Guest Guidelines
Storyteller Guests
Being a storyteller guest at one of our Fuze Night events is quite exciting - you have 5 minutes to tell a story about your community building experiences. It doesn’t seem that much, what can you do with 5 minutes? Quite a lot actually. TV ads tell their story in 30s. Songwriters tell whole stories in under 4 minutes. We’re giving you a whopping great 5 minutes.
Research has shown that people’s attention spans are no longer than 5 minutes. Our brains have pretty much decided whether something is worth our attention within those first minutes of an experience. This is the reason why we don’t want our audience to sit in front of long presentations.
Of course, 5 minutes is not a long time. However, it is possible to make something compelling if you think about the story to tell. Here’s a great 8-minute video by Chris Anderson of TED explaining how to make a great public talk.
(Yes, we understand the irony of using another platforms content and curator to explain how to deliver a great talk. However, we feel that in the spirit of Chris Anderson, great ideas are worth sharing.)
Here are the main points that Chris makes:
Focus on one main idea.
Give people a reason to care.
Build your idea with familiar concepts.
Make your ideas worth sharing.
1. Focus on one main idea.
The idea is that you share one main idea rather than try to tell everything you know about a topic or your experience. If you have too many ideas, the audience will begin to zone out as they are being asked to take in too much information without the chance to process it. We know community and social issues are complicated subjects but try to hone in on the one idea that will help your audience “get” what you are doing.
2. Give people a reason to care.
This one is tough for community builders - shouldn’t everyone care about the issue or topic? Perhaps they should, but they don’t. Think about why that might be? Do they not know enough about why they should care? Surely if they knew about the situation, they would care more. Not necessarily. Even if they knew more about it, it might not be a priority for them. Think about your audience, and find a way to make them care about your idea.
3. Build your idea with familiar concepts.
This is all about accessibility of your story. Our audience is made up of people that won’t know your subject or aren’t experts in the topic area. Make it accessible by using concepts that everyone understands. Tie these concepts back into the main idea you are trying to leave them with. If sharing a concept confuses or requires more explanation, then think about scrapping it.
4. Make your ideas worth sharing
Your story, told at our Fuze Night event, will help spark conversation. Leave them with an idea that provokes thought and discussion - perhaps that could an idea that leads to new possibilities, or it might be a particular view point that encourages critique and support. If people are talking about your idea, and asking questions, it is something worth sharing.
Visual Presentation
With only 25 slides allowed for your presentation, we recommend that you keep your slides to a minimum of one slide per concept. Make the slides more a visual complement to what you are talking about rather than rely on your slides to tell the story.
Here’s Nancy Duarte explaining some ideas on how to make better visual presentations.
Performing Guests
For Performing Guests, it is hard to give a complete set of guidelines that covers the different art forms that we might want to showcase at Fuze Nights. You are also bound to the 25x5 rule. This means that any performance piece and accompanying explanations (if needed) should be delivered within 5 minutes. For songwriters, this gives enough time to share two songs or one song and an explanation of that song. Any slides or visuals that you plan on showing should not amount to more than 25 slides/visuals.
All art pieces and performances need to be original compositions, and you have to have the rights to perform them and assign rights to us to use.