Post 10 of 15
Leveraging professional networks
Without a doubt leveraging our existing professional networks is what helped us secure the largest number of delegates. We identified a group of leaders in the field, and contacted them personally, asking them to spread the word. We also leveraged our networks in the following organisations:
Directing traffic to event website
As stated in a previous post, we created a sub-section of our school website for our event. Doing so allowed us to route some of the traffic from the main school website to our event website.
Social media & online fora
We placed Twitter at the top of our list of social media to focus on. We Tweeted messages with the #ECIStech2015 hashtag and asked all of our delegates, sponsors and presenters to spread the word. Arguably we could have done a whole lot more with this, but limited time and resources held us back.
Leveraging related organisation networks
As the Tech Conference we organised was an ECIS event, we kindly asked the ECIS to advertise our event in the following avenues
- Main annual ECIS conference (keynote)
- ECIS Tech Committee newsletters
- Main ECIS newsletter
- ECIS Website
Leveraging sponsors networks
We kindly asked our sponsors to advertise the event using their existing networks. Many did, either using their Twitter account, or using their company website or blog.
As stated in an earlier post, we only had 6 months to organise the ECIS Tech Conference 2015. We know that advertising was one of the weak links in our organising the event. Nonetheless, we still managed to exceed our targets and expectations in terms of signups.
In the next post I will share tips on preparing the venue for a tech conference.