Event tip : Make the most of social media

A great way to spread the word about your events is through the smart use of social media. You can look at social media engagement to gauge which events will be popular as well as increasing the number of people you get to attend.

Former ALW best Event winners Phillip Island Community and Learning Centre Inc. (PICAL) used their social media effectively before, during and after Adult Learners Week.

‘In coming up with ideas for events we went back and looked at all of our Facebook posts and all the feedback and comments people had made on our Facebook page about what topics they were interested in. Then we took that list and looked at the logistics and practicalities of which ones we could offer.

‘One of the things that drew people in was our Facebook posts. We used aesthetically pleasing images for our promotions and picked the right times to post them and that vastly increased our traffic. The number of our Facebook followers jumped by 50% during Adult Learners Week. It also helped that our local paper ran a full-page story on the Wednesday before Adult Learners Week started.

‘We offered 21 different activities during Adult Learners Week that attracted between 7 and 30 people per session. One lady who came to the first Adult Learners Week event enjoyed it so much that she came to every single one of our other events during the Week. Now she’s a firm advocate and promoter of PICAL.

‘We had regulars come to our events, some people who had been once in a blue moon, but we also saw a lot of new faces. The cooking events are always popular especially because people can eat what they’ve made. But the one that surprised us for popularity was the basic home maintenance class. We had 12 people come along to learn things like how to hang a heavy painting on a wall and how to change a tap washer. People just don’t learn those skills anymore, which is why those ‘hire a hubby’ franchises are springing up everywhere. But people really want to learn how to do those things themselves.

‘All of the activities were 2 hour taster sessions and we used them to test demand for courses in the future. We made note of those ones where people said, ‘We wish you’d run a whole course on this.

‘Adult Learners Week was highly successful for us. We hoped it would be and we put a lot of energy into promoting it as hard and as far as we could.’

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