Want to have a successful event? You will need to advertise, otherwise it will flop–believe us, we know! Using the following quick and easy recipe, you will be on your way to holding a great event…
Ingredients
- An Event to Advertise (a protest, a movie, etc)
- A Flyer or Flyers
Directions
Making a Flyer
The first thing you will need to do is make a flyer. While there are an infinite number of ways to make a flyer, the following tips might be helpful:
- Use a clear and bold headline (ex: “Protest Bush”)
- Have a clear secondary headline giving the date, time, and location
- Include a brief description
- When selecting a graphic, it usually helps to select or create a large graphic that is black and white
- Include some contact information such as an email address or website
- Finally, it helps to have the main points of the flyer–what it is advertising, date, time, and location–large enough to read it from ten feet away
Places to Put Up Flyers
Every time we organize an event, we put up flyers at the following places–at a minimum. It always helps to be on the look out for new places. You might even want to keep a running list of places to flyer, adding new places and removing old ones as needed.
Colleges
- Aquinas College
- Calvin College
- Grand Rapids Community College
- Grand Valley State University – Allendale
- Grand Valley State University – Grand Rapids
- Kendall College
Businesses
- Common Grounds (Fulton Heights)
- Discussions Coffee House (Downtown)
- Four Friends (Downtown)
- The Euclid (Downtown)
- Harvest Health (Various Locations)
- Kava House (Eastown)
- Morning Star (Eastown)
- Vertigo Music (Downtown)
- Wealthy Bakery (Eastown/Heritage Hill)
Cooperatives and Other Spaces
- The Bloom Collective (Eastown)
- The Division Avenue Arts Co-Operative (Downtown)
- Institute for Global Education (Eastown)
In addition to the places listed above, it is generally a good idea to put up flyers in neighborhoods and businesses with a lot of foot traffic. For example, Eastown, Heritage Hill, downtown, etc. As with businesses, these should represent the minimum number of areas you flyer–always try to find new parts of town. Also, you should be aware that where you flyer can to a large extent determine the demographic that your event will attract–if you want to have broad attendance, advertise at places and in areas frequented by a variety of people.
To attach flyers, you can use tape, a staple gun, or wheat paste (see the wheate paste how to).
Online Advertising
Everyone seems to love the Internet, or at least we’re all told that we should love it (for the record, the author of this guide hates it). While that debate is beyond the scope of this guide, we’ve certainly found that advertising online is a significant help for any event….
Calendar Websites
The following local websites have calendars and will list local protests, film showings, and other events pertaining to social change:
Also, by submitting the event to Mediamouse.org, it is automatically included in their weekly “upcoming events” email that lists social change events happening all over Grand Rapids.
You can also register for an account at WMJPC.ORG–the website of the West Michigan Justice and Peace Coalition–and post your event on their website. Like Mediamouse.org, they send out a weekly upcoming events email to their membership.
You can also usually get events listed at GRNOW.COM, a big entertainment website that apparently has a large email list. We’re not sure how helpful it is, but for the effort it takes to submit an event (about four minutes), it’s probably worth it.
MySpace
Unfortunately, MySpace is owned by the same man that owns Fox News. However, as one of the largest and most visited websites in the world we have had pretty good luck using it to promote our protests and other events. We have found the following tips to be helpful:
- Make an image of your flyer and put it on your profile
- Use that image to leave as a comment on all of your friends’ profiles
- Change your profile image to your flyer
- Send out a “bulletin” a few weeks before the event, the night before, and the day of containing the flyer and all the basic information
- When you send out your “bulletin,” it helps to include “*** PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY AND PASS ALONG TO YOUR FRIENDS ***” on the top and bottom to encourage folks to pass the information along
- If the profile you are using to promote the event is for a group (for example, ACTIVATE’s at http://www.myspace.com/activategrandrapids), you can use your flyer as a comment when you confirm new friends
While Facebook has a reputation as being “better” than MySpace due to its “cleaner” design and interface, it is every bit as bad. It’s still a wealth of data on all of us who have accounts and what we like to do, ripe for the taking by corporations and/or the government. However, like MySpace, it can be a really good tool for promoting an event. Here’s some tips:
- Create a Facebook “event” for your event and invite all of your friends and encourage them to invite their friends
- We created our own Facebook “group” (ACTIVATE SDS) and have invited people to join that. It gives us another way to reach potential supporters