How I got an audience for my event

By Simon Paul Miller.

When I mentioned to the leaders of the Jubilee church that I’d love to use their new facilities to record a comedy adventure script I’d written, I was surprised at the enthusiastic response I got. Turns out, the church were looking to publicise their new building to the local community and, fortunately for me, they thought the idea of getting locals in to watch a podcast recording fitted this requirement nicely. So I sent them a Rhyming Detective script, they read it, thought it was very funny and I got the go ahead. I not only got a venue from the church, but volunteers to act, a technical crew to assist in the recording and some members of the church made cakes and hot drinks for everyone in the interval. All I had to do was get an audience for a free event on a Thursday night, which wasn’t as easy as you might think. So, for those of you who find yourself in a similar situation, here is my experience of what works, what doesn’t work and how much it cost me…

The first thing I did was to set up a web site. I managed to purchase www.rhymingdetective.co.uk through one.com for £10.80 and that included more than enough user-friendly, on-line software to set up everything I needed, including as many email addresses as I wanted that end with rhymingdetective.co.uk . I should mention that’s a special price for the first year, after which it’s an annual subscription of just under £25 (assuming I stay within the 15 gigabytes I’ve been allocated). I didn’t shop around, so you can probably find a better deal if you do. Fortunately Thomas Adams, a friend of mine, created a great image for the podcast cover for me that I could also use in my advertising and on the web site.

I set up a tickets page on the web site and, using the software provided by one.com, I found it very easy to set up a form that people would fill in to request seats for the performance. Importantly, from this article’s point of view, I included a drop–down list on the form that asked where the person requesting seats had learnt about the event. I’ll now go through those options, telling you what they cost me and what results they gave me…

Church
Amount spent – £0.

Announcements were made in the Church email and during the Sunday service. Curiously, whilst 17% of the tickets we allocated were to church members, only 9% of the audience said they heard about the event through the Church itself.

Facebook
Amount spent – £23.

Before I could advertise on Facebook, I had to create a Rhyming Detective Facebook page and, when I eventually got to compose some Facebook adverts, I discovered the tight restrictions on how much text you can use (which includes text within the attached image). You’ll also need to design and format your image to fit Facebook’s requirements.

The £23 I spent went on two campaigns. The first was run for four days, six weeks before the event was due to take place. I chose to send the adverts out to Facebook users over sixteen within a 17km radius of Leamington (the smallest radius I could select), spoke English and who had an expressed interest in BBC Radio 4 Extra, Radio comedy, Podcasts, Theatre, Milton Jones, Podcasts, BBC Radio 4 or Sketch comedy.

In the second campaign I either stumbled onto a way I could narrow the advertising to just the Leamington Spa area or Facebook had made some changes that allowed me to do this. This campaign also ran for four days, from the Thursday through to the Sunday before the event, and I configured it to go out to Facebook users over sixteen with interests in Podcasts, Entertainment or Internet radio.

There’s a ‘Manage Adverts’ page within Facebook that is addictive to watch as you see the reach your advert gets, the resulting clicks and how much you are getting charged. Despite having set a limit on how much I spent, as the campaign ran, I got that screwed up feeling in my stomach akin to watching a taxi’s fare meter in a traffic jam. According to the ‘Manage Adverts’ page, the first campaign reached 7,444 Facebook users, but only resulted 47 website clicks. The second campaign had a reach of 4,286 users and resulted in just twenty website clicks. You have to take these statistics on trust, there’s no way of checking, but there are ways of adjusting how you are charged (which are completely baffling). The real value for me was in how many of those 67 clicks turned into seat reservations. I can tell you that the number of people who reserved tickets and said they had heard about the event through Facebook was… one. And that was a family friend who’d seen a post my daughter made on Facebook (and on the night couldn’t attend due to an illness).

So I found Facebook advertising an interesting experience, a lot of work but, ultimately, a waste of money.

Flyer on public display/ Flyer through the door
Amount Spent – £94.24 (A batch of 1,000 flyers followed by a second batch of 500).
I posted over 300 flyers through doors near the church and only two people indicated they’d seen one. However, sixty per cent of the people who reserved seats said they’d found out about the event through flyers on public display. I put out flyers around Leamington over the six weekends before the event, pinned on noticeboards in local sports centres, supermarkets, bookshops, the library, the Town Hall and anywhere else I could get permission to, but mostly in cafes. Often, I would have to re-arrange the notice board to fit mine in, but I always made sure I never obscured someone else’s flyer. It’s annoying to go back to a place where you’ve put up a flyer to find someone else has covered it, or even removed it. However, it happens and you need to regularly check that your flyers are still on display.

Some places had noticeboards in such obscure places that it completely defeated the point of having them. However, if I asked nicely, I found I could normally leave a small pile of flyers on the counter. It became easier over the weeks as staff recognised my face and just smiled and nodded to indicate I could leave more flyers. I did have one awkward situation where two managers in a Costa store, presumably on overlapping shifts, erupted into a huge argument over whether I could or could not leave some flyers on their counter. At the strong insistence of the one who said I could, I left a pile and made a quick exit, leaving them to their shouting match. I don’t know if the argument ended peacefully or not but, later that same day, all the flyers had gone. Maybe due to a sudden surge of interest, but I suspect not.

Hearing from attendees after the event, “I just picked up a flyer at <insert café name here>” was a common phrase, indicating that flyer piles were a successful tactic. My flyer was A5 sized which was great for leaving on counters and pinning up on noticeboards, but a few places had stands with pockets that took narrow leaflets about half the width of an A5 sheet, so if I do this again, I’ll consider getting two types of flyer. I’m sure having some nice artwork really helped (thanks, Tom!), but also keeping the layout simple and minimising the amount of text helped to make the flyer attractive.

WhereCanWeGo.com
Spent – £4 (Optional)

This web site is a community events guide where you can post your event for free, but I went for a premium entry where, for £4, you can make your advert stand out with an image. It really did look good and certainly stood out from the rest. Alas, nobody who reserved a seat said they had come from this web site so, if I use it again, I’ll just post a standard event.

Word of mouth/A friend

32% of people who went found out through a friend. Half of these I could identify as church members who didn’t hear about the event through the church, some friends, some friends of friends and relations of the cast. The other half, I assume, heard through people who’d seen flyers but I can’t know for sure.

Not Specified

On the ticket page I gave the option of emailing Enquiries@RhymingDetective.co.uk to get tickets if they experienced difficulties using the online form. I got three requests emailed directly to this address and, although I asked, none of them let me know how they’d found out about the event.

I did try contacting a local paper to see if they were interested in running a story about us, but never heard back. I also contacted Warwick University’s Student Union hoping they’d like to tell their members about a free event but received a very blunt reply informing me of their advertising options, the cheapest of which was £170 to distribute 1,000 flyers to Students (and I had to provide the flyers!). Maybe it just Warwick University’s Student Union, but was surprised at how Student Union’s have become so commercial.

When sending out the tickets by email, I did ask people to let me know if, for any reason, they couldn’t attend and this worked, in that I did get twelve (very nice) emails before the date from people telling me they couldn’t come. I also sent out a reminder email on the Monday night before the recording, which included the first mention that free tea/coffee and cakes would be available to encourage attendance. By the night itself, we had 150 reserved seats but I didn’t think they’d all come and I was right. Many of the larger groups arrived apologising for a missing member having caught a rather nasty bug that had spread over Leamington Spa that week and the severe flooding that had closed roads and caused traffic jams, put others off attempting to come. As a result, we performed to an audience of 120 people which was a nice size and, as Church members seemed overly keen to point out, was a lot more than turned up on Sundays.

So, in future, I’ll avoid advertising on the internet and stick to flyers placed in strategic, public places. I now have a mailing list that can use to inform those who attended the last event, or shown an interest in it, when the podcasts are available and if and when we hold any more recording sessions. Now that I’ve uploaded the first episode, I’ve got to figure out ways to publicise the Rhyming Detective podcast itself of which, did I mention, you can find out more about at www.rhymingdetective.co.uk .