Event promotion

The event: a gala on Friday 20 March, 20:00, tickets online, capacity 200. Audience: all four year groups plus alumni.

Here's the whole promotion, start to finish.

Set it up#

In Events, create the event with the date, the venue, and the ticket link. Audience: the everyone-plus preset (year groups + alumni — see the association playbook).

Pick the aggressive cadence — five messages. A gala earns it; your average drinks night does not, and standard is the right default for those.

That generates five slots. Now write them.

The five messages#

Save the date — 14 days out, midday#

*Save the date: Spring Gala, Friday 20 March* 🥂

Tickets go live next week. Put it in your calendar now —
last year sold out in four days.

No link. The job of this message is one thing: get the date into people's heads before anyone else claims that Friday.

Announcement — 7 days out, midday#

*Spring Gala — tickets are live* 🥂

Friday 20 March, 20:00 at De Bourgogne.
Three-course dinner, live band, dress code black tie.
€35 for members.

Get yours: https://yourassociation.nl/gala

The full pitch, and the only message that needs to be complete. Everything below assumes people saw this or can ask someone who did.

Reminder — 3 days out, early evening#

*Gala update: the band is confirmed* 🎷

{Nightshift|The house band} is playing, and we're at
140 of 200 tickets.

Still coming? https://yourassociation.nl/gala

New information, not a repeat. A ticket count, a line-up, a confirmed guest — something that gives the message a reason to exist. This is the single biggest difference between a promotion people tolerate and one they mute. Note the variation braces.

Last call — 1 day out, early evening#

*Last call — gala tickets close tonight at 23:59* ⏳

18 left.

https://yourassociation.nl/gala

Two lines. Urgency plus link. Nothing else.

Day of — the morning, 10:00#

Tonight! 🥂

*20:00 · De Bourgogne · black tie*
Doors close at 21:00 — don't be the person
arriving at 21:05.

Practical only. No selling; tickets are gone. This message exists to get the people who bought tickets to actually turn up on time.

Before you launch#

Launch shows you two things worth reading:

• Conflicts — is another committee promoting into the same year groups that week? If the sports committee has a tournament announcement on the 17th, move your reminder to the 18th.
• Health warnings — groups that will be skipped when a slot fires because they're over cap or inactive.

With a daily cap of 1 on year groups, the weekly digest going out the same morning as your announcement will block one of them. That's the warning doing its job: shift the announcement to the afternoon.

If a group should never receive event promotion, an admin can suppress it rather than untagging it — but note that suppression is org-wide, so it applies to every event, not just this one.

Afterwards#

Open the event funnel and look at which slot drove clicks. The pattern almost everyone finds:

• Save the date: almost no clicks. Correct — there's no link. Don't conclude it failed.
• Announcement: the biggest single spike.
• Reminder: usually second, and often higher than the announcement when it carried real news.
• Last call: high click rate on low volume. The urgency works.
• Day of: negligible clicks, and irrelevant — it isn't a selling message.

Then look at click rate by audience. If alumni clicked at three times the rate of first-years, next time the announcement goes to alumni first and first-years get a different pitch.

Doing it again#

Clone the event for next year. The timeline, roles, and audience come with it — you change the date and rewrite the specifics. If your association always runs this shape, save it as a cadence preset and have an admin publish it so every committee inherits it.

The version that goes wrong#

For contrast, the promotion that gets you muted:

• Five messages, all of them the announcement text with more exclamation marks.
• All five to everyone-plus, including alumni, who get nothing but ticket sales all term.
• Two of them on the same day because someone thought the first didn't send.
• Sent at 23:40 because that's when the poster was finished.

Every one of those is prevented by something on this page: real news per slot, an alumni weekly cap, the cooldown, and quiet hours.