Thursday night, EMBRACE Action won.
The North Texas nonprofit earned the People’s Choice Award at the annual Fast Pitch competition. That’s not unusual. The Dallas Influencers in Sports and Entertainment organization has awarded the honor, this year sponsored by sponsorship data firm MVP, every year since 2015. What was strange this year was the winner couldn’t take the award home with them.
Normally a half dozen charities make presentations in front of judges and an audience of sports and entertainment industry types. The panel deliberates and doles out monetary grants in amounts they deem appropriate to the quality of the presentations. The crowd gives out more money to one of the six via the People’s Choice balloting.
But 2020 has frowned on gatherings. And passing awards between undersanitized hands. But it has driven home the need for kindness and generosity in one’s community. DISE decided it needed to still have a Fast Pitch.
Maintaining a sense of normalcy has proven challenging throughout the pandemic, and few professions have felt its impact more than those involved in planning live events. Many have canceled their gatherings altogether. Others have looked for ways to host them virtually, but one can’t possibly exactly duplicate the experience of a prestigious, rollicking, or meaningful program via electronic means.
To make the most of what you’ve got to work with, it helps to start by thinking about what you would have aimed to accomplish had you held the event live. And then to think about ways to still achieve those goals and, if possible, add enhancements unique to the virtual world.
For Fast Pitch, we identified this list:
• Celebrate charities who do good things for the community
• Celebrate a prominent sports figure who has made an impact
• Actually do some good for the community through donations and awareness
• Bring DFW industry professionals together for networking
• Provide value for sponsors
• Show what a vibrant sports & entertainment industry DFW has and position it as a leader among markets worldwide
• Have fun (and cocktails)
OK, I might have added the cocktails part myself. But I didn’t get any pushback either.
The nonprofits normally get two things from Fast Pitch: funds through grants and notoriety via getting to tell their stories on stage. The organization luckily did have some funds available for grants. They decided to select three charities, with the DISE Philanthropy Committee choosing from among applications.
Without presentations on a stage, the notoriety portion seemed trickier. Here’s where we decided to utilize the advantages a virtual approach supplies. We realized we didn’t have to limit ourselves to just a one-day event. A rich mix of online content might allow us to achieve an even broader footprint for Fast Pitch spread over multiple days instead of just one bang-up evening.
We wanted a heavy dose of video to mimic the energy of a live stage. Specific communication resonates better than general, so rather than simply run overview videos for each grantee, we would ask the nonprofits to each supply us with three stories of ways they had helped a particular person, neighborhood, or cause. We’d create scripts and videos about the stories and run them on DISE social channels leading up to a virtual finale event. We’d still award a People’s Choice Award at the finale, but instead of just having one night of balloting, we’d allow individuals to vote once per day for 10 days. We wanted the community to have ample time to explore these organizations and for them to rally their supporters.
Who should we have tell these stories? Our distinguished collection of narrators featured sponsor representatives, including The Marketing Arm, the Dallas Mavericks, Tony Fay PR, and MVP, along with DISE board members and our finale emcee, Julie Dobbs from The Ticket and The Mom Game. We hoped this social media-centric approach would add a level of engagement across multiple days, with likes, shares, and comments from the narrators, their organizations, the beneficiaries, and all of their networks.
2020 influenced not only how we recognized the charities, but how we selected them. All summer, DISE programming had addressed the erupting racial tensions. So the Philanthropy Committee members looked for organizations whose missions included both service to children and social justice. They found three excellent ones:
• After8ToEducate
• EMBRACE Action
• Youth With Faces
Normally at the Fast Pitch event, we have a headlining music act of the caliber of U2 or Taylor Swift. We needed to duplicate their powerful impact, but I had, unfortunately, misplaced Taylor’s number.
OK, we haven’t convinced Taylor Swift to play a Fast Pitch yet (although Downtown Doug did a nice set one year). But we still needed attention-getting content to supplement the charity stories. We decided we’d have board members Hunter Harvin and Quashan Lockett do a retrospective on the social justice in sports webinar series DISE had held earlier in the year in conjunction with Black Sports Professionals – North Texas and the Women in Sports and Events DFW chapter. It would be poignant, but we also needed some content that could duplicate the exuberance everybody feels during the one time a year when the whole industry gets together. We needed to be, you know, fun. Even without cocktails. Or Taylor Swift.
Luckily DISE President Carla Rosenberg saw the vision. She let my colleague Dave French and I record video of her in front of a green screen and she gave a great performance while we threw her footballs and stabbed her with a hockey stick (the referee would have assessed me a five-minute spearing major penalty and a game misconduct in a real game).
The fast-paced result proved to be exactly what we needed as an opening video. If DISE members hadn’t picked up on the vision before, they could now. And they were energized. They could now see that Fast Pitch was still gonna be cool.
We put a couple more talented board members to work doing fun videos promoting the People’s Choice Award and the online auction (presented by Polsinelli), plus a promo from Julie. We also got all the charity stories videos shot and edited.
Meanwhile, we also wanted to find a prominent local athlete to honor with the Heart of Dallas Award, presented by Southwest Airlines. Past honorees have included Clayton Kershaw, Emmitt Smith, Jamie Benn, Troy Aikman, and Dirk Nowitzki, so we wanted to keep that run of quality going. Luckily the board saw an obvious choice in a Dallas Cowboys Pro Bowler who had both talked the talk and walked the walk on social justice and community service this year: DeMarcus Lawrence.
Thankfully Lawrence accepted the honor, designating the Ronald McDonald House to receive $10,000 on his behalf.
We tried to make the virtual happy hour finale fun, with Rosenberg and Board Chair Kern Egan even proposing drinking games involving the evening’s sponsors, Andrews Distributing and Red Bull (see how I worked cocktails back in there?). Via SPORTFIVE’s bespoke virtual events platform, we did much of the affair live, with a few pre-recorded bits. I’m not going to tell you which parts were pre-done - watch Julie’s DeMarcus Lawrence interview and see if you can guess which it was.
We wrapped it all up on time and, at the end, EMBRACE Action won the People’s Choice balloting. Just like a deserving nonprofit does every year. And we felt like we got all our boxes checked in terms of what we wanted to accomplish with the virtual version of the event. Thanks to social media interaction and the chat window at the finale, we even felt good about the networking angle. All the same, we’ll be happy to put 2020 behind us and do Fast Pitch in person next year. With cocktails.
Rush Olson has spent more than two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns, television programs, and related creative projects for sports entities through Rush Olson Creative & Sports, Mint Farm Films, and FourNine Productions.
