Conference/Retreat Planning Series: Advertising Your Event

Spreading the word about your event...

When planning a CM conference or retreat, there are many free and low-cost tools you can use to advertise your event. Effective marketing is important to recovering the costs you will incur (often before the event) so that you can pay your speakers, rent the facility, order catering if needed, and provide materials.

General Advice on Advertising

• Advertise early and often.
• Use inspiring and beautiful images that reflect real things in the real world. Vintage art that represents real scenes or people is also lovely.  On the image, super-impose text that provides the name of your event, dates and theme with a contact email at the bottom. Make sure the text doesn't clash with your image though and stays very simple. Keep the details to a minimum, but point potential attendees to a place where they can get all the information they need. 

• Ask your friends to share and re-share the good news that an event that speaks directly to a Charlotte Mason education is available in the area. Ask them to post information to their circle of friends on social media and in their community or church. 
• Customize advertisements for specific groups. For new homeschoolers, speak to their need for encouragement, support and reliable advice when embarking on lifelong learning with Charlotte Mason's philosophy. For experienced homeschoolers, highlight the workshops or main sessions that help them deepen their understanding of Mason's philosophy and practices.
• Highlight your key speaker (s) in some of your advertisements. If your key speaker has an encouraging website or blog, consider including that in a short bio.
• Is the hosting facility a place where potential event attendees meet, like a church or community center? Will they put up an advertisement on a general board? Even Panera Bread has a community board where you can advertise local events.

Social Media
When considering how to spread the word about your conference or retreat, social media is a platform that reaches the masses very quickly and efficiently.

• Facebook hosts numerous pages for current and prospective Charlotte Mason homeschoolers. Using Facebook's search bar, you can find CM groups in your local area or national CM groups such as CM Homeschoolers. There are also curriculum specific pages, but you would want to check with the administrators of these pages to ask permission to share information about your event. Consider setting up a Facebook page for your event so that you can share a post  that reflects the theme of your conference.  Use an image in your post. This will catch the eye of a parent who is scrolling through a long feed. Instead of a text post that describes the event, share a link to your event Facebook page that can be re-shared by attendees. 
• If you have an existing Twitter account and a decent number of followers, you can advertise your event with a short text tweet or an image and ask others to re-tweet.
• If you belong to a Forum or list serve group for your local homeschooling community or a particular curriculum, ask the administrator for permission to share the event. Keep your details to a minimum and instead direct the reader back to your website or Facebook page for more information.
• Post your retreat or conference here on Charlotte Mason in Community. With close to 200 CM communities listed on the site as of March 2017 and many thousands of hits per week, this is a site where many people will find your event and consider attending even if they live several hours away.

Email Subscriber List
If you already manage a blog or website, the site most likely offers a tool for you to add subscribers to a mailing list. If you are not using this functionality,  you should. The CMIC site has a few forms that collect email addresses of CM community leaders. The platform I use (Weebly) allows me to drop this information into a spreadsheet and import it into a site like MailChimp (see below) and create a regular subscriber list.

Event Website
WordPress, Weebly, Blogger and other website development platforms provide an easy way to get your site online fast. Some of these platforms are easier to use than others, especially if you have not developed a website before.  If you don't want to go to the expense of paying someone to set up a website, I would suggest that Weebly has a great user interface for people who are new to creating websites. Weebly allows you to set up a free domain (as long as weebly.com is the suffix), or you can pay a relatively nominal amount of money to purchase your own named domain for one year. Weebly is a drag or drop interface that is very intuitive, and if you get turned around, there are tutorials and help pages with plenty of advice. Weebly can be upgraded (at a really reasonable price, imo) to host a store so that you can sell registrations directly from your website. Weebly seamlessly integrates with Paypal or Stripe. You can also set up forms to collect information such as name, address, etc. for your attendees. Weebly allows you to export your orders or form information to a spreadsheet file so you can view or sort your registration information.

MailChimp
MailChimp is a free platform that allows the user to email a large number of people at one time without falling into most spam filters (though nothing is perfect, sometimes MailChimp emails do make it into a junk file). MailChimp only costs money when you get to a certain number of users, which is unlikely for most retreats and conferences unless they are national events. You can create attendee lists in MailChimp that are re-usable for future mail-outs.  You can customize your emails with beautiful graphics and fonts and include links to new event information on your website or Facebook page.

I hope some of these tips will get you on your way to planning a conference or retreat that blesses others while not ruining your bottom line. It's no fun to lose your personal funds on an event, and I've heard about that happening far too many times. Planning far in advance will pay dividends.

Blessings,
Jenn