For rural event planners, it’s essential to find the right combination of traditional and new media methods for turning out attendees. These six tips include ideas for maximizing your online presence to benefit your event, in the short and long term.
Create A Hashtag…For Marketing & To Crystallize your Purpose.
Creating a hashtag for rural events isn’t a good idea just for the sake of promoting the event, (although that’s certainly a benefit). Bigger than that, deciding on a hashtag will force you or the committee planning your rural event into distilling the theme or importance of your event into a few words. This exercise will help you make decisions about the aesthetic of your marketing and the selection of key stakeholders. For example, #InspiredOjai and #OjaiLeadeshipSummit may both describe the same conference in small-town Ojai, California, but the feel and audience for them is completely different and would dictate correspondingly unique marketing approaches. Try to create a short, distinctive and thematically descriptive hashtag for best effect. It’s worth figuring out your event’s sensibility early on in the process. The requirements of an effective hashtag can force you to up your game in the production of traditional marketing methods like flyers or billboards.
Register With Every Online Calendar You Can Find.
Take advantage of listings from your local government, libraries and other relevant charities. A quick Google search of the word Calendar with the name of your town or county may help bring up potential listings. Start early and hit them all to make use of that new hashtag.
Celebrate Your Volunteers With Online Profiles & Interviews.
Dale Carnegie’s classic self-help tome, How to Win Friends and Influence People continues to provide folksy wisdom that applies to the media landscape today. One of the timeless quotes he offered was, “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” Carnegie noticed that people like you…when you listen to them and talk about them rather than yourself. Perhaps his insight is a humbling reality of human nature, but as event planners, take advantage.
Let’s say your organization caters to young people and is planning an event aiming to achieve great attendance from local students. Sure, you can ask your young volunteers to share the official flyer for the event. ‘It’s such a great cause!’ And maybe they will. ‘After all, there will be free food and a great speaker in attendance!’ If they don’t share your flyer, you can ask again. ‘Honestly, the event is going to be awesome!’ If they’ve already shared it, you can ask them to share it again. And again. And maybe they will. But, using some of Carnegie’s insight, you might be better off doing a “Volunteer of the Week” profile for the eight weeks leading up to your event than recruiting young people to trumpet your organization’s official message.
Consider this approach: each week, the director of your charity interviews and profiles one of the eight young people volunteering for your organization. Then publish one per week with the final question of each interview about the upcoming event. Chances are MUCH greater that those young people will share the news that they are the “Volunteer of the Week” because it highlights something about them that would bring them pride among their friends and family. Maybe their parents and family members would share in that sense of accomplishment and attend the event, too, out of gratitude that their kid’s potential was highlighted. After they’ve been profiled, you may not even need to ask your volunteers to share the official flyer – they may enthusiastically do so on their own. With rural events, you’re necessarily dealing with a relatively small pool of people, so finding ways to maximize each individual’s impact on attendance is even more crucial than if you’re hosting an event in a densely populated area. One way to effectively use social media for a rural event is to really celebrate the individuals helping you to put it together.
Build A Synergy Cycle that Leverages Online Interest Into Quality Sponsors.
One reason we believe that rural businesses should invest in great social media practices year-round is because those followings come in handy when it’s time to produce your big yearly event. Let’s say you’re a small town publisher that’s started a writer’s retreat in your scenic town in rural America. Once a year, eight writers will pay a premium to take a break from the city and travel to your neck of the woods to discuss the great American novel, then produce one.
But even a relatively modest retreat like this – eight or ten writers – will require help. Those attendees will need a place to stay. They’ll need affordable local eateries. You may even want to offer them something special, like a free software for screenwriting or a $25 gift card for the local bookstore.
Good social media practices will pay their dividends in gathering the resources you need to serve your attendees. How? If your social media feed for your publishing company has been offering free writing tips for a year and you have a sizable following, it will help your case when you drive down to the local bed-and-breakfast and ask them to become a sponsor of your retreat. They’ll be more likely to provide free or discounted rooms for your conference guests if you can show them that thousands of out-of-towners will be exposed to information on their hotel, which in turn may help their business. It also works wonders if you can make arrangements with your partner businesses to include information on your retreat on their own feeds, perhaps as an “announcement” of their sponsorship.
It’s a relatively easy ask to say, “We like to celebrate each sponsor coming on board with an online announcement – do you mind sharing that with your folks?” After all, one of your writers may come from 10 miles away rather than 1,000 miles away. Perhaps they’ll see a retweet from the local bookstore or a restaurant they patronize, which will in turn feed their interest in committing to the event. And once again, your strategic partners will be more likely to share information on your writer’s retreat if they see you have a powerful presence that extends beyond the borders of your small town. So remember, the social media legwork you do in May could end up substantially helping your year-end events – it’s a process. For more on how to build a social media following for rural businesses, check out our blog on the subject here.
A Great Photographer Will Amplify An Awesome Event & Redeem a Lousy One.
It’s so important for every rural organization in this social media age to hire a terrific photographer for your event (or nurture a budding shutterbug on your staff). If your event is a huge success, the photographs will be extremely useful in spreading the “1,000 words” at a time about your organization and its mission. But great photography is also a way to save an event that might be perceived as a mild failure and digitally transform it into a big success.
How? Let’s say 25 people show up, but you were hoping for 75. In fact, you promised your local sponsors there would be at least 50 people there. Lower-than-expected numbers could lead to some difficult conversations. Even the stakeholders too good-hearted and nice to be openly critical of your efforts may walk away feeling slightly dispirited, not the emotion you wanted to instill in them. However, if you have a terrific photographer covering your event and effectively use those photographs on social media, your sponsors may yet think of your event as a winner and be grateful to collaborate with you in the future.
A great photographer, in a matter of minutes, can capture imagery that your sponsors could use for years on their websites or social media feeds or even display at their place of business. A well-framed photo with creative use of exposure can capture a fun moment between friends with a higher-level aesthetic than a backyard selfie, something young people would be excited to share…just because it looks so damn good. Many times, a great photographer will cost you some dollars, but it’s like taking an insurance policy out for the stakeholders. So if turnout is low, you’ll more than make up for it by capturing stunning photographs, then sending graphics to your sponsors they can use. How about a sunset photo of three smiling participants in their target audience in front of their logo underlined with a classy quote from you, something like, “XYZ Sponsors made quite an impression on attendees”?
One caveat – sometimes people who charge money to photograph events aren’t truly great photographers, so you have to do some homework and invest in the right person. If you don’t have access to a worthy photographer but see some talent in one of your young volunteers, “sponsor” an online photography course for them. They’ll be honored – and for a cheap $25 investment, you’ll start getting better pictures.
Decompress. Then learn from your data.
Remember, for rural businesses and organizations, it’s not just about one event as a silver bullet to success. It’s about developing a system that allows you to build an organization, cause or attraction that has long-term appeal. So take advantage of the data that social media platforms provide (once you’ve had time to decompress and take a day off). It’s important to note who were the social media stars on your volunteer team and which articles, e-flyers and posts drove traffic, so that you can make your next event an even bigger success!