Marketing Yourself, Your Organization, and Your Event

As a volunteer coordinator, you’re asking people to give their time for free. It’s not only important to show how cool your event is, but the ways in which your organization is making an impact on the local community. It’s also easy to forget about marketing yourself – how can you show volunteers that you’re a fair leader, who recognizes and rewards hard work?

 

In order to understand these questions, it’s important to understand the nature of your relationship to the public. As such it is vital that you regard your volunteers as ambassadors of the public. I say this rather than to the public because this point of view maintains the understanding that they are not just working for you. They volunteer because they want to give service to their community through which you are the vehicle. Their good graces are extended through you.

 

So, let’s say it again: Volunteers are Ambassadors of the Public

 

Often times, they are the back AND foreground, accomplishing tasks and interfacing with the public at-large whether they are flagging people into parking spots or managing the main stage. Make your volunteers the face of your marketing efforts. Show the enthusiastic personas and helpful demeanors which they possess. Get the public excited about the people they will meet. Do they have any special talents? Creative acumen? How have they added to the flare and flavor of experience? 

 

These questions can be engaged from all angles and is up to your marketing team (are they volunteers?) how you want to convey the positive manifolds of your endeavors. Also, try to decide what the best platform is for your community offering(s). Spend time researching similar Organizations or Events to see what they are doing and how they are representing themselves and then decide how you are unique in what you do. 

 

This added recognition is a very public display of positive reinforcement to your volunteers. In our techno-driven collective conscious, this is equivalent to going to the rooftops—nay, the mountain tops and singing their praises.

 

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