Marketing a Charity Event

I recently completed a project that I had been working on since January. My friend Emily and I were asked to Co-Chair an event that would raise money for a local organization that provides scholarships for deserving young women in college.

This was a new challenge for me. I have experience running events for a company, but not for a non-profit. With a budget of $500, how was I going to sell 250 $25 tickets to a charity Fashion Show?

Here are a few of the things that we did to accomplish this goal:
>Facebook: We created a “Facebook Event” and we asked all of our members to pass it around. We advertised the event on our organization’s Facebook Fan page.
>Twitter: We tweeted about the event, and asked all of our members to RT our messages.
>Email: We sent monthly emails to all 375 members and asked them to share the Fashion Show information with their friends.
>PR: We found the best bloggers and online “local news” websites and asked them to share our event with their subscribers. We also found some of the top local “tweeters” on Twitter and asked them to give away a few tickets to the Fashion Show. Their Twitter followers were required to RT their message, for a chance to be selected as a ticket winner.
>Community Calendars: We went to everyone online newspaper and added ourselves to the community calendar section. Some websites will allow you to “vote up” or “vote down” events. We asked our members to vote our event up, which caused it to appear first on each webpage.
>Direct marketing: We printed promotional business cards and posters and then asked each boutique that we were planning to feature in the Fashion Show to keep them by the register, and in their store windows. We also asked each company that either donated money or a product to promote the event on their website.
>Do a Preview: We held a “Fashion Show Launch Happy Hour” one month before the actual event. We encouraged people to come out and purchase their tickets early. In doing so, attendees received a special VIP pass to the Fashion Show. The happy hour generated a lot of buzz and excitement for the show.

Follow the link to see the results, and to view more pictures.

The result: We sold 350 tickets and raised $10,000. It was a huge success, and social media played a large role.

Business cards that promoted the event