Cold emails
Objective: To send a cold email to someone I’d like to meet, and set up an in-person, phone, or video meeting with this person.
Process: When I just started working on my book project, I decided to reach out to people dealing with Vitiligo to learn more about their story and how they viewed ‘body acceptance’. I believed that doing this would help me understand if people would resonate with the theme of my book.
I reached out to 7 people with Vitiligo and 10 Vitiligo support groups via email/instagram to have them hopefully answer my questions.
Most of them ended up replying and/or answering my questions, which was great!
One such person was Stef Orzech, who’s Medium article I found during my research and resonated with me. I tracked him down on LinkedIn, without knowing if I had the right person, and sent him a message saying I wanted to chat!
Outcome: He responded! Although two weeks later, I was so glad that he did anyway. He turned out to be the right person, and he was more than willing to chat :)
Unfortunately, I didn’t get back to him at the time - I had already moved beyond the research phase of my book and I thought I would later.
I recently messaged him back to continue where we left off, and hopefully, I’ll hear from him soon!
Reflections
Out of all the people I reached out to, none of them converted into a phone/video call, including Stef’s (at least yet). I believe it was harder for people considering the times.
Reaching out to people I didn’t know through various channels and then actually receiving responses was definitely very satisfying. I didn’t feel comfortable reaching out on Instagram DM since I was always used to going the email way. I thought it was intrusive to someones personal space. But I found that people were actually more responsive on their social networks, and approached the same conversation in a more friendly and less formal way.
Although my reaching out didn’t result in a phone/video conversation, it did help me get people to respond via email and help my project!