publicity tips

Creative publicity is essential to recruit, build your DM club, organize successful events, and spread DM ideas and messages across your campus. Always use at least THREE different kinds of publicity to make an impact.

  • Banners – Hang up large banners promoting DM and/your events in your student union, dining hall or dormitories. They should be bright with big lettering.

  • Campus Media – Contact all your campus media organizations. Get your campus radio and tv stations to advertise your events/meetings. Write for your campus newspaper and/or contact them to cover DM events. Get your meetings and events listed on all campus calendars.

  • Chalking – . Give your DM members sidewalk chalk and set them loose to cover campus with announcements about your event.

  • Class announcements – Ask professors if you can manke a one minute announcement to the class and pass around a DM information sign-uop sheet. OR before the professor arrives, stand up and announce DM meeting/events. Also on a corner of the black or white board before the professor walks in write the iDM nformation.in.

  • E-mail listservs – Send announcements of your events to other groups on campus to send to their lists.

  • Flyers – Put your eye-catching DM flyers everywhere - in bathrooms stalls, in academic buildings, in the student union, in student mailboxes, and of course when you table.

  • Friends – Word of mouth can be some of your best publicity. Have your members talk to their friends about DM.

  • Group announcements – Send DM member “Ambassadors” to other clubs’ meetings to pitch your events there.

  • Social Media – Post interesting information TWICE a week. They should include 1) interesting/important political news and 2) DM information about meetings or events. Get creative - make them funny and/or provocative. Ask everyone to re-post!

  • Professors – Ask Professors to announce events in their classes. And ask them to give extra credit for attendance.

  • Quarter cards – A week before a DM event, give each member a stack of quarter cards to hand out to friends or while standing in high traffic campus areas (library, dining hall) or tabling. p to place on chairs in classrooms, standing in high traffic campus areas (library, dining hall),

  • Resident Advisors – Contact RA’s and ask if you can do a voter reg or democracy presentation in the dorm. They also might hang up your flyers inside.

  • Table tents – Design attractive table tents and put them on tables in dining halls, snack bars, your student union etc.

  • Tabling – Incorporate specific event publicity and meeting place and time in every DM tabling.

  • Websites – Put your information on school websites.

TIPS FOR SUCESS

  • Visibility -Your goal is to find ways for students to know about DM and what you do (events, projects etc), even if they’re completely oblivious to everything else going on at your school.

  • Simplicity - Keep your messages short, understandable and simple. Communicate your ideas/events with brief descriptions. Too much text discourages people from paying attention to your publicity.

  • Language - Don’t use jargon, slogans, or acronyms unless they are easily understood - eveyone knows what they mean.

  • Hope & Positivity - Balance political critique with hope and positive alternatives. Political groups are often criticized for over-emphasizing the negative. If you use an strong negative statement to get attention, also include a positive hopeful statement

  • Creativity - Be outlandish! Much publicity on campuses is dull, dull, dull. Colorful, irreverent, interactive, 3-dimensional, eye-catching, funny etc. publicity is more effective. Just don’t let your creativity obscure your message.

  • Repitition - People should hear or read about your event at least seven times. No kidding. After the first few times, people who might not otherwise come or participate will become interested.

  • Recognition - Promote DM by clearly having a DM logo, name, and perhaps a contact person, or time and place of your meetingsclearly visible.

  • Audience - Think about what audience you’re trying to reach and design your publicity to get their attention. .

  • ONE-ON-ONE PERSONAL CONTACT - Talk everyone about your passion for DM - even briefly - standing in lines, in classes waiting for professors, hanging out, on your social media, etc. Word of mouth is one of the best (and cheapest) means of publicity.