Leadership Resources
Leadership Skills — Publicity & Advertising
Publicity serves an extremely important role in promoting your meetings and/or programs. Good publicity will pay off through better attendance and participation in your events.
Before beginning your publicity campaign, the following should be considered:
- Audience: Who do you want to reach and how? Is your event for just the members of a specific floor, or can anyone attend? The answers to these questions will guide the scope and location of your publicity.
- Information: Make sure that your publicity materials contain all of the appropriate information (who, what, when, where, why, how). If you have a gimmick to encourage attendance (free food, raffle prizes, competition, etc), include this information.
- Resources: What are your resources? Look at people, talent, materials donations, etc. Publicity done by just one person may limit what you can do; whereas, a committee of people working on publicity can do so much more.
- Location: Where will your materials get the most attention? Choose high traffic areas and give thought to placing your advertisement in different and unusual places. Be creative! Make sure to research the rules and procedures of your location and how early you need to reserve it. Be sure you find out and understand campus public posting policy.
- Schedule: How much time do you have? What deadlines must be met? The optimum time to begin advertising the event is 2-3 weeks before it is going to happen. Write up a realistic calendar with deadlines to keep track. Once you have thoroughly discussed the above items, your publicity campaign should be ready to take off. All that is needed is the appropriate medium. The following contains a list of the various types of media that will help you formulate a successful publicity push.
Types of Publicity
- Word of Mouth: Probably the best medium of all is word of mouth. Once you have put together a publicity committee, it must sell your event to the residents. If everyone talks up the event, people will become interested. Get people talking and interest will spread.
- T-shirts: Use bright colored T-shirts with phrases like “Ask Me What I’m Doing Tonight” or specific information about the program such as the Date, Time and Place to help encourage other students to talk to you about the event.
- Banners: Making a Banner is as easy as projecting an image on to a plain bed sheet, tracing the design, and painting on the information. Hang the banner in highly visible places (ask first) like Student Centers or Cafeterias.
- Tickets: Your event may be free but they don’t have to know that! Create tickets for a big event that include the Date, Time and Place and pass them out to students.
- Food: Use stickers or labels to add information about your event to snacks and pass them out to hungry students.
- Invitations: Make advertisements personal by creating invitations to be placed in mailboxes or under doors.
- Internet: Use Facebook groups, E-vites, and E-mail to notify students of your event. Create a webpage and post the link around campus.
- Get Other People to Help: Send out an announcement about your event to faculty, sororities, fraternities and other relevant groups and have them help spread the word.
- Erasable “Vandalism”: Write on mirrors in public bathrooms or windows in public areas with erasable markers. Use sidewalk chalk to draw arrows to your event and other information. Be sure to clean up your promotion afterwards!!
- Traditional Promotion: Anyone can make a flyer or a poster so make sure it stands out! Use different size or colors of paper than what you are used to seeing. Include easy to read information or an eye catching graphic. Convert your flyer into a Table Tent (tri-fold so it stands alone) or a Doorknob Hanger.
- Incentives: Offering food, giveaways, prizes, and gifts can be as simple as buying a bag of lollipops or ordering shirts for attendees. Think about it this way – Do you ever turn down free stuff?
University Posting Policy
All publicity appearing on bulletin boards in Residence Halls must be approved and stamped at an Area Desks on each side of campus.
Publicity for posting in the Student Centers must be approved by Student Center staff. You can take your posters to the information desks in each Student Center for approval. The staff will then take care of posting the fliers on the appropriate bulletin boards.
The event, time, place, and cost/price/donation (when applicable), must also be stated. Event posters must be taken down 24 hours after the event has been concluded.
Posting over or removing existing material is not allowed.
Adapted from: California State University, Student Activities Office