Promoting an event on a (no) budget

Investing funds when you don’t have funds can be a scary risk. So, this post is for the organisations (think community theatre, services clubs, church groups etc.) who host events or concerts where they need ‘bums on seats’ just to cover costs.

Here’s five tips to get started that are free or take a little financial investment or investment of your time.  

Social media:

• Create a Facebook event with clear ticketing information and get everyone involved in your event to invite their entire friends’ lists
• Post about the event regularly across Facebook and Instagram
• Grow your Facebook profiles by liking other pages with similar audiences
• Grow your Instagram by following profiles who like similar organisations to yours
• Create a profile frame to help spread the word and get all of those involved in your organisation to apply it
• If you can allocate any funds, boost some posts or promote your page (ensure you target your local demographic, using appropriate key words)

Promotion:

• Write a media release (no longer than one page) and promote each of your participants to their local media. If you’re not confident with your writing, you might get lucky by calling a newspaper and explaining the story to them and they might write it for you
• List your event for free on ‘what’s on’ sites, such as Event Finda or on council sites

Cross-promotion – your events and others!

• If you have multiple events scheduled for the year, cross promote them! Different people are going to be interested in different events, or might want to come to all. Don’t wait for one event to finish to start promoting the other
• Get in touch with similar community organisations and see how you can help each other. Encourage cross-promotion across social media and invite ‘ad-swaps’ in your programs or newsletters

At Elevate, we can tailor our local PR campaigns to suit a variety of budgets. Let us help you grow your organisation and its community reach. Contact the Elevate team today!