How to Promote your event

Why should I promote my event? Promoting is the best way to get the word out about your event and get more people to participate. Our research shows: 94.5% of events that are promoted through the system have volunteers sign up. only 52.1% of events that are not promoted have volunteers sign up. So you can see that taking a moment to promote your event greatly improves overall participation. In this presentation we will show you the different ways you can promote your event and get volunteers involved.

Links to promote your event There are two different ways to access the Promote feature. The first one is from the Manage Tab, Manage Events link. Here you will see the link to promote off to the right within the list. The second place is when you click on the event title from any location within the Manage Tab. Here on the event description page you will see the link to promote off ot the right under the date and location box

Promoting to individuals or mailing lists Your first option is to promote to individual users. Clicking on either the magnifying glass icon or where it says Click here to add Recipients will bring up the user search dialog. Enter the name of a person you want to promote to, then search. When the results come back, simply click the box next to their name and then search for another person. You can select as many people as you like. If you have internal lists that break your group into even smaller subgroups and want to promote an event that is specific to one of these other groups here is what you can do: Open the user search dialog and search for and select yourself, write your custom message then promote the event to yourself. When you receive the , forward it on through any internal mailing list that you have.

Promote to your group To promote to your entire group, click the group tab on the promote page. You will see your group(s) listed in the available box. Click the group(s) you would like to promote in the Available box to move it into the Selected box. If you want to promote to more than one group and are set to manage more than one, use the list box to select the group category then select each group from the available box and move it into the Selected box. The radio button All is checked by default. If you leave it set to All then your promote will only go to individuals that have All of the groups you selected as memberships in their profile (This would be good if you were say, promoting to a city group then possibly a division or department group). If you want to send to multiple groups such as locations/cities then set the radio button to ANY, this will then send your promote to everyone that has any one of the groups you selected. Once you have selected your group and written your custom message, click the Preview button. NOTE: People can only be members of one group per category but they can have memberships in multiple categories.

Preview and submit your promotion The Preview screen will tell you how many people you are about to promote to. You can also see here how your will appear to the people that receive it. They will have your custom message at the top then the full event description an a link to go directly to the site and sign up for the event. If you are happy with the number of users that will be sent the message, hit Submit and you are done. If you feel the number of people is too large or you want to target a more specific audience then you can use the causes and skills section to further filter the list of recipients, in this case click the Cancel button to return to the previous screen.

Filtering the list with causes and skills You can use the Causes and Skills lists to further filter down the number of people your promote will go to as well as targeting a more specific audience that might be more inclined to be interested in participating in your event. You can select as many causes that relate to your event and skills that would be appropriate as you wish. The system will now look at all members of your group(s) for people that have at least one of the selected causes or skills and send the promote to them. The members of your group(s) that do not have at least one of the causes or skills will be excluded from the promote . After you have selected a few causes and skills click the preview button to see the new number of people who will be sent your promotion. NOTE: This filtering works best if your users have been encouraged to fill out their profiles. It is recommended that when you talk to users and/or in any communications about your site that you politely reminded them to take a moment to fully fill out their profile. It benefits them as well as you.

Preview and submit your promotion Now that we have selected some causes and skills we can see that the number of users that we are going to promote to has been reduced from the entire group of 1,250 to only 550 members. Besides reducing the number of individuals we are now also reaching out to a more targeted audience of people that are more likely to want to participate in the event. If you are not happy with the new number of targeted users simply click the cancel button again and go back as either add or remove some causes and skills until you get the desired number of individuals you are comfortable with. Once you are satisfied with the number, click the submit button. NOTE: Promote s are sent out every 15 minutes, and very large numbers of individuals are broken out into smaller batches so as not to overload your system. If after one hour you determine that no one received your promote contact so we can help determine if there is any issue with your servers trapping them.

Your Event is Promoted Congratulations Youre done!! You have now nearly doubled the chances that your event roster will be filled with eager and enthusiastic volunteers!!