Section 1
Advertising can be done in so many ways - flyers, posters, online, in-person, radio, newspapers or even TV. I have seen many many adverts before (hasn't everyone?) but I have never had to actually advertise myself.
The successful use of advertising can really be broken into 2 main points: What grabs peoples attention? And, more importantly, what makes them interact with it? The whole aim is to make people do something, not just look at pretty images. Doing is the hard part. No one likes putting effort into things they didn't necessarily set out to do in the first place.
My first instinct when advertising educational workshops for children was to talk to schools. For this, I created a flyer with all the information about the planned workshops and how to register on it.
Creating the flyers was an interesting process as it involved deciding on the branding for Notate Create Innovate. I settled on a bright and cheerful colour scheme of orange, yellow and other pastel tones. I chose these as I thought they would appeal to children and convey a fun energy.
I also included some photos of Megan and I to add a personal touch. I decided to bring Megan in to lead the sessions as I knew it's one of my weaker areas. Megan had a lot of experience of leading groups of children before so I was confident in her abilities. I would still be present at the sessions to assist, deal with parents and technical malfunctions but I let Megan predominantly take the workshops. I think putting faces to the organisation during advertising helped parents to feel more comfortable signing up.
Each workshop on the flyer also had a short description of what to expect so parents could judge which their children would be most interested in.
Section 2
I aimed these workshops at ages 7-11, known as Key Stage 2 in schools. I thought this age would be a good fit for the online format and the content we wanted to produce. The graph below shows the spread of ages we had attending the workshops, which shows that we catered to the level expected.
When advertising, I originally wanted to work with schools to find the children who would benefit most from the musical workshops. I targeted some schools that were recommended to me who might appreciate the opportunity. However, I found that it was very hard to get schools on board with this project. Some schools might have sent the information in newsletters, but I found out from a previous school administrator that schools are inundated with companies wanting them to advertise so most of these emails get deleted straight away.
This possibly would not have been a problem had I been able to go to the schools in person, but as they had moved online this became impossible.
Instead of relying on the schools, I decided to branch out and try other platforms. I had seen lots of similar projects (and competitors) advertising on social media, particularly Facebook. This prompted me to make lists to different mums and parents groups on Facebook in areas I had connections with both in London and Bristol. This is one of the major advantages to online workshops: you aren't limited by location.
I found that the mums groups succeeded in spreading the information and that my network of teachers were also able to reach people more effectively. Facebook groups did present their own challenges though:
A lot of groups are private so it takes time to apply and become accepted as a member.
Some groups don't allow sharing. This is one of the things that was frustrating as I had quite a few people who wanted to share from a group but I had to redirect them to my Facebook business page instead.
Some groups have many members, but this isn't always a good thing. I found that the biggest groups with potentially the biggest reach also were the most saturated. It was hard to reach people when there were several posts an hour.
Other groups didn't allow members to post and you had to go through an admin or ask for approval, which took a lot of time.
A few groups didn't have any type of posting from members and instead had 'community' tabs. These were not very useful as these posts don't show up on feeds or get seen by many people.
I also considered using the paid advertising feature on Facebook but decided against it. This is because the targeted advertising would only target friends of friends - I do not think I have many parents of young children in that group!
Despite all this, people talked and people shared. People also signed up.
Section 3
To see how effective each platform was at reaching people, I tracked it all in spreadsheets and graphs. This allows me to see where I should focus my efforts when I next run workshops.
I also produced some graphs so that I could more easily see the results. It was clear that my Facebook page was the most successful way of reaching people and had the most engagements, but I believe that this was because of people being directed to it following seeing the flyers posted on various Facebook groups.
The groups that were most successful seemed to be the Frampton Cotterell and Coalpit Heath Blog, with a good amount of comments and redirections so that the information could be shared. The other group that had a good amount of engagement was the Trinity Laban Official Freshers 2020 Page. This targeted music teachers instead of parents and I know quite a few children we had attend had siblings being taught music. This was an interesting point, although not necessarily quite who we were originally aiming the workshops towards.
It was harder online to specifically direct the workshops towards disadvantaged households as the nature of online content is that anyone can see it. That said, the children that attended were engaged and the parents were appreciative of the experience.
This was an interesting learning curve which included many adaptations and changes as the workshops drew closer. It was important to analyse what was happening and change platforms and methods as I progressed to assure that the workshops had enough interest.
Overall, I found that social media is just an online extension of word of mouth. It is easier than ever to share activities and events with friends all around the globe with just the simple click of a button. We had children all over England join us for the workshops and even reached Brazil!
If you would like to learn about the process of creating the workshops have a look at A Deep Dive into the Creation of 'Are Conductors Wizards?'.
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