Resource:How to get people to come to your events

Introduction

When you think about a major event, what do you picture? A room full of people, free food, or maybe even games.  To have a successful event you might not need anything that fancy at all. In the following paragraphs we, will go over some key concepts that will aid you in achieving a successful event. These concepts will include information about your audience that will be attending your event. Along with some basic strategies that have been found to be crucial in having a good attendance. Even more into the idea of grabbing people’s attention, we will go into the concept of outreach. A useful idea that allows us to add a personal perspective to any event. Making people feel welcome and special, which is important if you want to have them come back again.

Once you have your audience and your event planned out, you are halfway there. Now the fun can finally begin. Whether you have some planning to finish up or you are ready to go, always have a plan. In our content section, you will read about some helpful hints to create and conduct the event. Touching on the organization, introductions, and more. Making your event one that will be like no other. If you follow these helpful hints, you could be on the track to having a successful event, but if you still want something more, look down at the illustrative backstory. An in-depth story about an event that was a big success. Lead by Macy Tush, a University Innovation Fellow at William Jewell College.

Audience

For people to attend your event, identifying a potential demographic can lead to a strong attendance. However, this is not always the case when planning for an event. For an event to be successful, you must allow for a variety of people to attend. No matter how big or small the event is, having a diverse audience will allow events such as talks and discussions achieve great success. By opening your event to a wide audience, you are gaining a bigger outreach and greater potential for a successful attendance.

Note the following suggestions:

• Try to identify a potential demographic of people to reach out to, but don’t be closed minded on who should come.
• Try and experiment with your audience by inviting a diverse range of people to your event.
• Leave a mystery or reward for your audience can lead to greater attendance and publicity to attract a bigger audience in the future.

Strategy

Please read the general tips on how to strategy effeciently to maximize the success of your event:

• Work with a team to develop measurable goals and expectations.
• Lean on your UIF cohort for inspiration and your administration for guidance. It’s harder if you have to do everything alone, so divide the work to suit everybody’s strengths.
• Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Remember that everyone has a view, perspective, and voice to contribute. Be open-minded.
• Brainstorming can take time, especially when working in a group. Don’t get discouraged.
• Use PR as a way to tell people about your event. Try to be mysterious and don’t give everything away or your audience will lose interest if they know everything that is going to happen. Try and do something new to get the wow-factor that will blow people away.
• Use incentives to get people to come, such as having a personal touch to your invite and making people feel important/heard.
• Don’t be afraid to fail. Learn from past experiences and failures to prototype what works best for your campus. Find out what works.
• Understand the diversity of students when deciding on the best way to have your event. Scale your audience accordingly to fit your goals. One easy way to start a conversation is to keep it simple, small, and informal.
• Reach out to students, but don’t waste their time. You need to earn their respect. Sit down with them and show purpose and initiative in your goals.
• Don’t do the same thing twice the same way. You lose a sense of awe this way.
• Keep contact with people that have shown up to past events. This way, they can help market promotion for you. Consider even sending a thank-you note or a physical takeaway to commemorate your event. Give people a sense of pride.
• Don’t let people leave your event empty-handed because they are coming to your event for a reason.
• Remember that what you put into the event is what you get out of it.

Content

Read these recommendations for your event:

• The organization is key! Plan out how you would like the event to run prior to it happening. Make sure any tools that will be needed are available and ready for use.
• Introduce yourself and the other members in your cohort.
• Give a background to what UIF is and the intentions of the group.
• Make sure the audience understands your mission/goal for the event. (Example: Identify issues around campus)
• Make sure when addressing an issue you brainstorm solutions. This will prevent people from just complaining.
• Know your setting; if the event is casual, there should not be a long PowerPoint presentation.
• Get people into groups! By making diverse groups students have the opportunity to interact with individuals that they are unfamiliar with.
• Value everyone. Each person brings a unique view to the table.

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Overall it is important to have a fun event that is interesting and interactive. Nobody wants to come to an event that seems like another lecture. Also understand that incentives such as T-Shirts, School apparel, and even free food are great ways to ensure a decent turnout. The value of the information or the achievement of a certain goal has a value, do not be afraid to spend some money.

Outreach

When organizing an event, effective outreach is essential in ensuring strong attendance. Utilizing traditional advertising strategies such as posters and university communications can yield successful results. However, to further engage the potential audience, a more personal approach is recommended. Personalizing the invitation and reaching out to the potential attendees face to face is a useful tactic to ensure high event turnout. Doing so adds a personal touch to the invitation and makes the potential participant feel that their unique opinion and perspective is valued. Also, when inviting individuals to the event, the exact details of the event can be left a mystery. This will create a sense of intrigue and curiosity that will entice the individual to attend.

After the Fact

Looking back and evaluating the event may seem like a pointless step in a guide to get people to come to your events, but it’s probably the opposite. Macy describes the event that she put on as an experiment, and the results of this particular experiment far exceeded her expectations. So like any good scientist Macy evaluated her results to understand how they could be used in the future. She particularly learned the importance of hearing from a wide variety of people and that some amount of mystery draws people to attend. She can now use these insights as she makes plans in the future.

Once the event takes place, hopefully with good attendance, take time to evaluate it and ask yourself a few questions such as the following:

• What was the best part about the event?
• Why did people want to come to this event?
• What did I learn from this that can be used in the future?
• What ideas do I have now to improve on this event?

Illustrative Backstory

This information was gathered by interviewing  Macy Tush, a current University Innovation Fellow at William Jewell College. She led a team and selected 20 unique individuals to attend an event at a local pub. Each person was personally invited using a business card with just a time and place to create mystery. The event brought together twenty people, who may not have interacted outside of that event, to voice their opinions and collaborate to come up with solutions to their university's problems. The event had 100% attendance, and the UIF team were happily surprised with the number of problems identified and the quality of solutions proposed. Macy and her team created a movement at her school that elevated UIF on her campus amongst students and faculty.  The students who attended were given shirts with a popular joke on it that only William Jewell College students and faculty would understand, which spread awareness about the event and created an outpour of interest in UIF. Seven of the original twenty people who were invited and given a voice at Macy's event ended up being so passionate about making a change they joined UIF in the following semester! This is just one of many examples of UIF cohorts adapting and creating unique events to make a change.

We would sincerely like to thank Macy Tush for giving both her time and insight on this guide! If you would like to learn more about how awesome she is, check out her wiki page here.

Written by: Damian Munoz,Sunny Murthy, Josh Jay, Michelle Paradise, Daniel Yim, Alexandra Haller, and Robert Shepherd.