Publicity
From SecularPortal
Publicising your society is a nightmare. It doesn't matter how much you do, it doesn't matter if you go into people's dreams and announce what your society is doing or go round to their house every single day and scream at them - they will still complain they didn't know what events you were running or worse, that your society existed at all! You can never do enough to reach students but every little helps so you just have to keep chipping away at it.
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Reaching your members
There are a number of good ways to reach your members. And if you do all of them you might actually get through to a handful of them.
Mailing lists
Mailing lists are always good for members who can actually organise their time will find it useful to know what is going on. You need to be careful not to spam people, so sending out an email at a maximum of once per week (at Leeds we send one weekly mailout each Saturday) should take care of that problem.
It may be best to set a specific day when you will send the mailout out so that people know when to expect it. If you're having problems with emails not getting through you may want to use a university society email account as this can help get through the spam filters. Generally though this shouldn't be a problem.
The biggest problem comes from people writing down illegible email addresses when they sign up. Therefore it's best to get them to enter it on your website to ensure it's right, or if you must collect them on paper, get people to write in block capitals to reduce confusion. Even so, don't be surprised if up to one in three of the email addresses you are given fail or are returned undeliverable.
One of the biggest problems you may face, especially at the start of the year is that most major mail providers (both universities and 3rd party services such as Hotmail) have a preset fail limit. For example if you send 50 emails to their server and a preset number of them are to invalid addresses, say 5, it will reject all the emails thinking you are a spammer just guessing at email addresses. Therefore it may be sensible to send the first email after a large intake of addresses (such as after freshers' week) in batches of 50 or so.
Collegiate universities, presumably just to be awkward, tend to have mailing lists for each college. You need to make good use of your people skills to ensure that as well as running your own mailing list, your events will be appearing on college lists. Quite often college undergraduate bodies (Unions, JCRs etc) will advertise local student-run events in these roundups of college and university information, so sending details of your events to the appropriate people can be very effective.
Facebook rules everyone's lives these days which makes it excellent for sending out event notifications. Create a group for your society and get everyone to join it, then create events hosted by that group and use the "invite members of this group" feature to send an event invite out to all the members of the group.
It's good practice to create the event and then finish and view to check over all the details (especially the time and location!) before inviting everyone. Make sure you include an image, normally your society logo, so people can instantly recognise who is running the event.
Importantly though, don't rely on Facebook as an indicator of how many people will turn up to an event. "Maybe attending" usually means they won't be attending and "Attending" means they may nor may not attend, so no accurate information about attendance can really be gathered from it.
Text messages
One of the systems we introduced at Leeds was a mentoring scheme - each member of the society was allocated a mentor - a committee member they could talk to about any problems they add.
An advantage of this is that each mentor can build a personal relationship with each of their mentees and drop them a personal text message before meetings to remind them about the meeting.
Reaching non-members
Once your members know about an event, you want to get the wider student community to know about it as well. This can be done in a number of ways, some of which are outlined below.
Posters
Never underestimate the humble poster. These are especially good in lecture theatres because lectures are, as a general rule, very boring and so people will read every single poster on the poster display board rather than actually pay attention to the lecturer.
Union website
Many unions have an events section of their website that you can post to. While it is questionable how many people actually read this, it is generally easy and free to list events on here, so you don't really have much to lose by submitting your events to here.
Importantly, many unions use this information to combine events listings for things like their union reception also so it can have a knock on effect.
