Believe it or not your speaker or other campus guest cares whether or not you get a good turn-out for your event. And many speakers are willing to get involved and help you promote your event to students, faculty, staff and the local community in any way they can. The best speakers know what draws people to their events and are often willing to devote extra time to insure your success.

Here are seven ways you can get your speaker involved in helping you recruit an audience.

1. Ask your speaker to design a flyer. Most speakers who regularly deliver campus programs probably already have a general template designed. They’ll just need to change the date and other details to correspond with your event. If the speaker can’t provide one consider recruiting a graphic design student or artist on campus to design one. Once you have it, post/distribute it all over campus.
    
2. Blog about it on your school blog. Your speaker can usually make lots of advance information available to your blogger and even make themselves available for a blog interview. This is a good way to talk to your students about the benefits of hearing this speaker. (NOTE: If you don’t have a school blog, with the help of someone on your campus activities board, you can blog about it here at CampusTalkBlog.)
    
3. Arrange for a newspaper interview. Get your guest speaker interviewed for you campus or local newspaper if the next issue will be out before the event. Speakers love to be interviewed and it can be done by phone so distance isn’t a factor. The speakers should also be able to email any photos or other visuals you might need for the article.
    
4. Do a radio interview. Get your guest speaker to call in to campus or local radio. Most radio stations can interview guests by call-in and this can really get your audience excited. They’ll get a chance to hear the speaker’s voice and get a taste of the energy they’ll bring to the event.
    
5. Get the speaker on TV. If you have a campus TV station or relationships with a local station your speaker would make a great news feature or talk show guest. The speaker might have to arrive on campus as much as a day before the event but often that’s not a problem. If their schedule permits, they won’t pass up a chance to be on TV.
    
6. Post a promo video on YouTube. Most speakers have the ability to make a short promo video, sometimes even custom tailoring it for your school, giving the date, time and all other important info. Most importantly, the video should stress the benefits of attending and give enough content to generate excitement. Once it’s on YouTube you can imbed it in your website or blog, send it out by email and much more.
    
7. Partner your speaker with a student marketer. Have a student (maybe a marketing major?) assigned to assist you in promoting the event. Connect them with the speaker and the two of them can work together to implement all of the strategies above and brainstorm other ways to promote that will be perfect for your campus.

Got any other ideas? I’d love to hear them and our speakers would jump at the chance to make them work for you.

PEACE.

Rick