Westside LA Team In Training - Summer 2009 Marathon & Half Marathon Team

It’s so AMAZING we have so many events lined up this early in the season! We’ll assume you’re already done with event logistical planning, and you need to get your event known to everyone. What do you do? Of course, the obvious is to tell all your friends and family. How? Is that enough? There’s never enough! We’ve compiled a list to the top places to go to post your event and get the buzz going!

First e-mail our Fundraising Captain, Erin Shulsinger, so your event could be added to her weekly HOT EVENTS e-mail to our internal team. Try not to conflict event dates unless your target audiences are completely different.

Event Invite Systems

• Evite.com
• Facebook Events
• MySpace Events

More Event Listings
The following are good supplemental event systems to get many people outside of your circle aware of the event. People might run into your event on several sites and become constantly reminded of it.

• Going.com
• Upcoming.com
• The Scene
• My Modern Met
• Experience LA
• Eventful
• Culture Mob

For larger scale events
The following are more focused to nightlife type of events or large scale events (100+), but it wouldn’t hurt to try.

• Napkin NIghts
• Flavorpill

Other strategies

• Work with a Meetup.com group to see if they can throw an event for charity, utilizing their present member list. This works best if you’re already an active member of that group.
• Know any popular Bloggers? See if they can help promote your event as a blog post or video
• Get a radio show to help promote your event (it has been done before)
• Get a local newspaper to feature your event in an article

Spreading the word
Once you have your events out to the public. Keep the conversation going with friends. Update your Facebook, Gmail, LinkedIn, and Twitter status messages. Get friends to post your events on their social networking sites, get active on forums, get active on your Facebook fundraising groups, get active on your special interest forums/bulletin boards.

Offline Promotions
Once you have your online presence covered, don’t stop there! Don’t forget about promoting your event offline. Go to your favorite local restaurants and drop off flyers. Some grocery stores have community cork boards which you could post events (ask the manager first). Post a flyer on your desk, and have a stack for your co-workers who come by.

Hopefully this will help you take your event to the next level. Don’t take your events too lightly by just depending on one source of promotions. There’s so much more potential. Sure it will take some time doing all this, but plan accordingly. Keep talking about it with your friends, and try to get them to tell their friends and so on…. and so on. If you have more ideas and strategies, please add them to the comments section of this article!