IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - June 2008 - 50

get others to proofread for you
and wordsmith it with you.

Ticket Pricing Bag of Tricks
Differentiate between members and nonmembers when you set prices for an
event. During the year, members may
have made up their membership fee with
savings in attending your activities.
Consider offering a group discount or
buy ten, get one free (this provides incentives for people with a lot of crowd-pulling
power to convince more people to come).
Often ticket sales tend to increase
massively the day before the event, and
this is especially the case for social
events; people tend to take their time and
only make up their mind at the last
minute. The uncertainty is not good for
you as an event organizer. So consider
offering an early bird discount.

Give Yourself Enough Lead Time
It's important to leave enough lead time
for promotion and marketing before the

50

IEEE WOMEN IN ENGINEERING MAGAZINE

actual event. For small events, allow ideally two weeks to a month. For large events,
ideally send out a "teaser" two months or
more before, and promote the finalized
details again at least a month before. But
there is a trade-off: if you promote too far
advance, you're risking the "out of sight,
out of mind" syndrome. So if necessary,
send e-mail reminders!

Elements for Success
There are two common elements for success between sponsorship and events
promotion:
1) Figure out what sponsors and attendees want. Open communication channels, and remember to collect feedback
afterward (whether by a formal survey
or by informal verbal comments).
2) Soft-sell what you have to offer. This
involves more than just stating the
"bare facts" (which engineers have a
tendency to do). Use persuasive writing
(OK, finally we're getting to this very
important point).

SUMMER 2008

Crash Course in Persuasive Writing
Effective persuasion relies on "getting
inside someone's head." Identifying the
decision maker and learning the decision
maker's needs, motives, and thought
processes will help you target your document appropriately. The key characteristics that you need to consider when
assessing your audience is how they like
to gather data and how they prefer to
make decisions. The sidebar "Approaches
to Gathering Data and Making Decisions"
shows how people can be categorized by
their decision-making characteristics.
Engineers tend to belong to the top two
quadrants, but the personality of potential
sponsors is anybody's guess unless you've
actually met and observed them. Try to do
your research on them. Or if you don't have
the time, at least try to write your proposal
to appeal to logic so that a decision to sponsor you should be quite easily justifiable.
-Helene Hoi-Ying Fung is a recipient
of the 2006 IEEE Regional Activities
Board's GOLD Achievement Award.



Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - June 2008

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