EMSSE e-Flyer
Faced with a £500 budget and a short deadline to market an event for the East Midlands School for Social Entrepreneurs we immediately shied away from the more traditional route of posters and flyers. Once one takes into account the print cost, the design cost, the copywriting cost and the distribution cost; not to mention the return on investment and the environmental impact the decision to produce an e-flyer pretty much made itself.
The image accompanying this text shows the finished e-flyer. It is essentially a web page with a form and a PDF download containing further details about the event. Embedded in the code of the webpage is a hit counter. This allows the school to monitor how many times the page has been accessed and which broad geographical base their viewers are from. The form acts as an immediate call to action for viewers. No phone calls or postage, fill in the form now and register.
Easy for the potential delegate and for the event organiser.
The e-flyer has an accompanying driver email which is text only, allowing the email to be sent to any type of email account. The decision was made early in the project not to send PDF attachments with an invite to the event. This was for two main reasons. Firstly some email accounts do not accept attachments. Secondly asking people to visit a web page straight from their email gives the event organiser an idea of the popularity of the event. The organiser will know how many driver emails have been sent. They will know how many (due to the hit counter) people have read the e-flyer. They will know how many people have registered using the online form. They will know if anyone registers who is not on the original driver email send out, this is evidence that the driver email has been sent on by the original recipients and so as been spread virally.
This project worked for the school. The response to the e-flyer ensured a busy conference with little recruitment headache for the event organisers.
“Third Sector media are fast, efficient and highly professional.”
Fergus Brazel - East Midlands School for Social Entrepreneurs
