Around a month and a half ago, I was told by my regional director from YAL about an amazing opportunity to host a debate on campus sponsored by the Cato Institute with two credible debaters, Alex Nowrasteh who is a Cato Institute Immigration Analyst, and Mark Krikorian who is the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

Due to midterms and such, I didn’t start the promotional process for the event until exactly a week prior to the event. So I thought I would share the 5 steps that I implemented to get 100 people to attend the event.

1. Get your personal network signed up before cold calling

I feel like this is an area that is often neglected when people host events, yet it is by far the most important area to begin your promotion process. Your YAL chapter and college friends are the most likely to attend the event, so ensure you get them signed up first. When they register for the event, ask them if they have any friends that would be interested in attending. If “Yes”, ask your friend to reach out to their interested friend because they already have a personal relationship with that person.

-My personal network resulted in 50 registrants in days 1-2 of promotion.

2. Reach out to Student Organizations

Student organizations is a key area for your promotion process and it can be very successful if you know the club officers personally. The student organizations we reached out to were The Alexander Hamilton Society, Students for Refugees, College Republicans, and Students for Trump. We gave the club presidents the elevator pitch about the event and asked if their club would be interested in attending the event. We also tailored our elevator pitch to each student organization, for example, a Students for Trump message would focus on closed borders while Students for Refugees was focused on open borders. All the student organizations agreed to help us promote the event at their club meeting and they sent out a promotional paragraph in their email announcements.

-Student organizations brought in 25 registrants during days 3-4 of promotion (75 Total)

3. Personal messaging people on Facebook and Groupme

Personally messaging people is very effective to get people registered compared to posting a status where only a very small margin of people will click the link register. So I would get the full list of people that were in a certain Facebook group and message them all personally. Groupme is another great resource to use for personally messaging massive amounts of people. Most student organizations have a Groupme chat and you have access to personally message everyone in the group (Ask permission first). Make your message sound personal and utilize copy/paste while only changing the name in order to save time. If it’s a student organization Include the sentence “A lot of people from ‘insert student group’ are attending, so I thought you would be interested” into your personal message along with a promotional picture with the date, time and link to register for your event.

-Personally messaging a couple hundred people brought in 20 registrants during days 4-5 of promotion (95 Total)

4. Focus on the traditional methods of event promotion during the final days prior to your event (Social Media, Flyers, and Tabling).

You want to post on social media throughout your promotional process but the final 2-3 days are the most crucial to get sign-ups for your event. Post on every social media platform where people might be interested such as Facebook groups, Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter. Hanging flyers around campus isn’t a great way to get people to attend because 99% of people won’t notice. Rather, It is best to go into academic buildings and walk up to students directly with a flyer and elevator pitch for your event. The act of walking up to random students can be intimidating, but it can be very effective to get random people to attend; we handed out 120 flyers this way. Lastly, we tabled outside with coffee and handed out 250 flyers to students during the morning/afternoon of the event.

-Traditional methods brought in another 15 registrants during days 6-7 of event promotion (110 Total)

5. Send a reminder to all of your registrants the day of the event.

This is crucial to ensuring that the people that registered actually attend the event. Make sure to collect the phone numbers of the registrants in order to have a direct method to send a reminder. Moreover, sign up for Mailchimp and schedule an email to send out a reminder the morning of the event using a catchy subject line like “Don’t miss the best event of the Semester Tonight.” By sending out direct reminders we were able to get 75% of the people that registered to attend the event (82). The additional 20 people showed up via flyers, social media, and through friends.

Those are the 5 steps we took to get 100 people to attend our Immigration debate with only 1 week of event promotion. I hope this post was helpful and if you have any questions feel free to email me at:

reesebrooks@studentsforliberty.org

The topic of free speech on college campuses has become an incredibly heated issue, thus I believe it is our duty as liberty lovers to defend our rights to free speech. Luckily, Young Americans for Liberty, Students For Liberty, FIRE and many more great organizations provide excellent resources to aid student groups in their fight for free speech. On my campus, The Ohio State University, our YAL group has chosen to fight for free speech via implementing a free speech statement. Our work is not complete yet but we have learned much during the process. So here’s the blueprint we have done at The Ohio State University to change the narrative of free speech in 6 simple steps.

Step 1) Reach out to existing organizations with expertise on free speech

Liberty minded think tanks and organizations love to help out student organizations, and connecting with them is as simple an email. We found the organization FIRE to be extremely helpful by providing us with many great resources. FIRE connected us with a one on one skype meeting with a free speech lawyer and he was able to lay out the best approach toward free speech activism and give us insight on the infringement on free speech at OSU.

Step 2) Develop a formal free speech document

Once we became more informed on the topic of free speech, we decided to develop a free speech statement, similar to the University of Chicago. A free speech statement is effective because it gives validation to your cause rather than simply stating that you support free speech. The free speech statement lays out the specific role that a University has in governing free speech and emphasizes its limitations. Luckily, FIRE provides student organizations with a free speech statement template which has been written by their lawyers and it is as easy as inputting your University name.

Step 3) Create strategic goals with your group to best implement your free speech statement.

We decided to create a petition for the free speech statement, something students could sign to show they supported document. By quickly google searching a petition template and adding a brief summary of our free speech statement our petition was created. We then made it a goal to have at least 200 students sign the petition and 10 student organizations co-sign the statement (We far exceeded those numbers).

Step 4) Host an activism event to gather student signatures

We found that the most effective way to get sign ups for our free speech statement was to do an activism event. We chose to do a free speech ball because it attracts a lot of students that otherwise would not be interested in interacting with our liberty-minded group. We would have the students sign the ball then immediately ask them if they wanted to sign our petition to help secure free speech at OSU via a free speech statement. Almost every student that signed the ball wanted to sign the petition. Overall, we were able to gather 500 total petition signatures over the period of 3 days.

Step 5) Reach out to other student organizations to co-sign the free speech statement

Creating a coalition of student organizations to co-sign your free speech statement is far more persuasive to student administrators than only your YAL group. I would recommend reaching out to clubs that have a key interest in free speech and also pull from a wide variety of backgrounds which might include conservative clubs, fraternities, Hispanic club, journalism club, debate club etc. I would recommend getting at least 10 to co-sign but it could be less depending on the size of your University.

Step 6) Present your free speech statement to your student government and student administrators

Student governments usually don’t have a direct role in changing student codes, however, they put massive pressure on university administrators to implement the resolutions that they pass. I would recommend presenting your free speech statement to your student government by greatly emphasizing the student signatures and club co-signatures that you’ve gathered. If the student government passes your free speech statement, I would then recommend contacting FIRE to write out the exact wording that needs to be revised in order to adhere to the constitution. You will then meet with campus administrators with all of your hard work and ideally they will implement the changes to the student codes.

If your student group is able to complete all of these steps get in contact with YAL or your respective liberty organization and reach out to as many news outlets as possible to get the word out about your awesome work.

If you have any questions regarding these steps feel free to contact me at reesebrooks@studentsforliberty.org and also contact YAL about free speech activism because they will provide your student group amazing resources to change the narrative of free speech on your campus.