Explainer: How to (correctly) pitch your business or service to us in hopes of a partnership or more

In this guide, we’re going to explore a question we must receive probably dozens of times a day. We explore partnerships of all kinds with various firms around the world. We love them as many of them often result in some rather amusing adventures along the way. Partnerships are also a vital piece of our network that helps our network survive.

Pitching your business or service to us is an important step to getting your project on our radar. We receive a large number of e-mails every day and may take some time to get to a partnership or request queries. Projects and partnerships are reviewed by our internal committee commonly known to the public as The Common Room. We have a strict set of guidelines for partners; vendors, advertisers, marketers, and anyone else who would otherwise fall into this category.

1. Proposals must be in PDF form or PowerPoint presentation. They must be presented in full form to a member of the executive committee. This is typically SHK after the proposal has been signed off on and approved.
2. Proposals must contain budget information. This information must contain the expected budget for whatever project or partnership and payment agreement terms.
3. Your pitch should contain the three Ws. The Who The What and the Why.
4. If a partnership requires an in-person appearance the pitch should contain (dates; expected compensation, accommodation information, point of contact, and detailed event information.)

Pitching your service to us

1. Your e-mail should introduce your service; your founder or executives, the company’s background, and other interesting or relevant information about the service or organization providing the service.
2. We do not endorse services or products that we have not personally tested or used.
3. We do not promote or endorse services or products from organizations or individuals with negative public images (think: a political endorsement for a political party or political action group)
4. We cannot guarantee that we will agree to promote or endorse all products or services that are shown to us. Although we give everybody a shot and we use particular criteria to pick our choices — we tend to promote and endorse things we also find interesting or that we think the public may find interesting. If these two conditions cannot be met we may not promote or endorse the product or service.
5. At no time will we promote or endorse a product to do with the American far-right or its allies. This goes without saying this also applies to Europe and the United Kingdom. This includes directly to individuals; organizations, companies, shadow companies, third parties, LLCS (US) and anything related. For individuals or groups found to have flouted this policy we reserve the right to collect the information that was used and will permanently ban said users from our server. This is irreversible and cannot be undone.
6. Religious-based products or services will be heavily scrutinized and reviewed. We retain the right to refuse products or services that are religious in nature and obviously or indirectly discriminate against a protected class or group. We’re not kidding we have internal content officers that review all products and services and anything that contains discriminatory content will not be tolerated. We do not care who you are, keep it classy and polite.

Pitching your product to us

1. Product pitches should almost read as if we picked up a magazine at the supermarket and were perusing the pages waiting to checkout. Presentation matters.
2. Your ‘sales pitch’ should include 5 reasons why we should test and later endorse your product. Why would it be beneficial for us as a product? How will it be beneficial for our audience?
3. Your product would ultimately appear in endorsements by SHK. This means that the final greenlight is a meeting with our Chief Executive who will either agree or reject the proposal based on their preferences and whether or not they feel it is an appropriate endorsement. Please keep in mind that although criteria for this exist, they may have their own requirements apart from this that are subject to change and would be discussed during final meetings. A helpful tip for those who make it to the final stages of partnership talks is that kindness and presentation matter. Timelines are also important.
4. Payment agreements or terms. This includes direct payment for endorsement or simply receiving the product for free.
5. Please keep in mind these particular posts in accordance with laws in the UK and the United States are marked as sponsored posts. If you are giving us freebies or paying us to talk about your product, those in power require us to tell the public we were paid to do so. We do not have the ability to circumvent this. It’s also just the right and ethical thing to do.
6. Beauty products and skincare stuff must be manually tested by us first before we will agree to promote or endorse the product. No question this is a mandatory rule.
7. This list is subject to change at any time and based upon the scale or complexity of a project proposal.

Investment proposals

We typically don’t accept investment proposals as these often include corporate interests and that sort of stuff. As many know, we do not allow corporate donations or investments as we do not want to subject editorial control or influence to outside interests or deep-pocketed investors. However, we do accept investments or rather ‘reader donations.’ Similar to a museum, we do do announce reader donations and later memorialize them assuming we are permitted to do so by the donor. Donations are simply donations and have no bearing over the editorial influence or control of this newspaper or its affiliates. They do not guarantee special treatment or favourable outcomes of newspaper coverage.