Challenge
The AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges) needed to promote its annual conference supporting a niche audience of professionals working in institutional advancement disciplines in academic medicine.
The conference – the AAMC National Professional Development Conference for Institutional Advancement – is AAMC’s second largest conference of the year and needed 618 paid registrants in order to meet its financial goals for the event.
Action
The event branding (artwork featuring the 2019 conference theme SPARK) and a “save the date” email were deployed prior to me being brought onto the project. However, no marketing plan was in place. The conference registration website was also not in place. I got down to work:
- Wrote and edited content for the conference website, including all main pages, keynote speaker bios, and a “make your case” download that potential attendees could customize to show their supervisors why they should be sent to the event
- Wrote a robust marketing plan that laid out topics for use in promotional emails and social media (LinkedIn and Twitter) and provided final copy of campaign emails
- Created a communications calendar denoting when each topic’s email and social media post would be deployed
- Identified new opportunities to promote the conference – for example, identified organizations whose constituents would likely be interested in this conference’s offerings
- Provided copy and direction to the design team to create print ads and a promotional infographic
- Wrote the script for a promotional video to spur “early bird” registrations. Sent AAMC’s video producer the copy (text), a selection of photographs to use in the video, and the CTA (call to action).
Result
These efforts resulted in the conference meeting just over 100% of its goal (619 of 618 paid registrants).