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Implementing Your Communities Talk Promotion Plan

The promotion plan you develop for Communities Talk to Prevent Alcohol and Other Drug Misuse serves as a guide to ensure participation and coverage of your activity. It also will help you maximize the impact on prevention conversations and actions in your community. As you get the ball rolling with implementing your plan, make sure you follow these key steps:

  • Create a timeline so that you can accomplish all your promotional goals. Be realistic about how long it will take to develop your marketing materials, contact the media, and invite your audiences. Consider other community activities that may attract your audience's attention and whether you need to schedule your promotional activities to avoid conflicts.
  • Integrate your promotion timeline into a workplan that details each specific task and who is responsible for its completion. Remember, steady drumbeats of promotion are usually more effective than last-minute surges of activity, so be strategic in how and when you execute tasks.
  • Record your plan's progress. This can be as simple as setting up a template that you can update easily with key metrics as they become available, like dates and content of social media posts along with corresponding "likes" or "shares," open rates on email outreach, or visits to your website. Then, take the time to study where things are working well and build on those examples.
  • Be willing to adapt. If your promotional activities do not produce the desired results, be willing to modify them. Small tweaks to social media posts may make a big difference in engagement.
  • Following the activity, evaluate the effectiveness of your promotional plan and adjust the activities as needed to prepare for the next Communities Talk activity. Ask questions such as: Did the use of social media increase attendance? How well did our promotional activities support continued engagement and message dissemination?

Next, read about Evaluating Your Communities Talk Activity.