The Young Professionals Association of Canada (YPAC) is a not-for-profit organization aimed at helping ambitious professionals aged between 25 and 35 advance their careers and social lives, through holding regular social and educational events. I am a director of YPAC, and I’m responsible to marketing the organzation.

The purpose of this blog is to track my efforts as I try to promote YPAC as the premier organization of its kind in Toronto, and hopefully in the near future, Canada. This is sure to be challenging as YPAC doesn’t spend any money on marketing materials. In the past all our marketing has consisted of an eNewsletter sent out to a distribution list of current and past members, and posting notices on other websites.

So my challenge is to think of ways to spread the word beyond our current membership, to reach people who have never heard of YPAC before. The obvious place to start is the Internet, but with so much information already competing for the attention of my target audience, how do I make our organization stand out? And how do I do it for free?

It does not matter how big or small your budget is, how impressive your visuals or well-crafted your copy. The most powerful marketing tool is Word of Mouth (WOM). You can spend millions on integrated TV and web campaigns, if your product sucks, folks won’t buy it.

For YPAC, our products are our events. So before we write our eNewsletter or design our flyers, we have to make sure that our events Rock. I want people to go away from one of our gatherings with a buzz. If we do that then it’s a sure thing that they will mention it to their friends. If however they don’t have a great time then we’re in trouble. It’s next to impossible to combat negative WOM, because it’s so difficult to change a negative opinion.

 
09/10/2006

YPAC is an events driven organization. So to get the word out we really need to be leveraging the impact of those events, particularly the more high-profile ones. This hasn’t happened in the past.

That will hopefully be changing soon. We have a speaker event coming up featuring the CFO of RBC, Janice Fukakusa, who will be taking ont he subject of “Women in business.” The demographic is pretty obvious for this one. In order  to get as much out of this publicit-wise, I approached a magazine that’s aimed at business women called “Esteem” and enquired if they wanted to be our “Media Partner”. They have jumped at the opportunity.

Furthermore, we may be getting TV exposure as well. I recently contacted ROB TV and asked if they wanted to do a piece on us, focusing on networking. They immediately asked when our next big event is so they could use it as a backdrop.

If all goes smoothly this could easily be our most publicized event ever. The exposure could be enormous. The moral of this story is, it pays to ask. Never in  our woildest dreams did I think we could get onto TV, but apparantly they are always looking to fill space and since we asked, they said yes.