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CREATIVE IDEAS FOR MARKETING,
PUBLIC RELATIONS AND WORKING WITH THE MEDIA

Creative Marketing and PR for Tightwads

Getting a lot of bang for not many bucks

Gail Cohen
IPRA Communications and Marketing Manager

PR and marketing professionals — especially those working in the arena of parks and recreation — must be more soothsayer than star, more magician than headliner and certainly more tightwad than spender. Boards may often see promotion as a critical concern, but when they shake out the dollars, we're somewhere between the bottom feeders and the low-lying shellfish.

What's a savvy marketer to do? Get clever. Find inventive ways to turn water to wine, fishes to...well, lots of fishes...and a day's worth of oil into an eight-day event. We've turned to some of our IPRA marketing and PR experts, asking them for tips you can take to the bank.

They're innovative. Lively. In some cases, off the wall. But, that's good. Borrow one. Take 'em all. They're our gift to you.

Sameera Luthman, marketing and communications manager for the Naperville Park District, shares the following advice:

1. Piggyback with promotions or events of other local groups if the time frame is similar. That way, you can split the printing and publicity costs with that group and promote your event for half the cost!

2. Coordinate with your city administration to see if they do bill stuffers or a regular newsletter that you can use to publicize your event or program. Since the publicity vehicle is associated with the city, the cost is relatively inexpensive.

3. Promote programs or events through community bulletin boards at your local library.

4. Check with your local newspaper to see if writing an article is a possibility. Many papers welcome the submission of completed articles — and its free!

5. Make friends with your local newspaper reporters and don't be afraid to pitch stories to them on a regular basis. They're always looking for ideas and new angles that benefit and are of interest to the community.

Sameera's sage advice is right on the money and perfectly compliments IPRA/IAPD's newest collaborative effort to give consumers an all-purpose avenue for finding the motherlode of park and recreation resources. www.illinoisparksandrecreation.com is the pride and joy of the Joint Public Awareness Committee, and since this site has been up and running, courtesy of an IAPD and IPRA collaboration, the number of hits continues to increase. Get your agency's website linked to this important resource and you'll find plenty to cheer about.

Lori Magee, APRP public relations and marketing manager for the Buffalo Grove Park District, really knows her stuff. Her photography skills have garnered the cover shot on this years IAPD/IPRA directory and her non-stop ideas are enough to make us hyperventilate. Take a breath and grab your share other wisdom.

"Following the news always helps," advises Lori, "or at least listening to radio programs — REALLY, REALLY listening to them — and finding a tie-in has always gotten me free ad space. Case in point: Eric and Kathy of WTMX, The Mix 101.9 FM, the #1 rated morning show hosts with listeners in excess of 850,000 each week (over 50K per quarter hour). I listen all the time. Recently, they launched a chat with the audience about how much money people spend on sunglasses each summer. The point of the discussion was to prove that the more you spend on sunglasses, the more you stress out about them."

"I tied the glasses hysteria to Buffalo Grove Park District lickety-split," she laughed.

"This summer, we're giving away sunglasses as part of our 'BG Park District, Starring You!' campaign. The sunglasses are a 'Hollywood' idea our staff came up with because we knew this would be a cheap giveaway. I packed about two dozen sunglasses into a mailing envelope and sent them with a letter to the WTMX morning show staff. The letter read, 'I agree that the more you spend on sunglasses, the more you stress over them, so enclosed are the safest kind of glasses you can get — they are cost-free and stress free!'"

Lori went on to thank the radio personalities for making

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MIXED MEDIA

people aware of stressors in their daily life and included information about the district's stress-reducing programs. Additionally, she mentioned that every community has programs to help people escape the daily stressors and mentioned ways to go about this.

She even included Buffalo Grove's recent park district brochure and invited them to come out to "The Grove" (wearing their glasses, or course) where everyone is a star this summer. "Not only was the letter read," says Lori, "but they went through the brochure on the air and made comments about the programs we offered. Calls came in like wildfire to find out more details about these 'stress-reducing' programs," she concluded.

Lori's big on radio and she uses her enthusiasm for the airwaves to good advantage. "I used the calendar on the Mix website last year to promote our 5K/10K race, which, by the way has been a BG tradition for over 10 years. We saw an increase in participants and volunteers of 21 and 14 percent respectively. The cost to provide calendar material: $0."

Buffalo Grove isn't the only recipient of promotional manna from Lori Magee. Streamwood Park District, her former employer, grabbed attention in a most unusual way. "When Harper College officials learned that the pumpkins their day care center kids planted and grew had been stolen from the garden and 100 children were heartbroken, enter the Streamwood Park District," Lori recalls. Streamwood was getting ready to host a family fall event. Coincidentally, they were going to sell pumpkins.

VIP invitations were made for the Harper kids who had lost their crop along with a letter and a coupon for a free mini-pumpkin if they brought their family out to Pumpkinfest.

"In addition, one large pumpkin was donated to each day care classroom for them to carve together," Lori recalls. "While this was meant only to be a goodwill gesture, this donation was promoted as 'Park District to the Rescue!' and was highlighted on NBC, ABC, WGN Radio and WLS Radio. What was meant to be a small gesture cross-promoted the test to the public, including the date, time, location, phone and Streamwood's website address."

At IPRA, we were faced with the dilemma of attracting media to the August Lifeguard Games thrown annually by the Facility Management Section. Getting a photographer out on a Saturday night is as easy as getting George Bush to vote Democratic, but we gave it a try. At the dollar store, we found Barbie-like lifeguard dolls blister packed with mini- rescue gear for a buck each.

We generated a press release about the lifeguard games and dry-mounted it to the backer card of the dolls. While we still didn't get photographers out, the release, in its entirety, made the papers and rumor has it that the IPRA lifeguard babes (with the giant IPRA logo splashed across the package front) have become treasured commodities in newsrooms.

Our cost? $30. The dollar equivalency of the space this story occupied (if we had to pay for it) is approximately $1,500. Even if math isn't your strong suit, you can see the pay off.

Like Lori, Sameera and our own experiences, Stephanie FitzSimons, CPRP, marketing manager for the Bartlett Park District, has a long list of her favorite promotion-on-the-cheap rips. Make at least one of these yours:

1. Go to local pizza and take out places and ask to have them put your special event flyers on their boxes and bags

2. At a parade, use stickers (nobody wants to pick up a bunch of flyers later — a sticker sticks) created by you on regular plain labels. Pass the stickers out to the crowd. They are now your roving billboards — without the cost of a shirt.

Hot links!

Easy to find, easy to navigate and easy on the eye, www.illinoisparksandrecreation.com is revolutionizing the way patrons view, select and visit parks across the state. You can't get better, cheaper public relations!

The site features a park and rec finder that allows consumers to plug in their favorite activity, then pull up locations from Chicago to Collinsville and all points in-between. And there are links to most agencies and many SRAs.

Hats off to the IAPD/IPRA Joint Public Awareness Committee (JPAC) for developing this terrific resource.

3. Barter for whatever services you need! We all have something that can be traded. (Check your policies before promising anything.)

4. Work with similar groups to swap advertising. Example: a local theatre group's playbill for your show or upcoming auditions.

5. If you have a special event coming up, make up a promotional sticker on labels. Plaster them on every outgoing piece of mail for a designated period of time.

6. Talk to your beverage distributor. They may be able to provide banners with space for your event announcements. Some are willing to provide T-shirts with their logo that also have space for an overprint that advertises local stores or your upcoming events.

7. Get involved with community service groups for extra free promotion of events.

8. Use pre-cut business cards available at Office Max/Office Depot to create quick hand-outs about events or to stick in outgoing mail before it is sealed.

"To encourage attendance at our Free Summer Concert Series I created a special concert shirt featuring a graphic of a singing bus," added Stephanie. '"Come on, get happy was our theme and we listed all of our concert dates on the back. When I was booking the bands I asked each one to reduce their fee by $50 so that I could promote their band on a shirt and also asked for permission to use their logo if they had one. Every band said yes, so my three dozen shirt giveaways cost me nothing! People still wear them today!"

Success stories like Stephanies combine innovation with perspiration, but unfortunately, even the best of ideas may backfire. Lori Shook, IPRA's education manager, pulled a newspaper article about Jerry Seinfeld wearing a National Park Service T-shirt while making a media appearance. When asked about the shirt by reporters, he told them he always wore freebees because he didn't make as much money as the public believed. How could we let that opportunity slip by? We immediately put together an entire wardrobe of IPRA and other park and rec giveaways and packed it all up with a personal note. Who knew that Jerry's paranoia about stalkers would cause the box to be turned away at every address we tried? We shipped the box out over and over, but Seinfeld was running one step ahead of our efforts to reach him.

The box is back in Carol Stream. If anyone has Seinfeld's address, would you please call us and pass it along?

36 | Illinois Parks and Recreation


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