Submit a Pitch
Submit your pitch for Hacks with Friends 2022. Pitch submissions for the 2022 Hacks with Friends event will be accepted through the end of the day, Friday, April 22.