Hosting your own charity event requires a lot of planning. However, the hard work doesn’t stop once you’ve finished planning the event. Once done, it’s time to turn your attention to promoting the event which can be a daunting task. Luckily, there are a lot of fantastic ways for you to advertise your event.
In this post, I’m going to run down the different ways which you can promote your charity event to ensure that it’s a success.
Step 1: Find your target audience:
Before you begin promoting your event, in fact, before you even start planning your event, it’s incredibly important to decide on who your target audience is. By finding out who your target audience is, you can then determine which methods you’re going to use to promote the event and also, how your audience will respond and engage with these methods.
STEP 2: CREATE A FLYER:
Creating a flyer which summarises all of the important information of your event is a great way to start the word about what you’re doing and what you’re hoping to achieve. It’s important that your audiences know all of the key facts about the event. This includes:
- What is it for?
- When and where is it being held?
- How can people get involved?
Flyers are excellent for providing this information as they can be passed around, hung up in different locations such as shops, schools, libraries and anywhere else you can think of. Just be sure that you get permission from where you’re hanging the flyers up before doing so.
Use social media:
Social media is an incredibly powerful tool where you can get attention quickly and efficiently with or without having to pay to advertise.
To start with, you can create a Facebook event which advertises your event and, from here, you can then begin to invite people who are on your friend’s list and also encourage them to invite people on their list. Some important things to remember when you’re creating an event are:
- Set your status to a few brief words about the event and change your profile picture to something related to the event – this can be either a graphic, logo or event the flyer that you created in step 2.
- Encourage your friends and followers to like and share both your status and your picture – they can even change their profile picture to be the same.
The next step is using Twitter to promote your event. When used the right way, Twitter is a brilliant tool, but if it’s not used correctly the tweet that you post can disappear within seconds and be lost in a sea of twitter posts and hashtags.
It’s important that you keep your post brief so you should write a few words which introduce the event and also include a link to a landing page or your Facebook page where people can then sign up to the event or confirm their attendance. You can also include hashtags in your post to help get more visibility.
You can use different types of social media tools that work for promoting events. Blogs are a fantastic way of being able to provide as much information as possible about the event, the cause, and what you’re hoping the event will achieve.
You can also use Instagram and Pinterest to share some photos of the event as well.
Create a promotional video:
I’m a firm believe that videos are king. You can create blog post after blog post describing your event and the reasons why you’re hosting it but getting people to read the entire post is always a challenge. However, if you create a promotional video, you can describe everything you need to for your audience to watch and to listen to – taking the work out of finding out all of the information about your event.
Creating promotional videos can be a lot of work, but if you’re event is on the large side then it can be a fantastic way of bringing much-needed and much-wanted attention to it. Also, you don’t need to be a professional filmmaker to do this – you can simply grab a camera and keep your video as simple as possible.
A great idea is to storyboard the video beforehand as this will allow you to record the video and then upload it to YouTube and other social sites without having to edit the video too much.
Use your target audience:
Form relationships with different organisations and clubs that have a similar mission to you and your charity event. Contacting these groups can give you access to a ton of resources, a lot more information and, most importantly, more people who will be interested in attending your event and will help you to promote the event to gain an even further reach.
For example, if your event is to raise money for a children’s charity, you could contact local schools, children’s hospitals and universities with a similar mission statement and then you can tap into their groups and their community organisations.
Go local:
There are several different avenues that you could use when it comes to going local and advertising your event. Many communities will have some form of community calendar – this could be attached to a local community centre, youth centre, or even a local children’s hospital.
You could also consider using local newspapers, radio stations or a TV station that focuses specifically on the news in your local community. Before attempting to do this, it’s important to research what resources your community has and then, based on your target audience, decide which resources are best for you to use.
Give incentives for those who attend:
If you want your event to really hit the ground running, you can create a number of different activities and give your attendees cool branded promotional merchandise which is related to the event and your cause. You could even consider having a raffle to give away prizes to those who sign up to the event.
All of these are nice ways of creating unique incentives to encourage more people to sign up. This also means that, when the event is over, the winners of the different prizes will be more likely to talk about the event and help grow popularity for future events – perfect if you’re thinking of hosting more events in the future.
Create alternatives for those who can’t attend:
You can choose any day in the calendar to host your event but, unfortunately, there are always going to be people who would love to attend but can’t. Consider offering alternatives for those who can’t attend as a way of making sure that everyone can get involved and no one has to feel left out.
CONSIDER USING PRINTED CHARITY MERCHANDISE:
Printed merchandise, such as charity T Shirts, are an excellent way of spreading the word of your event. If you’re hosting the event as a group, get everyone in the group to wear a T-Shirt which promotes your event so they can advertise it for you when they’re walking around.
Another great idea is to get branded merchandise, such as giveaway T Shirts, mugs, printed tote bags and other promotional items, which all feature the name of your cause, and give these away at the event. By doing this, you’re creating incentives for these people to promote your event for you and they’re more likely to get involved again in the future.
Additional tips:
- Offering food is a great way to attract more people to your event.
- An excellent way of getting attention is to create a tangible symbol for the event and get it printed out. Then you can get people to pose next to the symbol and take pictures. Upload these to Facebook and ensure that everyone gets tagged in the photo.
- Create an online registration form using a survey website so you can keep track of how many people should be attending your event.
- If you do create a video for the event, make sure it’s either creative or to-the-point and states relevant information about the event. If the event is designed to raise awareness then consider interviewing some people and asking them about their prior knowledge on the issue so you can use the footage to highlight any misinformation and incorrect facts that other people may believe about the cause.
