Strategies and tools for promoting an educational event
This article was originally posted on my WordPress site, now replaced by this Github Page
Probably you are thinking of hosting a conference, webinar, or workshop, but not sure how to promote an event or what tools to use. This blog will list several popular tools, ranging from easy-to-use ones with built-in templates, to those that require a little bit more time and energy. But first, there are some principles for event advertising and choosing tools.
Principles of promoting an educational event
An educational event can be different from a society event, concert, sports game, or election. What I mean by ‘educational event’ is that the aim of the event is mainly knowledge sharing, knowledge production, in which there might be keynote speeches, panel discussion, or breakout discussion. Generally, they can be conferences, seminars/webinars, workshops, roundtable talks, etc. There are several principles that I find quite important when preparing for an educational event.
Know the topic and audience. As an educational event aims at knowledge sharing and production, we normally wouldn’t talk randomly about everything, but just focus on particular topics. What’s the theme of the conference? Is this going to be a lecture or training workshop? Then we need to know who the audience are, and more specifically, are they general audience or specialised audience? Are they students, staff, and at what levels? It would be better to state these clearly when promoting the event, because we don’t want to confuse the potential guests so that they would not show up in an event which is not what they expected or not suitable for them. (This happened to me once - I showed up in a roundtable discussion about system evaluation which should be for Early Career Researchers while I was still in the first year of PhD!)
Know the format. Do we want a large conference or a small workshop? Do we want online, hybrid, or in person? These should coincide with local/university regulations, and also be in line with our aim of the event. Will it be a hands-on workshop? Will it be mainly lecturing or include several breakouts to encourage discussion and sharing? Is the event inclusive, e.g. provide alternative formats of materials for visually despaired people? Are pictures, videos included with captions and/or transcripts?
Think about how would you like to spread the message. One thing to consider is how long before the event that you start preparing for and advertising because preparation time may vary for different strategies. If you are still not sure, next I’m going to list a few options and resources for you to get the hang of them. Note: these are just my personal opinions and this blog is not sponsored by any of these tools.
Useful tools, divided by format
Texts, newsletters, email marketing
Texts, newsletters, emails
The simplest way to promote your event is through texts - one or several paragraphs including the date, time, theme, targeted audience, etc. to spread through emails or social media. Depending on how wide the audience you want to achieve, you can choose to spread among a small research group, a School/College, or the whole University’s Intranet. But just be aware of the time that the event is going to happen - this decides how long beforehand you want to start reaching out.
If you want to collect a series of events and promote them together, maybe you can send out weekly/biweekly/monthly newsletters that viewers can subscribe to. However, these newsletters for educational events can be different from email marketing for products, brands, which might require you to send email automation to personalise each customer’s message, which is beyond my knowledge, but if you are interested there are loads of tutorials on Youtube (I find this one to be a good introduction on some of the most popular email marketing tools).
If sending out newsletters is the only function you need, these two are quite easy to use and have great templates that can save you time on some design work: Mailchimp and Mailerlite. Besides, they have free plans for a limited number of subscribers or email limits, so better think about how large your potential audience is.
Pictures, posters, flyers
If you want to make your advertisement more attractive then some visual works can do. Canva must be familiar to a lot of you, which has a great number of templates for slides, posters, social media posts, even videos if you would like a more dynamic introduction of the event.
Apart from Canva, I would like to introduce Adobe Spark to you, which is also a simple-to-use tool for design. Most functions are similar to Canva - with a lot of templates. But one thing unique to Spark is that it can build one-page websites that collect a group of event information to form a newsletter, and you could share with others with a link to the page. The difference between Spark and previously mentioned email marketing tools may be that the Spark page will not be incorporated into the email, just through an external link. But I do think Spark pages are handy and visually attractive, even if the functions are limited. See an example page built by me here: Exploring Edinburgh. (It only took me about 15 minutes to build this page)
The University of Edinburgh provides Pro account for Spark. And you can use the Resource Finder provided by the University’s Digital Skills and Training team to find workshops to attend or online courses for self-learning. Just search for ‘Spark’ in the Resource name. I find it quite useful.
Short video clips
Making videos can be time-consuming, particularly for non-professionals, like some academic researchers. It is better to evaluate how necessary it is to make a video, and also the cost and benefit. Thanks to technologies, these days making videos are far easier than before - for example, you can create simple videos using Canva or Adobe Spark, just adding pictures, texts, and raw videos you shoot, and no need to worry about the transitions or movements of pictures. But here I’d like to introduce you to one type of video making - the whiteboard animation, which I find quite interesting, and could be useful if you’d like to introduce some concepts as a way to attract more audience to your educational event.
Some of you might have seen a whiteboard animation before (or if haven’t, here is an example ‘What is a Blockchain’). The most attractive feature to me is this moving hand that can somewhat make my attention focus on the point which is being described, instead of a wordy slide or poster that makes me don’t know where to look at. Whiteboard animation tools usually already have a lot of sketch materials that you can use, and you don’t need to do coding or make the hand move - these are all done for you! But what comes with the handy features is the pricing. The two most popular whiteboard animation tools are Videoscribe and Doodly, and you can check the prices on their website. Both of them provide a free trial option.
So these are some of the tools that I find interesting for promoting an educational event. I should say I haven’t tested them all myself because of time and budget, but at least I hope it can tell you where to go if you want some creative ways for advertising.
Well, finally what I want to say is, try not to let technology get in the way of your content - sometimes simple words can be powerful!
This blog is part of the completion of the Digital Skills Specialist Edinburgh Award. There will be a reflective blog of my progress during this programme soon.