How would you get the word out about an event on the Notre Dame campus?

While I don’t profess to know all of the different ways to reach faculty and students, I will give you a run down on what I would do.

• You have to put the event somewhere so people would know what’s going on. I would put it on my website with the sign up form. If you want it to look really nice and email you every time someone signs up, use wufoo.com or surveymonkey. If you don’t care about how it looks and you don’t care if it emails you, then use a Google Form and embed it on the website.
• Next I would put it on the calendar.nd.edu – if you don’t know how, there’s a submit an event button on the bottom left.
• Then I would make sure The Week email has it. They send out two different versions so you need to specify which ones you want it on. Contact theweek@nd.edu
• If I was going after students or it was students, faculty and staff, I would do table tents. They are free to put out but you have to provide them. You need to contact Food Services for this and you should speak with Eula Hernandez. She’ll have a form for you to fill out and they will allow them up for three days and then throw them away. BTW, you need to put them up yourselves now that Adworks is no longer around.
• Posters are a must for all groups and they last longer. I would make them and then put them up. Again, with Adworks being out of commission you’ll have to put them up yourselves.
• Listservs are great for communicating to specific groups on campus. You can find all the different listservs here and you’ll need to contact the listserv owner to send it out. Each dean has his own listserv as well. A message from the Dean gets read but use it wisely.
• Inside.nd.edu is another great place to get the word out. I would make some graphics and have the inside.nd.edu team get them into the rotation. Lots of people visit inside.nd.edu every day. You can contact Jack O’Brien to get things moving on this one.
• The Observer is another great vehicle. I would buy ad space but I would also contact the staff to see if I could get a story about my event done. You never know if they are interested and a good pitch could get you some good earned media placement.
• Social media is another great place. If you have a Facebook page, then make sure the event is posted to the page via the Event Application. Then share it with as many people as possible.
• There are lots of other things to do like guerrilla marketing with post-its and giveaways. I originally had sidewalk chalk up this is not permitted on campus.  Thanks to Brian for the correction and link to advertising via the dulac.
• Having free food and drink is a great attention getter. Just make sure you have the budget. And if the right clearances for the beverages you want to serve.
• Probably the most effective way to get the word out is to have people pass the invite along. If you and your guests invite other people directly, then you’ll have a big event so encourage those coming to pass the word.

What are your favorite ways to get people to show up at your events?

I wanted to add this because Carol Bradley did a great job of following up on our Linkedin group.  Here’s comments by Carol.

Great post, Don! We have a number of channels for publicizing events:

The calendar: EVERYTHING should be added to the calendar! If you need training in how to use the system, contact Jen Laiber, laiber.1@nd.edu.

The Week: The weekly email blast, covering events on campus for the upcoming week, is emailed to faculty/staff/postdocs at 8 a.m. Monday mornings. There’s a separate version that’s sent to undergraduate/graduate students–it goes out around midnight Sunday night. Items for the week should be sent to theweek@nd.edu by noon of the Thursday before, or click the “Submit an event” link in the email itself. Indicate when you send the information whether it’s intended for fac/staff, students, or both. Events that require tickets or advance registration can run more than once.

InsideND login page: The faculty/staff content is managed by me–I review The Week and look for events of general interest to the campus community to include, but people are welcome to send items to my attention. Events should be of general interest–the page gets 15,000 to 25,000 hits per day, so it’s probably not the venue to promote an event in a room that seats 40! Brian Fremeau handles the student side of the page. Email me at bradley.7@nd.edu, or contact Brian at fremeau.4@nd.edu.

I often include events in the top news block of Today@ND (today.nd.edu), and special events also generate news features (like the Holy Cross Harvest Food Drive). Call or email me with information or submit to today@nd.edu, which forwards to my account.

Major events (the Forum, the food drive, United Way) also are covered in NDWorks, our monthly print newspaper–the publication dates of upcoming issues are Feb. 9, March 22, April 19 and May 24, and I need the information about three weeks before the publication date to ensure we have space to run it.

Today@ND has a Facebook page with an audience that’s growing. I’ve set it up so you can post your events to the page–the vision for the page is to act as a hub for what’s going on around campus. The FB page would also be a great place to post photos of your events and activities. The link is www.facebook.com/today.nd.

The campus-wide listserv is now reserved for major announcements from the administration, emergency notices and such, but many units have developed their own listservs and RSS feeds to reach their audience directly–RecSports, for example.

As always, our job is to facilitate you doing YOUR job, so let us know how we can help! I’m happy to talk any time about how to coordinate publicity between the various news tools.