Successful Event Promotions

September 29th, 2007

Girls Inc. is an amazing educational nonprofit that provides services to over 7000 local kids every year. I’ll be posting more on some really cool behind the scenes stories, but I wanted to do a quick writeup on a few of our successes for 2007…before the event has even happened.

Women of Taste is the annual food and wine tasting fundraiser for Girls Inc of Alameda County. This is a premier event in our area…with close to a hundred purveyors offering tastings, and more than 1200 guests attending.

This is the 16th anniversary of Women of Taste, and the first year the event has sold out. It’s really been a great achievement for the planning committee and Girls Inc. staff. We’re all ecstatic about this so I thought what a great opportunity to share the promotional tools we utilized.

After having received the sell-out news Girls Inc. development manager sent out a thank you letter to our sponsors and volunteers. It was interesting to note the changes in our strategies and how the directly had an impact on ticket sales. This included…

• TV interviews
• TV psa ads
• donated color print ads
• larger print ads
• sales donations at local retailers
• more website calendar listings
• dedicated email newsletters
• new website with event photos
• online ticket purchasing

Planning and marketing an event this size is no easy task. Our volunteer committee was comprised of approximately twenty people, not including staff members. We have a number of subcommittees and three core groups that help manage promotions: public relations, website, and sponsor development. There is a constant flow of information among these teams that keeps the ball rolling. Our goal is to; a) bring in media sponsors to spread the word, b) grow press coverage, and c) provide easy to access information online and off to the community.

This is by far one of the most exciting projects I’ve worked on and we’ve already been brainstorming for 2008. One of the new concepts that i’ll be targeting is adding interactive features to the website that will pull in visitors and donations year round.