An Ideal Roadmap To a Successful Promotional Campaign For Your Club

Being the Vice President Public Relations (VP PR) of a club is not an easy thing, especially if you’re taking your role passionately. No Toastmasters club officer role is supposed to be easy – hence the growth in your personal life, career, and so on – accept the challenge to do something you haven’t done before in a supportive environment, with access to documentation and people who have done the job before you.

On March 8, we hosted a great workshop called Promote your club like a PRO! where JD Thomas, DTM, past Public Relations Manager for District 60 and District 123, shared some great information on how you can promote your club.  If you would like to see his presentation, please email me at prm@toastmasters60.com

I am often asked – how can I best promote my club’s events? From an open house to a regular club meeting, there are many things that you can do to ensure your event is visible and guests will come.  For example, when I recently visited a club, one guest told me that he had seen the post on social media and had decided to come because it was close to where he lived.

That said, here’s what the ideal promotion roadmap looks like in my mind:

• create seed content – who, where, what, how, when, why, etc.
• create a seed copy
• get the assets – images, etc.
• create the poster for print
• create the poster for social media formats (square and story)
• create copy for social
• create a press release and submit it…everywhere? (starting from page 46 in the VP of PR manual, there are some samples and how to promote it)
• create an Eventbrite event
• create a Meetup event
• create a Facebook event
• create a LinkedIn event
  • a note that all these channels have their own size and dimension for
  • invite all your connections
  • post it on all personal and club social channels (if you’re not using a channel, I don’t recommend creating one just for that)
• have all the guests/speakers do a short video promo
• have social media posts about each speaker/guest in advance
  • ensure you tag everyone
  • ask your club members to share, like, comment
• boost the post – you don’t need to break the bank, and arguably, any club should afford a 50$ ad budget twice a year – this is how you learn about creating an audience, craft a message towards it, and so on (here I make a note that rarely I recommend boosting a post as it’s not as efficient as creating an ad campaign – that’s a topic for another con
• send the email to your area and division director asking them to promote it – and create an event on the district’s site
• send an email to your (favourite) PRM for the district, as he can promote it on the District’s social channels (under certain conditions)
• print some fliers and leave them where your desired audience is – in your case, visit other clubs and ask if it’s ok to handle some fliers for promoting future events

All this will take a minimum of 5 hours if you’re proficient but don’t get discouraged. Trust me on this one; you’ll learn so much that you will feel accomplished. These are not meant to scare you but just to have a reference. It might not be worth investing in spending the time to create a Facebook event – many don’t.

And this is by no means something that ensures the success of your event. But it helps. Delegate – ask for help, and be creative.

Am I missing anything? email me at prm at toastmasters 60 dot com

Emanuel Petrescu, Public Relations Manager, Toastmasters District 60, 2022-2023