Here’s a first outreach message from a chemistry teacher moving into data analysis. The recipient is a data analyst at a health charity who made the same move from teaching a few years ago. The writer spent an evening on the message, reread it three times, and sent it. It starts like this:
Hi [Name], I hope you’re well! My name is [Your name], and for the last eight years I have been a chemistry teacher, which I’ve loved, but over the past year I’ve realized that what I enjoy most is working with data. I completed a bootcamp in data analytics in the spring, where I learned SQL, Python, and Tableau, and I’ve been building projects ever since…
It goes on for another five sentences. Now picture the recipient reading it on a phone between two meetings. Where do you think they stop reading?
Write for a Busy Stranger
Most likely, they stop somewhere in the second sentence, long before the writer gets to the point. When the message finally gets there, it contains three asks. These are a chat about the recipient’s role, information about any openings, and a request to pass on the writer’s CV.
A stranger owes you nothing, so a good outreach message is easy to say yes to. It’s short enough to read on a phone and specific enough that it’s clearly written for this person. It also ends with one small ask that they can grant in a minute or two. That gives you a simple three-part structure:
- Who you are: one sentence, taken from your positioning statement.
- Why them: one specific line that only this person could receive.
- One ask: small, with an easy way out.
