Marketing and Communications

How to Promote your Group and Events

There are so many ways you can promote your group and your events! Whilst printed materials are the obvious choice try and think creatively about how you can capture people’s attention. Here are some top ideas you can try:

You can create free logos at Squarespace – www.squarespace.com/logo and artwork with  Canva.

Not sure how to use a new marketing channel listed above? Speak to the Activities and Events Team for some advice.

Copyright

Copyright protects the artistic expression of an author of an original “work”. It is a form of intellectual property that gives the author of an original work exclusive rights to that work for a certain period of time.

Copyright applies to all created works from photographs, videos, to writing, music, scripts and plays etc. One created work may include multiple copyrights. There is no requirement to claim copyright, it exists automatically, and they don’t need to use the copyright symbol © for copyright to apply.

So how can you use visuals to promote your group and events?

Do not to use images from Google. You can use old photographs that your Society has previously taken, take your own, or get images from stock image websites including:

• Pexels
• Pixabay
• Visual Hunt
• Flickr

Social Media

Social Media is a great way to advertise your events and keep your members engaged in between society meetings.

We recommend having a few social media channels as your members will have individual preferences of what sites they use most frequently.

Here are some social media tips for making your pages engaging:

• Be interactive and approachable
  • Ask for comments and opinions
  • Get your members to tag your account.
  • Use social media sign-ups
  • Use language like ‘Tag a friend who…’ and ‘like if…’
  • Hold online competitions
  • Regularly post photos and videos from events
  • Live streams of important activities and events for your group e.g. guest speaker event.
• Try and focus on quality
  • Remember your audience! 
  • Post regularly 
  • Use professional or good quality phone photos
  • Stay on-brand and keep your society identity
  • Create customised graphics / images in advance.
  • Correct spelling and words in full, avoid abbreviations. 
  • AVOID - References to alcohol, or images to alcohol, swearing, poor language or poor conduct

In the event of social media misconduct, please contact the Students’ Union immediately so we can support you in limiting damage to your society reputation. Instances of poor conduct on your official pages can have a drastic effect on breaking down the sense of community you have worked hard to build in your group which affects your member engagement for the rest of the year.

GDPR

The General Data Protection Regulation provides enhanced protection of an individual’s personal data in a positive way but is not designed to prevent them from entering into beneficial arrangements – such as joining your Society.

What you need to do….

• Don’t collect any personal data. This includes emails, phone numbers, addresses, names.
• Utilise the Students’ Union website to send emails to your members to ensure your Society is compliant.
• Any old personal data held by the Society MUST be deleted now.
• We are in the process of creating new email addresses and accounts for all Societies. Please look out for an update as these will be your official email accounts. In the meantime, you can create Gmail or Hotmail accounts for your society email address, but you must delete all personal data from the account before 31^st July each academic year.
• With the new tools we have provided you with you should not need to collect or store personal data.
• Delete any WhatsApp groups that you have for your society that includes society members. It is fine to have a group for your committee but not a whole society chat where everyone can see each other’s personal data.

Top Tips

• Don’t collect your own mailing lists, it makes it very difficult to secure this data to the level we are required to do so by law.
• Always email your members through the Students’ Unions website, this will ensure all your members are contacted – even the ones who have recently purchased their membership and are waiting to hear from you.
• Keep your web page and social media pages up to date