In case you haven’t been keeping up with our series, we are preparing a planning strategy for a youth camp at Lake Williamson.  In the last blog, we went through the steps of picking our theme, “Anchored”.  Now it is time for us to do something with it. 

Online

Word of mouth is a great way to let people know about an event.  The personal invitation is a nice touch.  But we can guarantee that they aren’t going to remember any of those details.  So, that is why we have to put our event online.  This means a webpage and social media.

We will start with the webpage.  If the church already has a website, the ideal strategy is to create a new page that incorporates ALL the details.  This is the “X” on the treasure map.  There is nowhere else to go, so everything has to be here.  This is where we want prospective guests to get to. 

However, not every church has its own website, or even if they do, not everyone is capable in the technical process of putting a new page in.  That’s why there are free sites that allow users to make their own website in a friendly format.  For our kids camp, we are going to use Wix.  NOTE: You do have to sign up for an account, because you are logging into something that is storing design and content.  As previously stated, this is where ALL event details must go.  For our page we made sure to include the theme title, logo, location, who is invited, cost, dates, registration, and a link to the venue (aka Lake Williamson) so guests could explore for themselves. 

After the webpage is up, it is ready to be social.  Yes, I’m talking about social media.  Let’s start with Facebook.  One of the great features of this platform is that it isn’t limited to personal profiles.  That’s why we are going to create an event page.  Aside from all the necessary details (who, what, when, where), this is a key place to incorporate the theme.  The event cover photo is your prime spot for the logo.  But one place people tend to forget is at the top of the posts.  Create a post that includes the most necessary information and either your logo or camp promo video and make it a pinned post.  This keeps the post at the top of the page no matter how much stuff gets added, so that the first thing guests see is what you want them to.

Promotion

The primary use for the logo created in step 1 is to place it on promotion materials.  This means flyers, emails, postcards, online banners, slides in the church service announcements, etc.  Every single piece will have the logo and theme name on it.  Here’s a couple of examples we created:

Email header

Online banner

Flyer