Taking Long Night Online Part 5: Marketing Long Night on your Campus More Effectively

Part 5: Marketing Long Night on your Campus More Effectively

This blog will take you through a few ways to create a digital marketing plan for your event and then how to remake it when things don’t go according to plan.

Southwestern University | Dr. Jennifer Marciniak

Prior to moving online, our marketing was very 50/50 material and digital. We used posters, banners, table tents, and tabling activities in the student center. Digitally, we took to social media as well as student and faculty listservs and the SU app. Moving online meant that students were no longer around to see the physical marketing materials, so we had to get creative without saturating digital platforms.

Revisions to Digital Marketing

First, we changed the frequency of marketing on social media. Instead of twice weekly ads, we created a countdown advertisement campaign on the SU app, which was mirrored on the daily Campus Notices listserv email. Theresa Zelasko, SU librarian, took over all media marketing for the event, per her request. Second, in addition, to the SU app and Campus Notices, we also reached out to faculty. We sent faculty digital posters for their Moodle sites and digital syllabi. We asked them to share these with their students. Third, we used WCOnline’s mass email feature to target all students registered with the writing center. 

Image: SU invited two popular professors to help with test prep for Business and Math. Advertising the involvement of these professors helped us attract students from STEM and Business and Economics.

ProTips for Marketing a Digital Event

• Make Campaigns Interactive  Creating an active marketing campaign means interacting with your readers. Create a quiz, scavenger hunt, or some type of trivia that takes place weeks or days prior to the event. Use the activities to prime students for the event and amp up the excitement! You can even announce winners of pre-event games and activities at the event to make sure those who participated attend. 

• Trickle Release Information  Students are already overwhelmed with email and social media. Going to classes in a virtual world increases this feeling ten fold. 

• Thus, be proactive in your marketing campaign. Have introductory posts with invitations to like and share. Use Instragram’s multiple-photo feature for posters as well as rules/info on pre-event games or event day schedules, policies and procedures. Ultimately, trickle your media. Don’t post multiple times a day. Release just enough information to keep them interested. 

• Network, Network, Network  Reach out to Student Life, Marketing and Communications, and Academic Success to help marketing your information. Ask your consultants to post it on social media of organizations in which they are involved and talk about it in their classes. And most important, get faculty buy-in early on. Students will listen to them if they talk up the event as worthwhile. Word of mouth is the ultimate marketing tool. 

• Check Your Links The day before the event, we released the finalized schedule and list of FAQs via social media, email, and WCOnline, and the SUapp. Unfortunately, we forgot one very important piece of information: the Zoom link to the event itself. One thing you don’t want to do is have to send out “Correction” emails and posts 24 hours before the event. Make a checklist and triple check everything twice. The success of your event might just depend on it.

Nevada State College | Dr. Rachel Herzl-Betz, Kayla Arceo, and Sandy Vasquez

Like Southwest, Nevada State’s pre-COVID advertising strategy was split between online and in-person outreach. In recent semesters, one of our most successful strategies was simply having Writing Specialists walk around campus with an IPad so interested students could sign up in real time. Without that face-to-face connection, we had to get creative, and we had to do it quickly.

What worked well

• Narrow the social media focus: We decided to use Facebook and Instagram as our primary outreach methods. This ensured that we didn’t overload our Advertising team by trying to use every possible communication channel. Narrowing our focus also allowed us to connect more strategically online. For example, we tagged campus leaders and started conversations about the event to magnify each post’s impact.

Image: Two side-by-side LNAP 2020 advertisements designed for Instagram. The image on the left advertises the full event. The image on the right focuses on the YouTube livestream space.

• Create that larger vision: Even though the turn from a face-to-face to a remote event was speedy, our Advertising team, led by Kayla and Sandy, started by making a new big-picture plan. This ensured that we were providing consistent information across platforms and across posts created by different specialists. That planning and communication also kept our technological team in the loop, so that the website was updated with the same information going out to our social media platforms. 

• Emphasize team innovation: We also reached out to internal stakeholders, like the Provost’s Office, for advertising support. Many of our campus leaders particularly appreciated hearing how Writing Center student leaders had responded to the crisis with creation and innovation. When talking about Long Night events, it can be easy to focus on the participant’s experience, but don’t forget that your team’s experience matters too. Let their hard work and creativity shine.

Goals for next time

• Plan even earlier: Start working on your advertising goals as soon as possible. Give yourself and your team time to think of new ways to reach out to your community. Starting early also gives you the opportunity to draw on strengths you didn’t know your center had.

• Draw on your resources: In our case, we found out that our campus’ Outreach Librarian, Alena Principato, also had extensive marketing experience. In the future, we look forward to drawing on her expertise and creating more consistent branding for the event. On your campus, keep an eye out for support that may not be immediately apparent. 

• Get friendly with faculty: In addition to larger-scale outreach, create a faculty short list and reach out for one-on-one conversations. Depending on the size of your institution and your event, even a handful of faculty partnerships can change who attends and how they use their time. If you can, come to the meeting with ideas for how the faculty member can go beyond simply mentioning Long Night in their classes. Perhaps they could offer extra credit, invite you to answer questions, or make themselves available for remote office hours during the event. 

• If your campus had faculty or staff writing groups, consider whether they might also be interested in a remote Long Night space during the evening. That kind of buy-in can make a huge difference for students and for faculty in the same departments.

Conclusion

Many Writing Centers are experiencing the challenge of switching to an all-remote advertising plan in the wake of COVID-19. While event marketing can take time, it’s also an area where a little innovation can make a big difference. Think carefully about your campus and about how your community engages online. Students who are relatively new to remote learning may engage differently than those who are used to having online classes. The relative age of your student body and their off-campus responsibilities may also shape where and how they learn new campus information. Keeping all this in mind, ask your consultants about how students on your campus get information about events happening on campus. Make a list of marketing venues and accompanying tactics that attract the demographics on your campus. 

A few more questions to keep in mind: How have your usage patterns changed since COVID-19? Which writer communities seem particularly engaged in your remote services? Which writer communities might need more outreach? What campus partners or collaborators could help you reach reluctant participants? How could being a part of LNAP outreach help them in return?

Author bios

Dr. Jennifer Marciniak is the Director of the Debby Ellis Writing Center at Southwestern University. She earned her PhD in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Louisville and began her writing center career at Berea College. She is from South Texas, and her research interests focus on oil and gas worker literacy practices. She was a first generation college student, and has personal and professional interests in working-class studies.

Dr. Rachel Herzl-Betz is the Writing Center Interim Director and an English Instructor at Nevada State College. She earned her PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and began her writing center career at Carleton College. She’s originally from northern Wisconsin, and her research focuses on the intersections between disability, writing center studies, and educational access.

Sandy Vasquez is an undergraduate student as well as a peer tutor within the Writing Center at Nevada State College. Currently, she is working on completing her Bachelor’s in Psychology with a minor in Counseling. She was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada. She has been a peer tutor at the Nevada State College Center for over a year now and a half now. Sandy’s interests are in visual rhetoric, social justice issues, and community engagement.

Kayla Arceo is currently a Writing Specialist at Nevada State College. She has been with the Writing Center since 2018 where she has been a part of the advertising team. Her research focuses on visual representation as it relates to academic writing.