Announcing Events

A society blog is a great way to put the word out about upcoming meetings, fund-raisers and other events.  It allows you to include information about the agenda and guest speakers, provide directions to the event’s location or entrance fees.  But don’t stop there.  Most local papers and radio stations have community service sections in their papers and on their web sites providing community groups a bit of free press.  Make sure you develop contacts with your local media and know how far in advance you need to submit your event information to get it included in their publications.

There’s another very useful resource you should consider – especially if you would like to connect with out-of-town visitors.  Take a look at Yahoo’s Upcoming site.  Visitors to the site can designate a location and find upcoming concerts, museum exhibits, festivals, sports events and meetings.  Anyone can add an event – all it takes is a free Yahoo! account.  You can post the obvious information – date, time, place – plus you can include details about the event and even links to your group’s web site.  Did I mention that it costs you nothing to do this?  Nothing but a few minutes of your time.

Now, here’s where it gets good.  Because this is a Yahoo property, you can bet any of the posted events will be easily found by the big search engines.  And, Upcoming is a great site for folks with smart phones like the iPhone, Blackberry and others that include web browsing capability.  They can quickly find events near their current location (iPhone includes GPS functionality) and connect to both Yahoo and Google maps to find their way to the event.

Take a look at Upcoming.  Try adding your meetings to the site.  I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.