Do you wonder how to attract new course participants, and at the same time encourage the existing students to continue learning in your school? Promotional events will help you accomplish both those targets. There are a few hints on how to organise them.
Why is it worthwhile?
An interesting event will help us stand out from the competition and naturally reach out to many new course participants. Let us be known as a school that focuses not just on dry teaching but also takes care of the language’s cultural context and its live usage.
Moreover, promotional events help integrate the course participants and build a friendly atmosphere in the school. Consequently, students will be more inclined to stay with us for the next term and recommend us to their friends.
What can we organise?
Please find below a few examples of such events, but of course, possibilities are almost endless … it’s all up to how imaginative we are.
Open days – it’s best to organise them a few weeks before a term begins to encourage potential clients to enrol for a course. During such meetings, we can perform demonstration classes, show photos from a trip to a given country, and talk about its culture.
Celebrations of the holiday – a joint Christmas party for the entire school is an excellent moment to familiarize participants with corresponding vocabulary and traditions of the states whose languages we teach. Let us also not forget about national holidays. The birth of the British Queen or the Fiesta Nacional de España, the national day of Spain held annually to commemorate the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s first arrival in the Americas, are also good opportunities to organise a promotional event.
City game – such activities have enjoyed enormous popularity recently. They combine a cracking promotional campaign and fun capable of integrating our course participants. It is certainly important to embed such activities in the context of foreign language teaching, a given country or something similar. Recently PASE Association organised a city game titled Language Thief. The photo gallery of the event is the best evidence of the interest it enjoyed.
Film shows – they can help us reach out to many new course participants. But when organising them let us remember about legal provisions regulating the issue of public screening – it is a good idea to contact the film distributor. We can also look for a partner organisation, e.g. a coffee bar club, which will make a room available to us and join in the promotion of the show.
Tasting events – tasting of delicacies typical for the country of interest for us can be an excellent form of promotion; if we have proper facilities, we can even prepare the delicacies together with the participants!
Cultural events – it is worthwhile keeping your finger on the pulse and organise joined trips to events related to the culture of the country whose language we teach, e.g. a theatre play, film, an exhibition or a dance performance.
Board game day – “the most popular word game” is an obvious choice for such meeting but even a ludo party can be highly developing – as long as the players communicate in the foreign language concerned. Preparation of a language city game is an interesting idea, but also one much more demanding in organisational terms.
Meeting with a VIP – a traveller, an artist, a representative of the embassy or some other interesting person connected with a given country, are likely candidates.
What shall we bear in mind when organising promotional events?
- Prepare your actions carefully to show that your school is perfectly organised.
- Plan the promotion of the event well in advance.
- Find partner organisations that will join in the organisation of your event.
- Boast of your activities – shoot photos and films and promote them on social networking websites.
- Collect e-mail addresses of the course participants and their consent to receive info about school opening … and next interesting events.
Promotional events are a creative method for promotion of our school. Their organisation is like making a virtue of necessity – ultimately course instructors and language school owners are usually aficionados of the culture of the country whose language they teach.
If you have any experiences in the organisation of events, share them with us in your comments.