It is a curious thing how the best and worst examples of how to promote and how not to promote your events can be found when trawling through the UK Universities’ events pages. I don’t intend to bore you with academic events but if you think about it you will see that they are perfect for this discussion. They offer a wide variety of events – like lectures, conferences, forums and lunchtime lectures. They tend to attract quite big names and they tend to present really good content (which was, is and should remain king). Yet attendance – wise they present major fluctuations from one university to the other.
Is that because their content differs?
Granted, some issues are less popular than others. However I have still to go to a university event that had really bad content. I know from experience that Birkbeck tends to have really good speakers. LSE does too. Yet LSE auditoriums are packed with students and industry people alike. Birkbeck event crowds tend to be more academia focused. And yet their content is not really all that different.
Should they really attract more people?
For me universities are not just there to educate their students. Nor are they there just to provide a platform for academics to talk to each other and stimulate research. Those two things are incredibly important but here is another point: Today universities should also share and spread knowledge more widely than ever before. You never know, the next big idea may come from an entrepreneur in the audience who hooked up with one of your research staff.
Is this going to be expensive?
I don’t believe in expensive either way. Working for a trade association does that to you. But specifically for UK universities (their finances tend to be somewhat worse than their US equivalents) I think it would be a waste of money. So no, this is not about big advertising budgets, PR accounts etc. This is about one simple trick:
Get them to come to you!
I am assuming you have good content. If you don’t, spruce up your content first, promote your events later. You don’t want to disappoint people. However once you do have the content you are happy with it is time to do two fundamental things: 1) Let people know and 2) Free the information.
1) Let people know
I already said this should not be an expensive exercise. All universities have websites now (I should hope) so why not use those?
- Have contact details of your events office. Not just for each event.
- Have a good newsletter (like Newcastle University). Some people might subscribe and stay on if you offer good introductions to your events and some interesting content.
- Have an RSS feed (like Goldsmiths do). Better yet have multiple feeds, like Newcastle University does for events, seminars, conferences etc.
- Have a function like “Add to Google Calendar” and/or “Add to Outlook”. Yes, people use them. Maybe not everyone but some do and that should be enough.
- Add social bookmarking (like reddit, delicious, twitter, friendfeed etc.) Let others do the advertising for you!
See a trend? The whole point is to give people content in a format that works for them and not a format that works for you.
2) Free the information
LSE does a wonderful job with this. They offer transcripts, podcasts and webcasts of their lectures (and note that they actually offer live webcasts). Granted, their pages could use a little work in terms of usability and design, but still. Why you should do this? Because your events are great! And since they are great, showing people how great they are means that they will start coming. And even if they don’t your aim (at least for an educational institution) has been achieved. You’ve spread some knowledge around.
Is this really going to work?
Have you heard of MIT? Take a look around the web nowadays and you will find videos of MIT events, forums and lectures all around. People upload them, promote them, talk about them. Discussions erupt on the web around those lectures and events. Can you imagine the positive implications this has for the MIT brand? Apart from the good content, MIT actually makes it easy for people to find and share this content. They have a central page for all their videos and they also have content on YouTube and iTunes U. You can share or embed their videos and they make this easy.
Why did I write all this? Because I really really really want to be able to go to some public lectures and conferences from time to time and I always miss out. By the time I trawl through the numberous website I’ve missed the event.
How about you out there?
