How We Reached Over 25 Thousand Applicants on Youth Conference
A short story of Future Leader Summit 2017
Well, it is a bit late to recall that moment. But I always believe, better to be late than never. So, here we go!
In 2017, I was a communication director that led 6 people on my team. I built a team with a goal to make a great impact through applicants (how many people we reached). Not only about applicants, we also have to build a great image of the brand. And surprisingly, we reached 25.512 applicants from across Indonesia. That was thecraziest moment in life, it was beyond our expectations.
Before I go further to tell you about what we have done to reach that crazy number with a really great online worth of mouth, let me tell you about Future Leader Summit first. Future Leader Summit is an annual national youth conference held in Semarang since 2011. We are a platform for youth to make a collaboration from all over Indonesia. You can visit our website or our Instagram.
In 2017, we brought a grand theme “Dare to create to maximize demographic dividend in 2020” with the tagline #DaretoCreate. We would like to encourage youth to not only giving the idea but also dare to execute their ideas through 6 room issues; digital, creative industry, urban environment, education development, science technology and tourism. Future Leader Summit 2017 held in Semarang with 25.512 applicants, 240 delegates, 15 speakers, 6 room issues and 11 event venues.
As a communication director, I would like to tell you about how to make a great exposure of your event and get the sponsor to call you even you never submit your proposal. And here are the secret recipe that succeeded to get 25.512 applicants and made a crowd among University students in Indonesia.
1. Make a great communication team of yours
(Picture: FLS 2017 communication team)
To be a leader is about how you build your team and make every part of your team make their self-improvement along the way we reach our goals and vision. By determining your vision, it makes you easier to put the right people in the right place in the team. In my experience, before I did the open recruitment for the team, I would like to make certain roles that I need in team. At FLS 2017, some roles that I need in my team are;
- Media Relations Manager
As a media relation manager, you will have a specific job description to build and maintain good relations with media, both national media and local media. This role taught you how to reach the media, build a relationship with them, and compile the press release. By taking this role, you will have many relations, which is good for your future.
- Social Media Manager
As a social media manager, you will work closely with the creative team and program team to make a great content that fits with the target audiences. Social media manager is a great communicator that directly communicate with the target audiences.
- Pra Event and Campaign Manager
As a pra event and campaign manager, you will work closely with the creative team, program team, and also third party outside organisation.
- Website and Blog Manager
As a website and blog manager, you will work closely with IT and creative team for crafting content and amazing website.
- Press Conference Manager
As a press conference manager, you will work with media relations manager and Liaison Officer of the speakers to arrange press conference after event.
2. You have to understand who isexactly your audiences and target market
Before we talk about communication strategy, first of all, as an event organizer, you should know and understand who is exactly your audiences and target market. The deep understanding of your audiences like what they like, their preference topic, what kind of social media platform that they use, and what time they use their social media the most. You have to look into detail about what things that make them interested. And in FLS 2017 case, me and my team really lucky, since our target market is in the same age as us and most likely their behavior is the same with us. Just like others conference, our audiences are the ambitious, optimist critical, and really passionate aboutsocial issues, which they are the great generations for the future of Indonesia.
By understanding your audiences and their preferences and behavior, you will know what exactly strategy to communicate with your audiences.
Communication itself is a key to everything, so how we communicate is really matters. If you want to make a great event, make sure you have a great team behind the communication.
3. Put the right communications tools for your audiences (With a low budget)
As I mentioned above, we have to know who is our audience and after that, we can make a great communication strategy to attract them. When you build a communication strategy, keep in your mind that you will always follow the trend of social media. Here are the communication tools that I use to hit FLS 2017;
a. Social Media
(Picture: Future Leader Summit Instagram)
In Future Leader Summit 2017, we used 4 social media platforms, which are they commonly used by our audiences, the millennial generations. They are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Official Account Line. Social Media platform itself just a tool, but the soul and the key is the content.
In the first gathering with my team, we set the goal for every social media that we used. Our goal is to gain as much as organic followers and build engagement with them. We want to make our audiences keep following us, even the event itself was ended. And as mentioned above, the key is content. Content is everything.
Content is everything and use their language to communicate your content.
Before crafting the content, you have to know the characteristic of social media platform that you used. For example, on Instagram, people really concern with the visual itself, and sometimes they skipped the caption. So, you have to make sure that your audiences can catch the information from the visual. And luckily, we had Instagram swap since last year to make us easier to give more information in one post.
At FLS 2017, I made contents for our social media continuously, since day 1 I became a communication director and had no team yet until the end of event itself. We want to build a connection with our audiences. We brought content that met their needs of information in the simplest way. We already knew that millennial always want something that fasts and instantly and that’s exactly the reason why our communication team worked really hard with creative team to make an informative yet simple content and doing it constantly with a tight schedule.
As a communicator, we have to take a note that the special thing about internet era is interactive communication, which means there’s an interaction between the communicator and the audience. It led me to craft a content that engages audience to tell their opinion, to make a crowd in the comment section. In the term of social media content, we are not always the one who communicate. We have to trigger and create a space for the audience to speak what’s in their head. This is the easiest way to boost the engagement.
Instagram and Facebook as a huge platform that millennial use nowadays give us opportunity to create a crowd and attract our audiences with really an affordable price through ads. The special thing about ads nowadays, it possible to make us grab attention in the exact audiences that we want to. We can set the age, the geographic area, and even gender. Which is the good news for every marketer in the world. Basically, selling an event is a bit common with selling goods. We have to stand out from the crowd to make our target market attracted to buy what we sell. At the FLS 2017, we used Instagram ads that automatically connected with the Instagram ads. The combination of a good content and ads really beyond expectations. Our followers grew up rapidly and they stayed, even the event itself has ended.
As an event organizer, we often talk about ourselves, our event, only that. We often forget to talk about what exactly our audiences need. We have to talk about what they concern which is that’s not only all about our event. In my experience, FLS account has over 25 k followers organic in Instagram with applicants over 25 k too and we need only 240 total delegates to attend our event. So, I have to maintain the total followers that really huge number comparing with the delegates that accepted. We decided to maintain all the followers with content that engages them, the content that not only talk about our event. Since it will be very boring if our followers that not accepted as delegates have to see every detail of our event without any opportunity to attend that event, which it might be led them to unfollow. What I want to say is, the right content will make your followers stay longer and loyal.
The content is the most important thing, but don’t forget how we behave and communicate with our audiences is important too. It’s all the way we reply their direct message and the comments. Be kind and be friend with them even they don’t really know who is the man behind every message of the event social media.
b. Websites, Blog, and Email Subscription
A website is an essential thing to make the audiences easier to find a complete information about your event and also to submit the applications. Build your website as simple as possible with an attractive design and a lot of information there but please, don’t be so wordy. People don’t want to spend that much time on your website.
At Future Leader Submit, we build our website as well as we build our blog. As we know, our target market is type A student who most likely love to write. And here it is, we give them platform to contribute through article. We made “Call for Articles” through social media and they sent us a lot of articles we’ll be the editor and upload it toour website blog and put their name. I always believe, that we can contribute to the society through writing.
At the bottom of the website, we put an email subscription box. The audiences can put their email there and keep in contact with us. As a result, we have hundreds email database through email subscription. We can communicate regularly with them about what’s new from us. We always can keep in touch personally with our audiences, which it’s really emotionally important to make them feel that we care.
c. Media Partners
Even we have our own media with a huge number of followers, we still always need media partners, the people outside our organization that talk about us. In the scale of national conference, we need to engage with both national and local media, both online or offline media. Coverage of online media itself helps us to win in google search engine, to make our audiences easier to find us (you can visit google.com and type Future Leader Summit). Media also help us build trust.
d. Make a campaign and build hashtag
At Future Leader Summit 2017, we built a social campaign with hashtag #DaretoCreate and #FutureLeaderSummit2017 (you can go check on your Instagram). The idea is simple, we would like to encourage our audiences to dare to execute their idea. We start the campaign from pra event until the close submission. To participate in the campaign, all they need to do just post the idea in Instagram, preferably the idea that has been executed. Amazingly, there was a lot of idea that posted on Instagram. We gave the winner the reward, that was a golden ticket to join Future Leader without doing the submission thing. Campaign is always important to me. It is the right tool to make an impact and crowd at the same time. And if you want your event stand out, please try this :)
e. Get the Testimonial
Like a brand, you need to build trust for your customer. One of the ways to create trust is showing testimonial. Get your customer to talk about your brand in positive way. And that is what we did in Future Leader Summit 2017. We asked our ex-delegates and ex- rangers (ranger is the name of our committee) to post on their own social media what they got from joining Future Leader Summit. Not only build the trust, it also help to make a crowd.
Through this article, I want to share with you my experience as a communication director of national youth conference. How my team worked really hard to increase the number of applicants from 1500 at 2016 to 25.512 in 2017. The number is not always important, but in my opinion with the number of applicants that really high, it reflects how our youth is really concern about social movement topic. Increasing number of applicants can create bigger impact. As a director, I really proud of my team and really proud of overall Future Leader Summit committee, others director, and of course the Project Leader that always encourage me to do my best.
I still remember how we arranged a meeting twice or even three times a week. Working closely with creative team, program team, IT team, Liaison Officer team, the person charged in delegates team, marketing team, media, and also the sponsors. It will always be a good memory of mine, to be part of Future Leader Summit 2017. Seeing good people from all over Indonesia, they were really amazing.
This article is dedicated to my Future Leader Summit team, delegates and everyone who submitted into this conference. You showed me that we have a chance to have a better future of Indonesia. Don’t forget to submit and be a part of Future Leader Summit 2018. You can submit here.
Thank you for reading!
Sincerely,
Efrilia
PS: Please, do give me feedback for better writing
