How to Promote A Student Group Event

Last weekend, I acted in a play called Rumors. The experience was a ton of fun, and I actually learned a lot about the best ways to promote a student group event.

Flyering on Campus. As I stood outside passing out flyers for the show, I realized that flyering is the worst way for people to first find out about the show. Very few people stopped to learn about a show that they didn't know anyone in, and even those people who I knew who stopped to talk to me were less likely to come to the show if this was the first time they heard about it.

Flyering is most effective for those people who have already heard about the event - whether that's through an email, Facebook, or word of mouth, it doesn't matter, they just need to hear about it first.

Announce and Follow-up. Students are busy on campus, and if you really want them to come to your event, you have to tell them multiple times. A person who gets an email about it and then you talk to them in person is more likely to come than someone who just gets an email or you just talk to about it.

Email. Keep the emails short and to the point. The purpose of the email should be up front. If you want a lot of people to come, the best thing to do is to go on facebook, write down the emails of all your friends, and then divide them up into the groups who they naturally know. People actually look to see who else is on the email, and if they know the other people you send the email to, they are more likely to go.

In general, people don't feel comfortable going to an event alone, so match them up with other people they know.

If you use this grouping technique, talk to one person in each group and ask them to organize and night to come to the event. This coordination gives the other people in the group a night when they know that other people will be going. What I found was that some of the groups of people I invited showed up in droves, while other groups had no one come - it depended on whether there was an organizer in that group of people.

Facebook invites. Facebook is so overused that invites are routinely ignored now. I would suggest using email instead of Facebook for the first round of invites because it's more targeted. Facebook is good, however, for the follow up to remind people about the show.

Face-to-face. The face-to-face follow up is critical because it's personal. Once you get a verbal commitment from someone, they will feel more beholden to stick to their word. They know that you'll notice if they are not there.

All-in-all, promotion takes a significant amount of work to do effectively, but the more effort you put in, the more people that will come out. I got about 25% of the people I contacted to come out using the techniques I talked about above, so I thought it'd be good to share.

The Fall of Communist China

A while back, I wrote about how China's policies of suppression will probably work as long as the economy is sailing. Once the economy goes into some sort of recession, though, I think they will be in trouble.

I read Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion over spring break, and it only reinforce my viewpoint. The author writes about how when freedoms or material objects are given and then at some point taken away, it creates a big backlash:

Perhaps, the most prominent proponent of this argement is James C. Davies, who states that we are most likely to find revolutions where a period of improving economic and social conditions is followed by a short, sharp reversal of thsoe conditions. Thus it is not the traditionally most downtrodden people--who have come to see their deprivation as part of the natural order of things--who are especially liable to revolt. Instead, revolutionaries are more likely to be those who have been given at least some taste of a better life. When the economic and social improvements they have experienced and come to expect suddenly become less available, they desire them more than ever and often rise up violently to secure them (page 257).

Once prosperity and freedom are given, it is very painful to take back.

Innovative Ideas

A lot of innovative ideas aren't actually that innovative. Most of them are taking ideas, techniques, and strategies from things that already exist and putting them in a new context.

I think the Penn Senior Class Gift Drive has made a mistake up until this point because they haven't looked at any other donation campaigns to get ideas for what works. The sad thing is that it'd be easy to take a look at what the Obama and Hillary campaigns have been doing and imitate their techniques. These campaigns are put together by professionals and the techniques obviously work, as Obama now has over 1 Million people who have donated.

Take a look at how their fundraising emails are written.
Take a look at how their ads are created.
Take a look at how their website is designed.
Then take a look at what you've done, and I bet you can find some innovative ideas.