Difference between revisions of "Publicity"

Revision as of 12:00, 8 June 2010

Ideally a single person should be in charge of publicity: someone who is able to dedicate a lot of time to it.

The more information people have, the more their interest is likely to be raised. A good publicity officer could increase your number of attendees by as much as a couple of hundred. And that may mean the difference between the convention making money and losing it.

Internet

You can use the internet to keep up a steady drip feed of information. The more often you can post useful information the better... up to a point! You can make useful news out of acts that you book, evening shows that you are organising, interesting workshops, announcing the pre-reg prices, asking people for their input on workshops, or asking for volunteers. If nothing interesting is happening, find something interesting and make it happen.

• Make sure your event is on all the relevant events listings that you can find, such as the Juggling convention listings on IJDB. As well as advertising your event, this also helps prevent other people organising a clashing event.
• Make sure your website is kept up to date with the latest news. Ideally the publicity officer should have the access and ability to update the website themselves.
• Post your news to all the forums: rec.juggling, UK_Jugglers, diabolo.ca, home of poi, and as many other sites as you think may be relevant. Don't spam, but increase your post frequency as the convention draws nearer. Answer as many questions as you can, as fully as you can.
• You should probably have a Facebook group (with an "event"), but not as your primary source of information: believe it or not, lots of your potential customers are not on Facebook, or have Facebook blocked at work.
• Post information on every possible social networking site you can, Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Twitter etc with updates and information from your website.

This thread on rec.juggling has some thoughts about how to do internet publicity in the days of social media.

Regional conventions

As soon as your venue and dates are confirmed, the publicity officer should go to every regional convention (wearing your logoed convention t-shirt) in the run up to the BJC, spreading fliers, posters, pre-reg forms and the latest news about how great YOUR BJC is going to be. If you don't have any new news, just be enthusiastic. MAKE people write the BJC dates in their paper/electronic diary while you watch them do it. (If they can't come for some good reason, then fine. But if they don't come because they temporarily forgot the dates, you just lost some money). If the publicity officer is not able to go to a regional convention for any reason, it is their job to make sure another member of the organising crew goes in their stead. Oh and have pre-reg forms to hand as soon as it is open, and remind people how much money they save themselves by pre-regging, and how much it helps out the BJC.

Traders

If you send flyers to traders in plenty of time, they will often be happy to include them in their outgoing parcels for free.

Local Press

IF your show venue is big enough to have spare seating for MGPs, then it's worth your while to promote the show to local non-jugglers. You can:

• Contact the local paper, radio & tv stations.
• Contact the council publicity officer who can get your BJC listed on the council website, in the council newsletter etc, particularly if the council are co-operating on the event.
• Distribute flyers in local shops, cafes, libraries, etc.
• Contact any local events listings or bloggers.

You probably want to use separate publicity material to market the show to non-jugglers, compared to what you use for the BJC itself.

Make sure that the money you stand to make on extra ticket sales is more than what you are spending on local marketing.