Augment Your Outreach With A Follow Up Event

This article was featured in our weekly newsletter, the Liberator Online. To receive it in your inbox, sign up here. How long is your typical interaction while tabling or at an outreach event? I’m hopeful that I will have 30 seconds… Just long enough to get in an elevator pitch. One of the biggest challenges we have as libertarians is condensing our message into easy to digest bits, while still explaining what we believe. Here’s how you get over that hurdle AND show your prospective new libertarians that your group is their best way to get involved: Schedule a follow up event after your outreach event. Here are key elements to making sure the outreach and follow-up events work well together:

• The follow-up event should be social in nature. No one wants to attend a boring meeting the first time they show up, so don’t make them. Newly interested people want to engage with the leaders and members of the group in one-on-one and group conversations. Think “Meet & Greet” or “Open House.” Attendees aren’t expecting champagne and caviar, yet you should have available some food and drink options. Asking the bakers and cooks among you to provide something they do well will make it cheaper than catering.
• Schedule the event two or three weeks after your outreach event. By scheduling something this far in advance, you give potential attendees an opportunity to put it on their calendar. We are all busy, and by giving your prospective attendees an opportunity to “fit you in,” you’ll likely increase attendance. Added bonus: You will have more experience with planning and executing events that aren’t hastily thrown together at the last minute.
• It is important that you give your prospective attendees a “take away” to remind them. There is a reason that door-to-door salespeople leave something for you when they’ve visited. They don’t want you to forget them and what they are selling. At an outreach booth, you are in a similar situation. While not going door-to-door, you will be interacting with many people (hopefully) in a short time, and you will want them to remember that you invited them to a Pizza Night/Candidate Meet & Greet/Open House with your libertarian group. In this case, something simple works, and you can print the who, what, when, and where on a small handout that fits six to a page rather inexpensively.
• Actively promote your follow-up event in conversation. Believe it or not, you or some of your volunteers will not include the follow-up event in their “elevator pitch” with interested, soon to be libertarians. A simple “and we’d love to talk with you more about [insert the issue by which you built rapport here] at our upcoming [insert event name here] on [date] at [location] at [time]” added to the end of each interaction, accompanied by handing them your “take away” will drastically improve the attendance at your follow-up event.

  We have an amazing opportunity before us, as we share the ideals and principles of libertarianism. Let’s not blow it by missing out on an opportunity to have a REAL discussion about libertarian ideas at a follow up event after we’ve identified some potential new libertarians.