How to Promote Your Career Center and Generate Additional Revenue at Your Onsite Event
Your events play a major part in gaining recognition for your association. They strengthen your community, increase brand recognition, provide networking opportunities, establish thought leadership and generate revenue. With months of preparation and hard work invested, you want to be sure your members are engaged with your event.
One event-related area of promotion and programming that associations sometimes overlook is incorporating their career center or job board on site at their events. Here are some distinct ways to do just that:
Booth presence / handouts
Capitalize on the space you have: Having a booth presence for your career center is essential for getting the word out. A booth or table is also one of the easiest ways to educate your audience about the usefulness of your career center. This can be as simple as an informational booth set up with flyers or handouts that inform your attendees about the benefits of your career center. These flyers can include instructions to guide employers and job seekers through the process of registering, posting and applying for jobs.
Someone from your staff who is knowledgeable about how the online career center works should man this booth to answer questions.
Registration kiosks
Make your event’s foot traffic work to your benefit. With hundreds of industry professionals (or more) attending your event, there is no better opportunity to engage them with your online career center than in person. Provide computer kiosks where they can register an account, post any open positions their company may have available, or search and apply for open positions.
Career fairs
Make your event multipurpose: When it comes to making employment connections, there is no substitute for face-to-face meetings. Holding a career fair at your event provides your audience with one of the best ways to find new job opportunities. Promote your event within your online career center to provide logged-in users with an extra incentive to attend. Promote the valuable connections they could make and the employer relationships they could nurture by attending your career fair within the larger event.
Giveaways!
Giveaways can engage additional candidates with your career center. Enter all job seekers who register their profile on your association’s career center during your event into a prize drawing. Prizes should relate to the career resources your association offers: resume writing services, coaching services or even a discount on membership dues.
Job listing promotions
Your association can run employer listing promotions at any time through your career center, but offering a job posting discount tied to your event is a nice thank-you gesture to employers who are supporting your association by attending your event. Postcards that offer a discount off future job postings can be given to any attending employer. This will help keep your association top of mind the next time that employer needs to advertise hiring opportunities, and possibly increase your non-dues revenue margins from paid job listings.
Career center learning sessions
For some associations, providing additional training and insight into their career center platform has helped their members and users find the motivation to use the career center more. Some attendees may not know that you have the career center as a resource or are reluctant to use it if they are not tech-savvy. A session about the benefits of your career center and a walk-through about how to use it can help involve additional users and encourage them to benefit from it.
Resume writing / coaching sessions
Offer additional career services to your attendees to further motivate them to use your online career center. If your organization works with a resume writer, or if you have seasoned members that would be willing to assist with career coaching, employ them as an on-demand or scheduled resource for attendees who are also registered users of your career center. Give your event audience plenty of notice about these services, and make it clear that they must have an online career center account to schedule themselves for a career service appointment. Then offer assistance registering people on your career center prior to your event. For job seekers, one-on-one consultations may be one of the most valued perks of attending your event.
Your association might choose to offer these services free of charge to attendees, and plan for the anticipated increase in paid registrations to cover the cost. Or, you could offer these services for a fee that’s well below the market rate, so that members are still receiving a great deal while your association is earning more non-dues revenue.
While promoting your career center at your onsite event will inevitably help drive additional traffic to the career center, your events can be reciprocally promoted within your career center platform. By incorporating event information onto your career center pages, you undoubtedly will expose the event to a wider audience. Engaging your career center audience with your events more will increase registrations and possibly additional dues revenue for your association.
Use your association’s event to promote your online career center, and you’ll find that it’s easy to engage more members while earning more non-dues revenue.
