Promotion and Outreach Tips
After taking the time to plan the event, it's important that the planning group creates a clear marketing and outreach strategy for how the event will be promoted at each of the system institutions.
Things to Consider:
- Is the host institution soley responsible for creating outreach and marketing materials?
- If only one institution is creating materials, will the other institutions have the ability to edit the materials to fit their needs?
- Is there any specific branding that all institutions will use on the outreach and marketing materials?
- What hashtags or other specific language needs to be communicated with marketing teams?
- How often will there be social media posts about the event?
- Is there specific language that needs to be included in the email commnuncations for each system institution?
- Will the host institution representative be responsbile for communicating with those faculty, staff, and students who are participating in the event?
Communicating with Participants
A system-wide event is likely to have more participants than an event that is focused on one institution so it's important to keep in communication with participatnts. The type and frequency of the communication will depend on the event itself, but here are a few questions to keep in mind:
- Will participants be required to register for the event? If so, there should be clear directions posted somewhere on where they can register and the date that registration closes.
- Will there be a way for participants to sign in at the event itself? Sign ins are great for record keeping but participants should be told ahead of time to look for a sign in sheet.
- Will the event be recorded? This will likely be a common question from participants who may not be able to attend the event live but are still interested in the information. Knowing whether or not events will be recorded ahead of time is important!
Example from Texas Tech University System Event
To celebrate Open Education Week, the Texas Tech University Libraries hosts an Open Education Week Virtual Conference. Since it was going to be a conference rather than individual events, it meant the addition of communicating with presenters. Here are a few questions that we had to answer when we were thinking about the best ways to communicating with presenters:
- How long was the call for presentation proposals going to be open?
- When would presenters know whether or not their presentation had been accepted for the conference?
- How were we going to handle scheduling presentions and what was the best way to communicate that with presenters?
- Should we include the institutional representive on the email for faculty presentation proposals that were accepted?
- Will we give presenters the opportunity to do a "tech check" prior to their presentation?
- If a presenter wants to share links to resources and/or presentation slides, when is the best time to ask them for those?
