Speaker 1: Hey, Priscilla Scalf, how are you?

Speaker 2: I am good. And you?

Speaker 1: I'm good. Thank you. Thank you so much for doing this recording with me. We're going to teach people today some best practices for getting a lot of attendees on a Zoom call. I appreciate your openness to these new ideas, and I know you're going to bring some new ideas to this conversation as well.

Speaker 2: Thank you.

Speaker 1: So this idea is going to be to speak to your Rotary Club and guests. We always add those two words, and guests, so that people understand that this is not going to be a normal deal. We're going to have some new energies, some new personalities, some potential Rotarians on this call. So I always say Rotarians and guests, and you want to put that in all of your promo as well, because by definition, a person doesn't want to attend a Rotary Club event if they're not a member of the Rotary Club. Okay. You have to really trip over yourself to actually say, hey, don't forget this is open to the public. And I think a lot of people in Rotary forget that. They just assume that everybody knows it's a public event, but if I see something that's a club event, I automatically think I have to belong to the club in order to attend. This is not true for our Zoom event that's coming up. Okay. We were talking a minute ago about a 100-day campaign and how important it is, and we may choose to come inside that 100-day campaign for various reasons, but here's the perfect event success formula. The first couple posts and outreach of the 100-day campaign is what's called a save-the-date campaign, and the save-the-date campaign can be what I call detail-free. In other words, you don't have to tell them who the speaker is, what the topic is, anything at all except establish positive expectation. The phrases are, you're going to really love this, our best program of the year, you don't want to miss this, a world-famous speaker, which is technically true, I've spoken all over the world. You never fib, but you create this kind of hyperbolic, hyperbole, bragging rights about what's coming, and all you really want them to do is mark their calendar. Here's the premise. McDonald's, I read this one time, the number's probably different now, but if McDonald's needs to make 7.5 impressions on you before you actually buy an Egg McMuffin, and you're not any better at advertising than McDonald's, what is the minimum amount of times you're going to have to reach out to people to get them to sign up for this program? 7.5 or more. That first one or two impressions, because you just can't send them the same impression seven times and expect them to sign up, it has to be a variation on a theme. The very first few can be this thing called save the date. In your case, the event's going to be in December, so you can say, we saved our best for last. That's another good phrase. It's true. Okay? We're ending the year with a bang. Without a doubt, one of the most famous speakers we've had this year. Don't even tell them who it is. And again, it's technically true, depending on your speaker lineup. Okay. The other thing you want to remember during the 100 Day Campaign is that people decide to do stuff based on the two halves of their brain. Half of the brain is linear or rational, and the other half is visual and emotional. And guess which side of the brain makes major decisions?

Speaker 2: Visual and emotional.

Speaker 1: That's exactly right. Even if it's a big purchase, like an automobile, or leasing a house, those are big tickets. But you never buy the house if you don't love it, and you never buy the car if you don't love it. Right? So the right side of the brain is the one that convinces people. So you're going to use those kinds of tricks to get people to sign up for this program. We're thinking about right side of the brain, so we're thinking about photographs. We're thinking about positive adjectives. So you would always put a positive adjective before the noun. Fantastic program. Funny speaker. Exciting event. See what I'm doing? Most people don't bother with those positive adjectives, and so the promotional copy ends up feeling flat and ordinary. They look just like everybody else's advertisements. How many Zoom promotions have you received in the last week?

Speaker 2: Too many. Yeah.

Speaker 1: How do you decide which one to go to?

Speaker 2: Oh, by which one sounds the most interesting.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Which one's going to stand out? Which one seems the most exciting, you know? And it's these words, these positive adjectives that make that happen. So photos, positive adjectives, and if you're selling a speaker, it's important to use sample video clips. Nothing sells a speaker like a video clip. Okay. So your video clips should be, there are plenty of videos of me and my YouTube channel at Michelangelo Caruso on YouTube, but you don't want to share the entire keynote. Keynotes can run anywhere between 45 minutes and an hour. No one's going to watch that whole video, and you don't need them to watch the whole hour in order to click your registration link. You just need them to be convinced enough to say, yeah, this guy's good. I want in. And that video only needs to be two minutes long. Now of course they could watch two minutes of the 45 minute keynote, but when they see that number 45, they won't even click on it because it seems too demanding of their time. So only share the two minute videos. And the one you want to share, and I'll share, I'll give you all of this stuff. Not many speakers do this, I understand, but I will share a complete promo package with you and tell you exactly how to use it. Okay. I'll even tell you which video draws the best. For those of you watching this video on YouTube, my full name, Michael Angelo Caruso, and then the word motivation. And then you'll see the avatar come up, it says my speaking style in two minutes. That's the video you want to use. Because once they get an idea of the style, they go, yeah, she's right. Priscilla's right. This guy's good. I'm signing up. And then the final point is you never post a promo for your upcoming event without posting the link to sign up. Now, if you're posting on Facebook, which a lot of people do these days, it's best to create a Facebook event. You know why? Right. You know why, Priscilla? Why? Well, technically you don't need to, because if you say you're using Eventbrite or your club's website, you could just post that to Facebook. But Facebook doesn't like it when you post outside links. If you post your website link, people have to leave Facebook to go see it. And if you post a Facebook event page, they stay on Facebook to see it. So Facebook is more likely in their algorithm to show the Facebook event page than they are your club page.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 1: That makes sense. This is true for my YouTube video. If you try to post my YouTube video on Facebook, it doesn't show very many people. It doesn't want people leaving the platform. But if you share a video that's already on Facebook, it shows it to a lot more people. And you can find those videos in my Facebook video. It's called the media file now, media folder, I think.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 1: Okay? Okay. These are some basics to help you get it. You could easily double your attendance. And the good news for anybody like Rotary Clubs, or usually when people call me to ask me to speak at their event, even if it's an association, and I do a lot of that kind of work. They want more members in their association, just like Rotary wants more Rotarians. So the idea is to get like a 50-50 relationship maybe at your event, which may be really high on the visitor side. Would that be fair to say normally you have more visitors? Yes. Right. I mean, that's how it works normally. You'd expect more members of the club to be at the club function. Right. But when you have a really good promotion campaign, you actually have more visitors on the call than Rotarians. That's exciting for a number of reasons. Rotarians get excited because they see all these new faces. The visitors are excited because this is their first, maybe their first experience with Rotary. That's pretty cool. And then there's a Venn diagram, an overlap that allows the visitors to understand, hey, I could get more of this. I could be with these kinds of cool people more often. I could see more great speakers. What do I have to do? Oh, yeah. I have to think about joining this Rotary club. And of course, that's one of your end games, right? Right.

Speaker 2: Absolutely.

Speaker 1: Okay. So we can talk more details about our particular event after we stop the recording, but what kind of questions or comments come to mind as we wrap up here, as we talk about best practices for promoting an event?

Speaker 2: I think you really covered everything very well. As you said, one of our focuses will be on membership. That's one of the things that we have set as a goal is to increase membership. So certainly anything that we can do and you can help us do towards that goal would be exceptional.

Speaker 1: Great. Great. So two more tips before we say goodbye and get on with the details of the program you and I are doing together. And that is you want to make sure that you not only that you post to a bunch of different what I call modalities. So let's list them quickly. All the places you could get the word out about your event. You start. You start. We'll do it together. Where could you post and get the word out?

Speaker 2: Well, Facebook, which we've mentioned. Yes. Web pages.

Speaker 1: Which kind of web pages?

Speaker 2: You know, I was thinking not only our web page, but like our the Rotary district web page.

Speaker 1: Excellent. So the club and the district web page.

Speaker 2: I would think that we would want all of our members to post on their own Facebook pages or if they have any kind of business web pages that they would be allowed to post on.

Speaker 1: That's a huge tip that most people don't get. And the reason is this. Let's say your club only has and I don't mean to speak deprecatingly about the number. Let's say the club only has 800 likes. But most individuals have far more than 800 friends on Facebook. And if you could get the people in your club who have the most Facebook friends on their personal page to share this club event, you see what happens? You see how many more people find out about it. So personal pages. Very important. I'll suggest a few ideas, too. Not just Facebook, but let's say you wanted to attract professional members, 40 somethings and 50 somethings that are still in the workforce. That's a nice get for Rotary. What platform would you post to if you wanted to promote the event?

Speaker 2: I hear that more and more use Instagram, Twitter. Okay, there you go.

Speaker 1: So I would say-

Speaker 2: And I don't know, can you post on LinkedIn?

Speaker 1: You can because you're just posting that link again, right? The registration link. And that link has all those things. It has the video. It has the positive adjectives before the words. It's called the link, but it's the landing page or the registration page. So you post to different platforms to attract different kinds of people. Facebook is kind of a catch all. LinkedIn is only people who are still working. Retirees aren't engaged on LinkedIn anymore by definition. If you wanted to get to 30 somethings and 40 somethings or 20 somethings, Instagram is a great place to be. Instagram is a little bit more particular about what kinds of things you can post. So maybe you want to post the avatar or the PDF with an easy link that they could type, right? Okay. Yeah. So those are the different kinds of places that you could post. Don't forget to do email, bulk email, it still works. And you want people, if you text a couple of people who are well connected in the community and ask them to share it with two friends, then they come out in text format. People often respond to text better than they do email these days. So those are, let's see, let's review quick. Facebook page, both public and personal, group and personal, club websites, district websites, personal emails, texts. Excellent. And now you know exactly what kind of content would do best for you. Okay. Okay, good. I'm going to turn off the recording. I look forward to working with you. You as well. By the time a lot of people see this video, it'll be too late to attend your event, but we want to encourage anybody that's doing an event to work with a 100 day campaign and use these strategies that we just talked about so that they can get the most number of people onto their programs and help the most number of people. Priscilla, thank you so much for all you do for Rotary.

Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you for helping us out.

Speaker 1: Give your club a plug quickly. The proper name, and I assume you have a website and you can be found on Facebook?

Speaker 2: Yes, yes. We are the Columbus, Indiana Sunrise Rotary Club. So we meet at 7 a.m. on Friday mornings and we can be found on both Facebook and we do have a webpage, www.columbussunriserotary.com.

Speaker 1: Very good. Thank you very, very much for doing this recording with me. Thank you.

Speaker 2: Thank you.