Ever since I attended the first Ignite, I was hooked - great topics, great speakers, draconian format, high potential for failure and a hell of a lot of fun. I knew that I wanted to help.

As a n00b to any organization, I'm a firm believer in taking the worst job to alleviate the most pain. And I asked my self, what's the worst job that Ignite Seattle has? That worst job was sending out rejection letters.

We get somewhere between 50-80 submissions for every Ignite Seattle, which sounds great (and it is, please keep submitting). But there are only 16 spots at each event. Almost no pitch to Ignite is bad, so picking the best talks for an evening is tough.

At this point, I've sent out hundreds of rejection letters to folks who are much smarter and likely better speakers than me. The most frequent response back was, Why? I can tell you, it wasn’t you, it was us.

But I'm going to tell you how we pick the talks to give you the best shot at getting in.
We look at 5 key areas of varying importance. I've tried to weight them here.

When we're putting together an Ignite Seattle, we have a lot of competing goals. First and foremost, we want our event to be captivating & entertaining. In our eyes, there is nothing more captivating than someone talking about their passion.

Passion is REALLY important to us. Ignite's origins come from geek talks - for and by geeks and as the event evolved, we realized that the definition of geek has evolved as well. People are geeky about ALL SORTS OF STUFF

The reason I'm speaking on this topic tonight is because I'm passionate about Ignite. I woke up about a year ago in the middle of the night with a cold sweat with this talk coming out of my brain. I knew that I had to write it down or I wasn't going back to sleep.

Tonight's event alone, you're going to learn about sustainable urban farming, what it's like to be committed to the psych ward and making moonshine. MOONSHINE - how awesome is that?

We're suckers for a good title. A title that captivates us, is likely to captivate the Ignite audience. Boiling down your topic into something shorter than a tweet is really hard to do, but if you can do that, it shows you can sell your passion to an audience.

Here are some examples of great titles of past Ignite talks.

No matter how interesting your title may be, however, if your topic isn't something that would be interesting to the Ignite audience, your talk isn't going to be selected. That said, almost any topic can be made interesting to geeks. Remember: we're geeks. Please pander.

The angle you take on a topic is the very important. Management lessons from MicroGoogAzon? … Management lessons from Star Wars? Who wouldn't want to know how a Sith Lord might climb the corporate ladder?

We definitely take into account the life experience you've had, but you have to let us know. If you've spent 10 years as a marine biologist, or if you invented the climbing wall or if you grew up in Antarctica, let us know.

We have made a very deliberate effort in including more women in our events. Initially, we didn't have many women in the audience, which in turn meant that there were fewer women submitting talks. We believe having a more equal gender split makes for a better event.

We use Google Docs for Ignite submissions and this is what the submission looks like for us. If you talk summary is too long, it's nearly impossible to read on my laptop. Plus, this is Ignite. Brevity is king.

This cute sloth is here to remind me to slow down and take a breath. We’re in the home stretch.

Here are some final tips
• don’t repeat a previous talk
• don’t pitch your business
• Do pitch your side project
• do hack our format
• do volunteer for Ignite
If all else fails, go meta and pitch a talk about Ignite

In Summary
- Talk about your Passion
- Have a good Title & Topic
- Share Your Knowledge & Perspective
- Be Brief

Hopefully this talk has been helpful at increasing your chances at talking at a future Ignite.