A Cautionary Tale of Caregiving
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Gainesville and Ocala Dance Group Leaders

Let People Know About Your Events

If you are involved in the running of a dance group, sign up for the Dance Leaders newsletter, enter your events on the calendar or send us announcements of your sessions.

Special Events

If you are thinking about running a special event, such as bringing in professional dancers to teach a workshop, avoid the biggest mistake I see many people make.

The biggest mistake is not marketing your event enough.

People like organizing the event, bringing in the professional dancers, arranging the logistics and running the event itself. That is fun. However, when it comes to promoting the event, many people do not like putting themselves out there. Often I see the only things they do is create an event online, send out emails and post annoucements in dance groups. This is the bare minimum for marketing an event and adequate only for your typical classes. This is not adequate for running a special event where you bring in outside teachers.

When you run a special event, your job is sales. People want to think their job is organizing the event and the sales will take care of themselves, because the event is so fabuluous. This is misguided. Organizing the event is your reward, not your job. Your job is to get people to show up to the event. You do a disservice to the outside teachers you bring in and to the attendees of the event if you do not focus on sales. If you are thinking about running a special event, understand your job is sales and if you do not want to sell, do not run the event.

The number one thing you need to do in selling your event is get advanced sales. You want to sell enough tickets ahead of time that your event is a success long before you open the doors. Any tickets you sell the last week of the event or at the door is a bonus.

You do not pay the instructors on how good they are. You pay the instructors on how many tickets you can sell on their fame alone.

The way you get advanced sales is by contacting leaders of other groups and get them to sell tickets for you. Offer incentives to highly motivate the leaders of the other groups to make the sales.

For example, I had a guest choreographer coming in to teach Israeli Dancing. I contacted the leader of the International Folk Dance group and offered a fixed price for as many people as they wanted to bring. Without contacting them, I do not think any of the International Folk Dancers would have attended. By offering them a price which was the equivalent of about 8 people, they brought 20. I made 8 sales I would not have made and the room was full of people providing great energy for the event.

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