Action for Happiness

Having now run hundreds of courses worldwide we've learnt a few things that can be really helpful to think about when promoting to the public.

We used take a more traditional 'marketing-based' approach, picking out the things we thought were most interesting to people, find a good way of describing the benefits and then pushing it out as widely and far as we possibly could, so that lots and lots of people get to see it. The hope being that some small proportion of those that do will go ahead and sign up.

Although this works (and is how we went about promoting courses for the first year or two) we have recognised two flaws in this approach:

1. It can take a lot of effort to get people to sign up this way (you often need to show it to thousands of people just to get 15 or 20 signed up);
2. The group this method brings together can be quite random (with varying levels of connection to one another, the course intention and the local community).

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as having a good level of diversity in the group can really be of benefit when thinking of the breadth and depth of conversation that can happen, however, it can also mean that some people sign up who are just not that committed to the intention of the course or two bonding with a community in the local area - meaning the first few weeks can sometimes feel like a bit of a struggle to really bring people together.

For that reason, we now advise leaders to think less about 'marketing' the course and more about 'community building' where we use the power of word of mouth and our existing relationships and connections to invite people locally to join us in making the course happen.

It becomes much less about 'what you'll get out of it' and much more about 'being part of something amazing' where the people we are inviting are those who wish to actively contribute to the collective experience, and are excited to bond with other like-minded people.

With 'community-building' in mind, it can be helpful to prioritise those methods that foster the most upfront connection with the people we are hoping to reach. The more connection that we build in the process of promoting the course, the easier it will be to encourage the group to bond and work together once the course itself starts.

For this reason, we invite all leaders to think of at least three people each that they know quite well who they would like to have join them on the course, and before doing anything else, to reach out to those people for a face-to-face conversation.

This isn't just about trying to encourage those specific people to join, it's also a very helpful listening exercise, where leaders can try out sharing their own way of talking about the course, and why it's important to them, and can listen deeply to what these people reflect back, what questions they ask and which bits speak most of them, in order to get a sense of what really resonated with them.

Doing this with one person can be quite a helpful sounding board, however, doing it with two or three people each starts to give a really useful spread of different responses and reactions to the course and it's core ideas.

These can be really useful because they enable us to think, in whatever communication we are doing, about the nature of the people who might be receiving it at the other end and can then use our real-world examples as reference points to communicate in a way that is more likely to really connect with people.

In terms of practically what to do, it can be helpful to prioritise tools and techniques based on what creates the most connection between you and the potential attendee: so, a face-to-face chat beats a phone call, a phone call beats a text message, a text message beats an email, an email beats a social media post, and a social media post (just about) beats a poster or flyer in the local area.

This is by no means a hard and fast rule and different areas and groups will probably require different strategies to generate the connections needed. But it is useful to reflect in whatever we're doing on which techniques are most likely to create genuine human connection and the opportunity for people to be really inspired, rather than just providing them with information and hoping for the best.

It can be helpful to remember that for many people this course is a little bit unusual (it's not like there's lots of things out there in society that are particularly similar to it). So, for many people who may consider signing up for the course, we are really asking them to extend quite a significant amount of trust to us that this is going to be something that is worth their time and commitment.

In building trust, it can be helpful to remember that 'people trust people' more than they trust organisations or ideas. With this in mind, we can think about how we put across the course in a way that also offers something authentic and perhaps even vulnerable about ourselves.

When we tune in to what really inspires us about the course, why we are choosing to volunteer our time to offer it, what we are hoping to get out of it and why we're calling on people to come together for it, we create the opportunity for others to resonate with our authentic experience and to place their trust in us also.

We can sometimes feel tempted to step back when promoting a course and to try to use as "professional" an approach as possible. However, if this way of communicating stops us from being warm, authentic, personable and human, we may be blocking the potential for someone to catch our enthusiasm, and thereby the inspiration to join the course.