Top Six Tips For Publicizing Your Gala
Image from Frontpage.com
So you’re putting on a great fundraising event and you want the world to know about it. Time to call the media! Here are six tips for maximizing your efforts.
1) Most reporters aren’t going to be interested in your fundraising event. Embrace this truth! Especially in a large market, they get invited to cover dozens a week during high party season. The average gala dinner just isn’t newsworthy. So don’t count on a fundraiser to be a major media opportunity for you. Focus on attracting your top donors and raising money instead of awareness.
2) If you have board members or an executive director who disregard the above and insist on media coverage, focus on bringing the reporters who cover the social scene. If you have an interesting guest list or are holding your party in a cool location, you can usually find someone to show up and take a few pictures. This will hopefully be enough to make your board members (and guests) feel happy. Putting your event on the local AP wire can help get the word out, but be careful of hangers-on — folks who troll the wire for parties, then show up claiming to be bloggers or freelance photographers. Likely as not, they’re just there for a free cocktail.
3) Make it easy for the photographers who do show up. Make sure your publicist, or someone in the development office who knows the guests, is there to walk the photographers through the party and help them find important people or honorees. And be prepared to email the editor with the amount you raised – as soon as you can estimate a figure, send it over. That night is best if you can manage it.
4) Make sure you’ve got someone on your payroll taking photos. Some publications will accept your own pictures for publication after the event. Look for smaller outlets or those that focus on a specific niche. For one gala I publicized, we had a lot of real estate people in attendance, and the local real estate weekly wrote a short column for us. At another, we honored a Chinese-American artist, and we garnered a few nice articles in the Chinese-language media.
5) Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. If you are in a smaller market, odds are much greater of the local paper re-printing your press release before your event. If your organization is celebrating an anniversary and you’re in a small media market (or it’s a very slow news cycle), you can probably count on some more general press coverage of your fundraising event (like on the local evening news or in the paper), though again, it’s likely be after the fact, not before.
6) If media coverage is very important to you, consider doing something different than the average dinner/dance. What about a live auction with a famous MC or auctioneer? Or a glamorous black-tie bowling tournament? Put on your creative thinking cap. Or consider hosting a pre-dinner event (like a tasting or cocktail party) at a much lower ticket price. An inexpensive, fun event has a chance to being listed in your local weekly newspaper or “what’s going on around town” magazine. And as a bonus, you’ll be cultivating those who can’t afford the higher ticket price of a sit-down dinner.
