How To Sell Your Tickets
by Melvin Tan, VC2
Winning speech for BVTMC Chapter Meeting on Thursday, 5 Sep 2019
Pathways Level 3 Project 1: Write a Communication Plan
“Hello everyone, I am Melvin from Buona Vista Toastmasters Club. We will be conducting a humorous speech workshop on 7 November, 7-10pm at Buona Vista Community Club. Our speaker, Clement, is the 2016 District 80 Humorous Speech Champion. Whether you are working on Humorous Speech or International Speech, this talk will be equally beneficial to you. Tickets are on sale now at our Facebook page – $12/pax and $20/pair. Walk-in price will be $15/pax. Do come down and join us for the fun on 7 November!”
How effective could such event promotion be? How many of you are willing to pay $12 to sign up for this event right after hearing this?
Yeah, I know it. My President won’t spare my life if I were to promote the club event in such a catastrophic way.
Good evening fellow Toastmasters and friends,
This is the scenario where I am tasked to organize a BVTMC humorous speech workshop in November. While the date, speaker, subject, and ticketing channel have been set up, now we come to one question: How should we promote it across potential audiences?
Communication should be planned well beforehand to maximize its impact. Communication plan sounds sophisticated, but it is actually everywhere in life. To promote an event aiming to fill the whole seminar room, a communication plan should be in place. The plan is more crucial especially when you have many competitors. Imagine this: While there is at least 1 running event every weekend in Singapore, you may see more than 2 or 3 Toastmasters-related meetings, workshops, and events every single week. Therefore, a proper plan is needed so that an event can stay visible.
Here, I will break my communication plan down into two parts; audiences and mediums. You’ll judge whether this plan will work.
First, audiences; We don’t have the budget to recruit market survey firms, but anecdotally, we identify three different audience groups.
- Group 1, serious Toastmasters members who want to take part in humorous speech contest in next February across the entire District 80, a.k.a. Singapore. They are aware of who Clement the district legend is.
- Group 2, Toastmasters members who may not want to participate humorous speech contest, but are interested to upgrade their speech delivery skill from dull to funny, or from funny to ROFL, rolling on floor laughing.
- Group 3, visitors and public guests who have little understanding of what Toastmasters and humorous speech is. I was in that stage two years ago. Back then, I could have misinterpreted this workshop as telling jokes while making a toast.
Here, we will match these groups to three different communication mediums.
- Medium 1, Buona Vista Toastmasters Club Official Facebook page – I’m sure many of you have visited the page. This is the medium that all 3 audience groups have access to. Therefore, our Eventbrite online registration page is published there.
To keep our Facebook page and event page afloat among Straits Times news, holiday pictures, and TikTok videos, we must post frequency. I would suggest various frequencies from once every fortnight in September to once a week in October, and finally twice in the workshop week.
Instead of monotonously repeating the workshop details, we will accompany posts with contents like Clement’s winning speech video, stand-up comedy clips, or even some humor-making tips. This is also to make sure audiences with different level of understanding can be equally attracted.
- Medium 2, the secret WhatsApp groups circulated among District 80 clubs. For your information, these groups are only made known to club officers, as a direct communication channel across over 220 clubs in Singapore. Events are promoted by respective club officers in the form of posters and URLs. Although information can only be indirectly transmitted to up to 12,000 registered members, there is no advertisement in WhatsApp – until Mark Zuckerberg decides to plant something.
- Last but not least, Medium 3 is 3D live promotion a.k.a. human bulletin board visiting clubs to promote the workshop – exactly what I did at the beginning. This method is useful to tackle with the serious Toastmasters group who aspire to go for contest, because we can stuff as many information as possible, even with demonstration. For example,
“Hello everyone, I am Melvin from Buona Vista Toastmasters Club. I am here to sell what we all need. Creating humor. Why? Because we are constantly under pressure in Singapore. Just now, when I was alighting the train, I heard a lady shouting, “Kill me! Kill me!” To my shock, I tried to see if there is any lady that I need to kill – sorry, I meant to provide assistance. Guess what? She actually said “Excuse me”, but Singlishly trimmed it to “Kills me”. With such false alarms, no wonder we are constantly under pressure.
Therefore, no matter you want to compete in humorous speech contest, to inject humor into speeches, or just to become jollier, you may join our hands-on workshop conducted by our 2016 District 80 Humorous Speech Champion Clement Chio. The workshop will be held on 7 November at Buona Vista Community Club. While we charge walk-in entries at $15/pax, discounted tickets are now available at our Facebook page – $12/pax and $20/pair. So, do come down and join us for the fun on 7 Nov!”
Well, does this plan work? I’ll let you judge it.
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