Choosing Your Outreach Channels
People love to communicate and in today’s world there are thousands of ways to do it. There are an uncountable number of specific outlets to choose from for connecting with each type of group who might be interested in your stream, but considering that the medium is fully digital and you are probably willing to spend more time than money on outreach it allows us to narrow the types of channels into some select types:
- Social Media (Choose the ones those you want to reach out to use the most. Facebook and Twitter are usually safe due to size, but ones with specific focuses can be more effective.)
- E-mail (If you have an e-mail list due to a blog or something else, send out and see if people are interested.)
- Blog (Through your own website or a 3rd party like Tumblr)
- Forums (Whatever content you decide to do, there’s most likely a forum full of people who enjoy that type)
- Video (Everyone loves video and considering your live streaming it’s good to create a short one announcing your stream for Youtube, Vimeo or whatever you’re comfortable with)
- Press Release (A to-the-point account of what your doing and why it matters to communicate to journalists & bloggers write one up and start outreach at least 2-3 weeks in advanced)
- News Articles (Articles that others write about your event for their readers. Journalists usually work with a 2 week buffer for stories, hence reaching out early if you want coverage)
- Sponsorships (Reach out to businesses and ask if they’d be interested in contributing to the event. Most will happily contribute money or product for the tax write off as long as they get marketing promotion in exchange)
- Cross Promotion (Whether with businesses, the non-profits, or other groups it’s a potentially great way to reach new communities. Contact me if you’re interested in a cross promotion with CLS!)
Before you do any promotion you need to figure out which channels are the best ones to reach your audience and which ones you yourself are comfortable using. Depending on how much time you have before your stream and how prepared you are will determine how much outreach you can do. Thus, you always need to work smarter than you work hard. Pick the channels that you understand the best for your first streams and use the knowledge build from prior events to expand to more channels with future events.
—Building Your Promo Campaign (Before Event)
So you know the communities who would be interested in your event and have a collection of the websites sites (channels) you can reach them at. Now you need to figure out what to say about your charity stream and how to best get that message onto all the sites you’ve found.
Different people will have different strategies, but I’m a big fan of creating a single, long form document thoroughly explaining what the event is, who is involved (broadcasters, support, non-profits, sponsors), how people can view it & donate, and where they can learn more. This master document will serve as a Media/Press Kit for any news/blogger inquiries as well as the content for your Information Page (CLS & your website).
After this master document is created you can then copy/paste bits and pieces off of it to create all your other outreach. This allows you to quickly create posts and updates for a wide variety of websites. After the first few streams you should have enough content to build templates for the channels you’ve used before, making it an even faster process.
An add-on to this strategy is automating some of your outreach so you don’t need to type up every post in real time. There isn’t a lot of variance that can be found with telling people about an upcoming event, so the fact that you’re automating those types of posts isn’t a big deal, but you should be making sure that there are other types of posts mixed in as well that are more unique. If there’s nothing but a wall of automated event promotion on your feed, then it doesn’t look like you’re engaging your audience. You can get away with it during an event because you’re live and raising money for charity, but before an event it’s a sloppiness that’s easily avoided.
Note: If you support to CLS then you also have access to tools that will help you automatically create content specific to your event. This content can be copy/pasted into the post manager of choice for you to add images & additional details before scheduling.
—Building Your Promo Campaign (During Event)
As I mentioned in the first part of this step, once your event starts your marketing priorities should shift from promoting your information pages to promoting the event itself. Regardless of the size of your team, you should ensure that there’s a minimum level of promotion while the event is happening. The best way it to schedule posts ahead of time that direct to the broadcast channel that go out every 10-20 minutes via Twitter along with posts for time based milestones (first hour, quarter through, half through, 3 quarters through, final hour) on other channels.
This way you can focus all your time on interacting with your community while the stream is going on (answering questions, running contests, inviting people on a one-on-one basis). Thus, even your promotion individual’s or teams’s time during the stream can be more focused on actual interactions with people.