Free Community Event Marketing Plan
An open source resource for your community group.
In this newsletter
+ Get straight to it and download the Community Event Marketing Plan, here.
+ The who, what, and why of the marketing plan.
+ Some pics of our recent Harvest Festival (which is where the marketing plan sprang from).
+ The marketing plan is a totally free offering (as is this newsletter), though if you get something valuable out of it and fancy supporting my work financially, you can buy me a coffee via my website, which will allow me to dedicate more hours to creating free things and volunteering.
What is this downloadable all about?
The Community Event Marketing Plan was designed by me, Nat Mendham, based on the strategy we use to promote the Harvest Festival and Springfest events at the Warrane Community Garden, in southern lutruwita/Tasmania.
Here are the key actions in the marketing plan:
+ Assemble a small team
+ Clarifying your aims
+ Get to know your audience
+ Set up some digital tools that’ll help you stay organised
+ Create some digital graphics, easily, without creative skills
+ Create a marketing calendar for the 8 weeks before your event
+ Use your own website, social platforms and newsletter
+ Get to know who your allies are, and ask them to give you a hand. They can help you by sharing your message with their audience, which might be different, bigger, or more active than yours - which is extremely valuable to your zero-budget campaign.
+ A few extra tips we use to spread the word even further on no budget and limited time resources.
The downloadable is full of click-by-click instructions, which may be overkill if you’re fairly tech-savvy, but I’ve aimed this plan at people with few computer skills in the hopes that it’ll be helpful to a broader range of people.
It’s a proven strategy for a physical event, but this plan could be adapted for an online event too. The intention is that you use this as a leaping-off point and adapt it freely to suit your event and audience.
It’s a free, open-source resource. An initiative that embraces community-oriented sharing of skills and resources - share widely and adapt for your own project.
Download the Community Event Marketing Plan, here.
“This marketing plan helped our small and under-resourced team to understand our event goals, audience and allies. It's super efficient, easy to follow and continues to be effective in getting the word out about our seasonal festivals.”
– Katie Kristensen (Garden Coordinator at Warrane Community Garden)
Some context about the Harvest and Spring Fest
The Spring and Harvest Festivals are pretty much a one-woman phenomenon, with a lot of physical help coming from volunteers. Katie Kristensen is said one-woman, she is the Community Garden Co-ordinator and all-round community legend.
The Spring and Harvest Festivals were created to raise funds for the community garden. Right now the goal is to build a community hub building on the site to house workshops and events.
Under the lofty title of ‘Comms Team’ is Katie, me, and garden volunteer Em. Katie has a lot of great connections with people and businesses within the community, which kicked off the Community Event Marketing Plan. For the past 2 festivals, the Comms Team has met just twice to implement the marketing plan.
Anecdotally, the plan has helped spread the marketing workload, systematise the process, and helped us promote future events because we record important information each time - but critically the event has grown in numbers and good vibes each time.
Who’s the marketing plan for?
The Community Event Marketing Plan is a free resource for small volunteer community groups who are organising an online or offline event and want to get the word out into the world, efficiently with limited marketing skills and zero budget.
If your group doesn’t know where to start, or have the budget to pay for advertising, or to hire a pro marketer, then maybe the Community Event Marketing Plan might be able to help.
What makes me an authority on marketing?
Well, I’m not really. My work in commercial photography has had me meandering adjacent to the world of marketing for the past decade and my husband was a digital marketer for many years, so by osmosis or curiosity I’ve packed away a few marketing skills over time.
I put them to the test when we ran our (super successful) farm business for 10 years, which threw me into managing and marketing farm gate events for hundreds of local families.
Why did I create the plan?
I have zero desire to make a crust from marketing but I think it’s a skill that should be shared widely - because it’s heartbreaking to see excellent people have their fabulous ideas fall over due to a lack of marketing knowledge.
So if you are an excellent person with a fabulous idea, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that if you build it, they will come, because it’s a noisy world out there, with lots of fabulous (and some less fabulous) ideas fighting it out for an audience.
Download the plan, and adapt it to your event.
Or… if you are an excellent person with more marketing knowledge than me I’d be so happy to take your suggestions for the marketing plan on board to make it a richer more helpful document. Let me know below, or get in contact here.
Want to support my work?
The marketing plan is a totally free resource. If it’s super helpful to you and you want to support my work financially, you can ‘buy me a coffee’ here via my website.
Your financial support will help me put more hours into creating more free resources in the future.
I hope you find the Community Event Marketing Plan handy + let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions.
Great share Nat, thanks!