Guide: Marketing your public engagement activity

Introduction

'Marketing' is sometimes seen as a dirty word in academic circles, but all it means in this context is taking action to get people along to your public engagement activity.

Marketing is about the 4Ps:

• Product
• Price
• Place
• Promotion

Most of this guide is about the last of these, but it's important not to overlook the first three.

Guidelines and approach

Product

The challenge is this: to design a public engagement event – a 'product', in the jargon – that will achieve not only what you want but also what the public, or a particular section of it, wants.

In the commercial world, formal market research is undertaken to find out what people want; products are tailored to fit known needs and desires. In the academic world, resources for market research are generally harder to come by. Fortunately, you can achieve a lot through a blend of common sense and informal consultation with colleagues, local organisations and members of the public.

Price

As well as designing an event that people will want to be part of, you have to price it appropriately. This is of limited relevance here, since so much public engagement activity – especially the genuinely two-way variety – is free.

Place (and time)

People have to be willing and able to get to your public engagement activity (unless it is purely an online experience), so consider whether it would be better to hold the event at your institution or at an accessible off-campus venue. Timing is another key factor – weekday or weekend; daytime or evening; early evening or 8pm?

The essential point is to have regard to your potential audience's convenience at least as much as your own. You can find out more in our Understanding Audiences guide.

Promotion

If all is well with the previous three Ps, your promotional task should be simple. By the same token, if something is seriously amiss with any or all of the first three Ps, even large amounts of clever promotion may not be enough to achieve healthy audience numbers.

Let's assume the public engagement activity you are promoting sits somewhere between these extremes. The three questions to ask are:

• What audience is this particular engagement activity for?
• What is our key message to that audience?
• What methods should we use to convey the message to the audience?

The answer to the first question may be obvious, or you may have to make educated guesses about the types of people who will be interested. Once you have a good idea of who they are, you can do some targeted promotion by:

• communicating directly with relevant organisations;
• making intelligent use of any mailing lists you or your communications and marketing colleagues have;
• piggybacking on relevant partner organisations' mailing lists (although there are rules about this – check with the lawyers);
• placing printed material in venues used by the target audience;
• advertising in appropriate specialist publications.

As well as targeting people who have an affinity with your kind of event, you should pursue the wider market. This can bring on board people who are not in the 'committed' or 'likely to be interested' groups but who are 'open to persuasion'. The approaches outlined below will be useful in reaching both the target audience and the wider market.

Printed material

Most of us lead our lives online these days, but there is still something to be said for good old leaflets and posters. Make sure your activity is included in any 'what's on' publication produced by your institution. You may also wish to produce a leaflet and/or poster of your own. Your institution's communications and marketing staff can advise you how to go about this and may be in a position to provide practical help as well. Your leaflet can include an invitation to join a mailing list, provided there is someone to service and update it.

Whatever you produce, make sure it is well designed. It does not have to be lavish, but it should look smart, clear and professional.

It is important that you have distribution points for your printed material and a means of getting it to them.

Web and new media

Your institution is sure to carry online events listings, so make sure your public engagement activity is included. Perhaps the event is sufficiently high profile to warrant a place, with a striking picture, on the institution's homepage. Perhaps there can be a link from the homepage to the text and images in your leaflet, which should ideally be properly web-rendered (dynamic) rather than in pdf form (static).

There are many other things you can do via the web and new media. For example:

• use Twitter to spread the word;
• get an online discussion going before your event;
• record the activity and (with participants' permission) put it on your website and/or YouTube.

Media relations

Local radio stations are hungry for local stories, including positive ones, and may want to interview an organiser or speaker, especially if the event is novel. The same goes for local television, although competition for airtime is fiercer. Local newspapers may seem to have a voracious appetite for bad news, but it's a myth that they won't cover good news too.

The secret is to identify the story. The mainstream media are under no obligation to give free publicity to anyone, so you have to offer them an angle – something fresh, perhaps quirky – that will capture their audiences' interest.

Again, your institution should have experts in its communications and marketing office to advise you.

Don't forget the student media – the ideal way of reaching what might be a key audience for you.

Paid-for advertising

Some areas are well served by popular magazines that preview events. As well as seeking a free listing, you might consider buying space to advertise your activity. This can be quite expensive, but at least one knows that people who buy such magazines are seeking something interesting to do.

You can find out via an audience questionnaire how well your advertising (and other forms of promotion) worked.

A note on key messages

We said earlier that as well as identifying the target audience and how you are going to reach it, you should think about your message. Here are some suggestions:

• find the essence of your message and express it in one powerful 'headline' statement that can be unpacked later on in your letter/leaflet/press release;indicate the benefits to the audience of taking part;
• use a striking quote – from a speaker, a distinguished academic or someone who attended a previous event – to support your message;
• remember that you are communicating with non-specialists, so use plain English;
• remember that people lead busy lives and are bombarded with information, so they appreciate brevity.

Drawing it all together

The various ways in which you promote your public engagement event can work together and reinforce one another, creating a 'perfect storm' that generates excitement – and an audience.

It helps if the institution is alive to issues that matter to local communities. If it has a reputation for local involvement and openness, the climate for promoting specific engagement activities will be favourable.

Over time, as more such events take place, the momentum will increase:

• some people will become regulars;
• you can tell them about future activities and they can join the mailing list;
• they will communicate on your behalf through their networks;
• journalists will notice the head of steam that is building up and take more interest.

Other resources

The best sources of help are people with whom you can speak face-to-face. Your institution's specialists in public engagement and events and the communications and marketing team should be your first ports of call. Public relations is quite different from public engagement, but people who work in these areas have interests in common:

• public engagement events can be newsworthy and warrant attention from the Press team;
• such activities can also be grist to the mill of the web and new media team;
• these events can be a powerful means of building an institution's brand and reputation.
  

Author

This guide was written by Barry Taylor, Director of Taylor Words Ltd; former Director of Communications and Marketing, University of Bristol.