A slide from Claire’s presentation

Last night Watershed’s wonderful Digital Communications Manager, Claire Stewart came in to talk to our group about how they might work with the communications team to promote their events. Claire is responsible for the ‘voice’ of Watershed; if you’ve ever interacted with us via Twitter or Facebook it was probably Claire you were talking to.

As they start to nail down their programming, marketing and communications the next things to consider. With that in mind here are just some of the considerations Claire put to our cohort:

Claire Stewart’s Top Tips for Talking to Audiences and Selling Out Events

1. The first thing I would ask someone putting on an event here is: agree on what you want to accomplish. So with each of your events, can you tell me what your goal is? Sure you might want to sell as many tickets as possible, but do you want to change audience behaviour? Educate people? Collaborate with them? Develop audiences? Get responses? What do you want them to do and how do you want them to feel?

2. Audiences – who are you trying to reach? The general public is not a target audience! ‘New audiences’ isn’t helpful either. Which audience/s will have the most influence and impact for your events?

3. The next step after asking those questions is to think about messages and reach – in other words, what are you going to say to your audience so that they’ll take notice and listen? Remember what resonates for you and your friends often doesn’t work for your target audiences. The difference between messaging that you like and messaging that is effective can be huge – it generally takes research to know the difference, but don’t worry, we are here to help you with this.