Publicity Techniques

York SU has over 200 societies, as well as sports clubs, student media, volunteering groups and more, so sometimes it can be difficult to get your voice heard!

We’d suggest the following to help plan your publicity campaign:

The Five Ws

Who, What, Where, When and Why are you publicising? Discuss this with your committee - these should help you set your marketing plan.

Plan

As soon as you’ve set the date of your event, work back at least four weeks in advance of the event date to set your publicity officer/team deadlines. Make sure you turn your rough marketing plan into a real action plan with dates and delegation.

Suggest-Fest

Hold a meeting with your committee where everyone has the chance to suggest publicity methods. Don’t hold back– write down as many different ideas as you can. You could write down associated words, themes and ideas; reflect on previous publicity; or draw inspiration from designs and adverts you currently like.

Branding

Try to develop a style or brand identity that all your communication material will carry. This enables you to create an identity for your campaign or event. Having a brand could mean having a certain colour, logo or tagline for your group, then making sure that you maintain it across all your publicity. This should make you more recognisable. Always keep in mind your target audience.

Time

Take into account how long design work will take to turn around, when to launch Facebook events, when to submit plasma screen artwork, and so on, so you don’t miss any deadlines.

Word of Mouth

The original social media! Use lecture shout outs to tell people about your society and upcoming events (this is a particularly useful tool for department-specific societies). Email the lecturer beforehand to ask permission, and prepare what you’re going to say. Try to get to lectures for different year groups, too!

Encourage your members to tell as many people as possible about the society. If you want them to spread the word though, you’ll need to keep them active and interested! Provide incentives, and maintain contact with them. You could run a ‘bring a friend’ event, asking every member to bring someone else along to engage more people.

Finally, come up with an ‘elevator pitch’ for your group. If you only had two floors of a lift ride to explain what your society is about and how the person you’re talking to can get involved, what would you say?

Feedback

Evaluating your marketing methods and techniques is key to further developing your society. There are various ways you can find out what people really think of your group and how you can spread your message further. Consider creating a survey (use Google Forms) and sending it out to your society members to complete anonymously. You could do this annually, at the beginning and end of your committee’s tenure, or even after each event to see how people found it, in order to improve next time.

Questions?

Contact your link staff member or our Marketing Team (communications@yorksu.org)

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