Leaders in Public Health Event Series

Phase Two

The second part of this project was to analyze what peer public health institutions were doing to promote their events. Over time I had been bookmarking marketing materials including emails, registration pages, forms, and more to see what their approaches were. Some of the things I really enjoy were:

• Clear, short emails.

• Short, automated registration forms that reminded me about the event and provided a link to add it to my calendar.

• Engaging titles and topics for the event.

From there, we did a small focus group with our communications student advisory board to better understand why attendance was so low at certain events. The two main pieces of feedback were that 1) students didn’t always understand who the guest speaker was how they would be benefitted by attending the fireside chat and 2) they wanted food.

Since we were asked to focus on non-food related resolutions, we focused primarily on creating recommendations for point 1. Previously, event promotion was done in the following manner:

• A bio was gathered for the speaker.

• An event listing was posted to the website.

• A media kit was made.

• Large posters were printed and placed in high foot traffic lobbies in both LEPH and 47 College Street.

• Emails were sent to the entire community to collect registration.

Through analyzing the process, I discovered many data and process gaps:

1. We didn’t know exactly where registrations were coming from (email, YSPH calendar, posters, etc.) and couldn’t evaluate the success of certain methods.

2. Most registrations occurred after the first email (and trail off from there). Very few registrations occurred during times outside of when emails are sent, which questions the value/efficacy of the printed posters. 

3. YSPH is first in # registrants, with YSM second

4. There were two registration forms – one on Qualtrics, and one on Zoom, so the data I collected did not include Zoom registration information as we were mainly focused on in-person attendance. This also allowed people to register more than once and in different ways, which is not effective for data tracking.

From this initial analysis, I made several recommendations:

• Combine the Zoom and Qualtrics separate registration forms into one, or utilize registration software. (Ex: automate a message after Qualtrics form is submitted containing the Zoom link for virtual attendees).

• Automated reminder about event in the days leading up (reduce # community-wide emails)

• Automated follow-up thank you message.

• Create a drop-down option for Yale affiliation (school, dept, other, non-Yale etc.) to more easily analyze which attendees are coming from where across Yale.

• Add a “how did you hear about this event” question (social media, email, YSPH events calendar, poster, etc.)

• Send an email to YSM community with registration link once at beginning of each semester (list of all events for upcoming semester). 

• Trackable QR codes on posters to value efficacy.

• Create an instagram story template with registration link to post the week of the event for a last-minute push to reach our students on different platforms.